Is it good practice to use Synthesia to figure out songs?

Question

Just wondering what pianists think about synthesia. You can type Synthesia followed by just about any song name you can think of on Youtube. ex "Synthesia bach minuet in g" and you'll get a Synthesia video that shows you exactly how to play it. I try to mainly figure songs out by ear so when I use Synthesia I feel like I'm "cheating", nonetheless it helps me sometimes. But is it bad practice to use or is it respected and used by advanced musicians for learning songs?

Answer 1

It isn’t bad practice. However you win your war you win. Whether it is the best idea or not in the long term depends on your goals. Just like learning guitar music with tabs rather than traditional notation there are advantages and disadvantages.

Some obvious advantages include:

• You don’t have to learn standard notation now

• You get to hear the song while you go along

• What ever other reasons you can think of for why you do it now.

The disadvantages are numerous.

• you can only learn pieces that somebody bothers to prepare for YouTube. While you think just about any song is there I am willing to bet that that’s not true. Also there would probably be only one or two arrangements of the song.

• you aren’t necessarily exposing yourself to technique building exercises. You might be but assuming you rely on this format only I doubt you’ll be doing many scales and études

• You’ll be limited in what you can play with other musicians or even strangers. By learning standard notation and conventional methods for you chosen genre and instrument you develop the ability to get started with others with relative ease. Guitar players generally know how to follow a song by ear. Jazz players generally know how to follow a lead sheet etc.

• Time - the biggest most significant disadvantage. Using any non written prerecorded format for learning music severely slows you down. If you miss something you have to manually use whatever interface to seek the point you missed. And repeating sections can only happen at the pace of the playback. Jumping along to similar passages based on similarity is slow. When reading you can basically instantly get to any point you want. You can also get an ‘Aerial view’ that would allow you to spot patterns and such.

If none of those advantages matter to you and you only want the easy way now so you can play a short piece for a talent show or something then you have the right tool in Synthesia.

Otherwise you really should put in the effort now and learn to at least kind of read written music. You’ll be better for it in the medium/long term.

As for the respect part... I don't know for sure but I am willing to bet ‘serious musicians’ would shake their heads in disapproval. That’s an obvious generalization but the music world is pretty well known for snobbery of all types. I recommend you don’t worry about that.

When you are performing a piece literally nobody in the audience cares how you learned it. They just care how you play it there and then.

Edit Apparently it just uses MIDI files. Which reduces the impact of the first disadvantage. However one must still be able to either find MIDI files or prepare them for themselves. If you're going to go through the effort of converting transcribed music to MIDI, you'll be at least learning the note names of standard notation.

Answer 2

Synthesia is a program that plays and visualizes MIDI notes as "piano roll". The MIDI file itself is created based on a (supposedly original) sheet music, or otherwise arranged by its creator.

As a self-learner, between a sheet music and Synthesia, I'd separate learning into 3 types:

• Sheet music: I think most won't argue that this is the best media to use if you want to learn and play a music. Sheet music is very expressive with their musical notations (e.g. dynamics, tempo, articulations), that are usually lost when translated into a MIDI file (read: the expressions themselves aren't lost per se, but human players will have a hard time to guess if a note is a staccato or just a very short 1/32 note.)
• MIDI file: For auditory learners, MIDI file can help translate the sheet music into a sound that auditory players can "see" in their mind (or alternatively, "play by ear"). Players might be able to play the music without having the skill to read sheet music. However, they are locked into a certain playstyle depending on the creator of the MIDI file.
• Synthesia/MIDI visualizer: For visual learners, these programs might certainly help them to know which notes to play without knowing to read the sheet music at all! However, just like with MIDI files, they are now locked into a certain playstyle; they won't know if a group of 5 notes is actually a trill, or actually just as-is on the sheet music (while Synthesia is capable of showing a sheet music based on MIDI, it's still only based on the final MIDI data. Compared to music notation softwares, it isn't capable to show musical notation like trills). Worse, Synthesia only shows the piano roll without any volume/tempo marking. This will only help them to know which notes to play, but not how.

My conclusion is, learn and read from sheet music, use MIDI file and/or Synthesia to help you, but don't fully depend on them.

^{As for "respect by advanced musicians", I don't have any data and can't answer that.}

Answer 3

I can offer my perspective as an old school music gamer and amateur musician. I began playing (konami) music games in the arcade before you could play these things at home. The difference is back then it was a full body experience. The first game I played was called "Para Para Paradise", which is more of a "dance to the symbols" type of game. Within a couple of years I was a high level DDR player and I competed in national tourneys with my feet. I ended up spending about 10k in dollar coins playing DDR during my college years.

Synthesia is basically a more refined UI on the Konami Keyboardmania game system. The mechanics are exactly the same. The arcade version of Keyboardmania even had a pretty decent electric keyboard, though the number of keys was quite limited. I remember playing against real-world pianists in that game, and being blown away. I could never move my fingers that fast; I was a DDR kid.

But in the context of your question, I think I can answer unequivocally NO, I do not believe that you can really figure out songs this way. And there is a fundamental reason why.

