Pianopics history

Pianopics history or how it all came about.
"Music is, afterall, the language in which a musician
unconsiously gives himself away..." -- Schoenberg

1990 was the year I, Jean-Claude and the author of pianopics, bought the house I currently live in. I felt that a house without a piano would not be much of a home. So I went out and found a used player piano with a decent sound and the promise of wonderful musical evenings.

How difficult could it possibly be to learn to play that instrument considering that I had been fiddling around with a guitar since I was thirteen? Well, I soon realized that I was not thirteen any more and that unless I miraculously acquired the gift of great ear-hand coordination, I would have to learn to read music. I was ok as long as I stayed within the seven keys in the middle of the piano but if I tried to stray above or below, or attempted to read sharp or flat notes, I invariably fell flat on my musical face with excrutiating sharp pains everywhere.

How could it be that something that appeared so simple to do when an experienced pianist played the instrument became so complicated and difficult when I tried to do it myself? It looked simple enough: hit keys either simultaneously or in sequence using the fingers of both hands. I understood that my difficulty stemmed from the necessary mental translation between sheet music and the actual sound generating actions.

I knew that if someone could show me the proper sequences of fingers stroking keys, a few at a time, I could definitely learn how to play. Short of watching a pianist play repeatedly the same combination of notes until I "get it" and then proceed to the next sequence, only a series of diagrams that looked enough like a piano keyboard would do the trick for me. Don't tell me how to do it, show me.

I now had to come up with diagrams that were essentially the same for both hands and that represented all of the keys stroked in one part and the order and duration of the note events in a second part. Space and time. Location and timing. Where and when. This approach would ensure that if it could be played, it could be drawn. The representation would also have the same historical aspect of all written languages, namely that of always being available for the looking. Thus was conceived the PianoPic.

In the past century and a half about six hundred people fruitlessly attempted to intoduce various alternate musical notation systems.

To be continued...

last updated 1/14/01

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