Continuing from my last post in a "what I did this summer" at music camp kind of vein, I had one other burst of creativity (?) come from our daily piano seminars. A student had gotten up to play the breakneck final movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, and in the moment, this reminded me of a commercial from about a decade back.
That video will also show/remind you how this music is supposed to go - before it becomes literally monotone. [The logic of the ad itself is so bad that I had no memory of what product was being advertised, so it took me a little while to track it down.]
That then reminded me of this amusing video in which a quirky Internet Piano Guy tunes all the keys on his upright to E and then springs the trap on a a few online teachers. As in the ad logic above, he complains that his playing "sounds kind of uninspired." (The first five minutes are the best part):
The dozen or so students in the seminar (ages 8 to 16 or so) loved both videos, so it occurred to me that it would be fun to let them try this out. Of course, there's no way I could re-string a piano, but I figured there must be a way to program a computer to accept input from a digital piano and send back...well, whatever. (I already have a digital piano on hand in the room to pair with the "real" piano so more students can practice sight-reading at a time.) There are probably simpler ways to do it, but I found a way to set up Ableton Live to re-map each key to C, so the next day we gave it a try. It was interesting to see the range of reactions. Some students were immediately amused and intrigued and others just seemed annoyed. Meanwhile, I found that I really enjoyed the feeling of playing one thing and getting this quirky feedback. It's especially fun to play fast passages since playing repeated notes quickly is notoriously difficult on a piano action, but here it's a breeze!
Even more so, I also enjoyed playing with the repeated notes on (playing through a speaker attached to my computer) while the digital piano's regular sounds played as well. It creates an interesting, ghostly echo/halo around the music. Because the setup I created required remapping the keyboard octave by octave, I didn't try to change the "one note" from C to anything else, so for my demo video below, I mostly explored music in C Major or A Minor. From a tonal perspective, it's quite interesting to hear the tonic constantly articulated (like a pedal point) as it makes it immediately obvious how far we've strayed from home base.*
For whatever reason, with my setup, although one can hear some variety of dynamics and articulations, chords don't really seem to register as much more than just single notes. That's something I'd like to improve, but for now I chose mostly linear music that I could stumble through without practicing. I also chose familiar pieces since that makes it easier to hear the hidden structures. For most of the selections, you'll hear a short excerpt played with only the repeated notes turned on. Then, the same music is performed with the repeated notes as decoration. For the two Bach pieces (a Prelude and a Two-Part Invention in C), I enjoyed the effect so much that I played through the entire pieces in the second manner.
The video begins with Mozart in C with some fast scalar passages and ends with the etude-parody of Debussy's Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, so those two excerpts best exhibit the somewhat unreal repeated-note effect. In between are some short bits of Beethoven and more Mozart. Links for each new section are provided in the "about" section of the video. (Beethoven's Für Elise works really well, as it is mostly linear - the excerpts from the 5th Symphony and the first movement of the "Moonlight" Sonata work less well, but they are so iconic, I thought it was worth giving them a try.)
But of course, once I'd thought about remapping the keys, I couldn't resist other possibilities. The most obvious and fruitful so far has been the simplest: reverse everything so the notes go in reverse order. This actually turned out to be even more fun, although again, it would be nice if I had a quicker way to choose the inversion point.
In this case, it's arguable that the "inversion alone" versions sound better than those paired with the real thing because of a curious feature of inverting. Basically, to put it in simple terms, if one thinks of the "white key" notes of C Major and inverts them from the C at the bottom, the pattern of whole steps and half steps reversed means you end up (going down) with C, Bb, Ab, G, F, Eb, Db, C. Not only is this the C Phrygian Mode, which sounds very different from major, but it introduces four pitches which are not in the C Major pitch collection, so inverted music doubled against itself will very quickly use 11 of the 12 possible pitches (F-sharp is the only one left out) which means: lots of dissonance.
Once again, I featured parts of Bach's prelude and 2-part invention in C along with Mozart's C Major sonata, Beethoven's Fur Elise and Symphony No. 5 and the Debussy Gradus ad Parnassum. To these are added Debussy's Golliwog's Cakewalk, which a student had played in class and which creates a really fun inversion of itself that is quite recognizable due to the syncopations, and the complete first of Poulenc's Mouvements perpétuels. That last one is the most fun because incidental spicy dissonance is already part of the original, and the inversion of the balanced left/right hand parts is quite satisfying. As with the first video, using the embedded chapters in this video makes it easy to sample the various experiments.
I can easily imagine some people thinking I'm wasting my time with this. Among other things, it would be trivially easy simply to drop this music into a DAW as MIDI and create the same repeated note or inverted effects. In fact, I've done this kind of thing before. What was different for me in this case was the experience of playing familiar music and having these odd artifacts of remapping sounding instead of what my finger-to-ear system expects. Perhaps it's a little like speaking English but somehow having the words come out in French - there's an "out of body" element in play.
For pit musicians who play musical theater keyboard parts, they are used to having notation instruct them to trigger various sounds and musical ideas by using remapped keys, but even that's not quite the same. (Come to think of it, probably the first experience I ever had of this was playing a John Cage prepared piano piece in high school.) Here, the ear is teased both by the familiar and the unexpected. Again, this is not for everyone. One very talented little seven-year old with perfect pitch was simply confused and spent her time at the instrument trying to get things (like "Mary Had a Little Lamb") to come out "correctly." But others found it really enjoyable and just plain fun in the playful sense. I could even imagine that playing either setup could help with practice and memorization in some contexts.
Other setups I've experimented with include: 1) remapping all keys to be either C or F-sharp so that everything comes out tritones and 2) remapping all the keys to be C but moving up by octaves going up the keyboard. It is also possible to program keys to respond randomly, but that seemed a little less interesting, although some "controlled random" might yield interesting results.
So if you've ever felt like everything you do just comes out the same or comes out the opposite of what you expect...perhaps you'll enjoy this light summer fare!
*It now occurs to me I should also try music in F Major in which C is both part of the tonic and dominant harmonies. When C is the tonic, the repeated Cs clash a lot with the dominant chord (G Major), but that does help emphasize the tonic-dominant polarity.
