Pick Up Piano - GR1

Observations and Interviews

We interviewed much more than the three people that was mandatory, however not all the interviews were helpful. The interviews that stood out the most are characterized below.

Novice Piano Player

The interviewee had started playing the piano only for a month, and "still [had] difficulties reading musical scores". In terms of distinguishing notes, he can only tell which is higher or lower.  He said that he would be interested in learning how to differentiate notes.
He noted some interesting things:

• He started to learn piano this late because of lack of access to piano or the instructor.
• Other factors like finger techniques and musical score interpretation were also important

Wannabe A Cappella Singer

This interviewee was fairly familiar with music, having some experience with piano, violin, drum, and choir. When we asked him about differentiating notes, he was very excited, and said that it was super important to him, since he wanted to sing a cappella. He was primarily interested in sight reading, but had actively spent time training his ability to differentiate notes.
Most interesting to us was that he had a very specific way of training his own ability to read notes.

• play the first note
• attempt to sing the rest
• play it on a piano and compare it with what he just sang
• sing it again
• recording can help, when there isn't a teacher around

What we also found interesting is that he doesn't really believe music can be taught without human interaction. He emphasized that reinforcement from a person when you're learning is important, and it would be important to get consistent, helpful feedback from a web application. He wants something deeper than "you did this right or wrong." He is generally skeptical of machine measures of quality.

Guitar Player

This interviewee played guitar for a long while some years ago, and enjoys singing. He has some sense of relative pitch, and said he'd be very interested in practicing exclusively to get better at differentiating pitch, since he thought it was important in appreciating music. He never considered training the skill in isolation because he didn't think it was possible. He believed it was something that could only be picked up as you were playing.
He was interesting to us for two reasons.

• He played exclusively guitar. The other interviewees all talked about the piano, and when he spoke of music, he referred to strumming the guitar. This reminded us that not everyone who is learning music is familiar with the piano interface.
• He strongly believed everything should be available online, and thought it was really cool to consider using a web application to help with steps in the music learning process.

Former Music School Attendee

This interviewee attended music school for a number of years. The following are the things some of the important things she noted

• Music learning in music school takes place much like you are taught math in primary school. You learn the different aspects of music (and piano) one by one, such as reading musical notation, playing simple songs with one hand (and finger exercises), distinguishing musical notes, music dictation, and more.
• In contrast to what many people believe, she thinks that you do not necessarily need a tutor to learn music. If given the right information, and with practice, one can figure it out by themselves.
• She also noted that there are no age barriers. It does become more difficult as you grow to learn a new instrument, but that doesn't mean that a 35 year old cannot learn an instrument he or she has never touched before.
• Lastly, she noted that, everything else remaining the same, she would definitely prefer going to a music school and playing with other people, than sitting in her room practicing music. However, if it reduces the costs associated with music schools and tutors, the freedom of being able to learn musical instruments from home at low cost would be much appreciated.

Other Interviewees

Other people we interviewed included someone with perfect pitch who believed the skill "couldn't be taught to an adult."
Many people expressed that differentiating notes was a specific skill out of many, and something they wanted to practice when they were actively learning to play an instrument.

User Classes

The users we will focus on are novices who are trying to learn how to play the piano. They tend to encounter problems such as lack of motivation or resources. They can be of any age, though we assume the youngest of the people interested are high school students. We don’t assume our users know anything about music, and we assume they may not yet be capable of reading notes or sheet music. They tend to be alone, and don’t want to be, as explained by our music school interviewee.

1. Complete Novices - These users know completely nothing about music.They cannot read musical notation or play any musical instruments, but they are interested in starting to learn. We didn’t encounter such people during our interviews, partially because we interviewed a limited sample of people, and partially because such people don’t volunteer to talk about learning music. However, since such people exist and many of our interviewees were recently complete novices, we have them as a user class.
2. Developing Novices - These users have some music experience, and can read music to some degree. They are interested in learning note differentiation because they want to learn how to play their instruments better and expand their playable repertoire.## Novice Piano Players - Piano players are the main body of our target users simply because there are a lot of them. Most of the people we interviewed had attempted to learn piano at one point or another, and noted that note differentiation was one of the skills they would like to improve at. They mostly have had some formal training.
   1. Other instrument players - We discovered that some of our interviewees were novice guitar players, and we believe they're a significant part of the population as well. Their goals are similar to that of the piano player, but they are likely used to more casual learning.

It's worth noting that our user classes explicitly do not address the needs of a cappella singers, because they are more interested in learning how to produce notes that are written, and those of people with perfect pitch, who don't have such needs.

Needs & Goals

From the interviews described above, we extracted the following goals.

Introduce complete novices to Piano

Complete novices do not understand how the keys in the keyboard are laid out. A brief introduction to the piano and the difference between notes, chords, etc would be useful to such a user.

Use the computing device as a musical instrument

Some of the interviewees, especially beginners, have mentioned that they have delayed learning piano due to the costs associated with buying a piano or having a tutor. As such, it would help them if we could provide music education (especially beginner level) at zero cost. i.e. we want to help the user without requiring that they own any musical instrument or have a tutor.

Enable ear training
Ear training allows the user to be able to play a piece of music the user just listened to. This is a skill desired by a large fraction of the people who want to learn how to play a piano. A number of people who are into learning piano for a few months get stuck at the stage where they have difficulty transitioning from "read and play" to "listen and play".

Make the platform interactive / social

Learning things alone is boring, and it is especially true in the case of music which is such an aesthetic and creative subject. Users have mentioned time and again how a simple right or wrong is not the kind of interaction they want to have, and also how having other people or some interaction makes for a much better experience.

Precise pitch training (optional)

Users have also expressed interest in learning not only the art of distinguishing notes being played on an instrument, but rather also having a tool which would give them feedback on the pitch at which they are singing. However, since real-time pitch analysis is an open problem with its own conference dedicated to it, we have marked this goal as optional.