At a high level of play there are a lot of players that can do things like memorize very complex songs and even play them backwards (i.e. with the keys reversed, and hands behind the back). The reason they can do this is the brain is only really responding to one stimulus at a time: the next key, or the next pattern. It's like memorising a speech from cue cards. You can do it, sure, but a lot of fluency is lost in the process. You're reciting the cue card... you're not actually "owning" the whole performance.

In order to own a performance it has to have a level of improvisation, it has to be based off your own "feel" of the music. Memorizing music tracking software has the effect of "dulling" the song, reducing it to notes. "Well people memorise music tablature all the time! How is it any different than that?" you might ask. And you're right, it's virtually the same. There is a little bit more subtlety in music tablature, but ultimately if you're playing music off of tabs you're also not really "getting it". The real understanding happens when you forget about the tabs and let your mind take control. Tabs also have the additional benefit that they have abstracted the form. Music tracking software is so literal and so explicit in its visualization that it leaves nothing to the brain to figure out, and I believe that makes the brain more dependent on the software and less able to understand the actual music. It seems easier because it is easier, only you don't want it to be easy. You want to learn the music.

Answer 4

As far as "respect by advanced musicians" goes. I know a few. Not many of them have heard of Synthesia, and those that have think it's "a cool idea, but I wouldn't use it." Judging by its original name, Piano Hero, Synthesia is meant to be a piano version of Guitar Hero. So, can you learn guitar through Guitar Hero? Somewhat, yes, but not fully. If you plan to have piano as a career, avoid Synthesia unless you are using it as a game, like you would Guitar Hero. If you are just an amateur pianist and want to learn how to play a few songs on your own, go ahead and use Synthesia. The other answers are quite helpful on this subject as well, going into more depth on the pros and cons of Synthesia.

TL;DR: If you want to play with a band, don't use Synthesia. If you want to learn a couple songs, and only that, use Synthesia. if you want a career in music, don't use Synthesia.

Post-Scriptum: If you learn to read sheet music, and/or play by ear, you can learn songs much faster than you can through Synthesia. I myself can learn a basic song through sheet music in under 3 hours. I can master it in a month. Using Synthesia, I could never master it, and it would take me weeks to learn it.

Answer 5

No, 'advanced musicians' would prefer to see the sheet music. Synthesia would be considered a very cumbersome method. There may be occasions however where a notated version of a particular song was not easily available, Synthesia would certainly be better than nothing! So thank you for bringing it to our attention.

Answer 6

You need to stop caring what other people think and get on with learning and mastering the things you want (in music and in life). Any way or any tool that helps you learn to be a musician and enjoy the craft is fine. Synthesia is another (great and fun) tool to help beginners master many aspects of music, most especially playing music.

It is not explicitly designed to teach you theory, but there are Synthesia scores and midi files that help you learn that. Same for other aspects of music education. By itself it is not enough, but combined with other things makes you a (better) musician. Don't buy into the BS that many elitists push into learners' brains. Enjoy yourself and learn.

You say I feel like I'm "cheating". This is a feeling you have, like you feel happy, sad, shameful, or hungry. Get over that and get on with learning. Synthesia is modern technology that didn't exist when your great grandmother was learning piano and perhaps got her knuckles bloodied by some ignorant "advanced learner" for hitting the wrong keys on the piano. If you mastered a song well and played it for her, she would (or should) be delighted. If she is not, then her negative feelings of jealousy or shame that interfere with her enjoyment of life. Fix your feelings and elevate them to support you. Take advantage of modern technology whenever you can, and don't let it substitute it for your own skills and knowledge. You must "own" and develop your skills and constantly improve them. Technology can assist, but not substitute for your skills when you are playing solo in public.

When you are older, (we all hope) you will lose the harmful mental habits of believing or caring what other people think. I don't agree with @Gavin and some other posters who provide their opinionated answers for your question. Should you really care to get "respect by advanced musicians"? I am opinionated (everybody has a brain and an anus), and I say "NO". If you a member of the society of elite musicians or similar circles of society, perhaps... and in the end, it comes down to performance. For now, have fun learning, and you will pick up the theory and professional musician practices when you need them.

Answer 7

Synthesia is at its most helpful when fingerings are added to the notes. Otherwise, you need to have at least a fairly good sense of which fingers to use on a given piece. Also, many who use Synthesia never learn proper legato playing, nor how to use the pedal. They play like a gamer might play. Leaving the pedal down through the whole piece thinking it sounds great, then desperately touching each key in a mad attempt to get to 'em all before they disappear from the screen. Ultimately you want to play like you're feeling the music, not like you're gonna explode if you miss a note.

Those Synthesia tutorials showing overhead view of a real person's hands playing - those are probably a lot more helpful. Really study their hands and their playing if you've got to go the Synthesia route. I bet most of those guys themselves had been tutored by an actual teacher who gave them individual attention.

Answer 8

I believe as long as you're able to learn a song, then you're good. In my case, I can read sheet music perfectly fine, but I can learn songs much faster by listening to them and using Synthesia. This is not cheating as long as you learn the song right.

Now, since I find it harder to read sheet music, I can do daily sight-reading exercises to help improve my skills. What I recommend is to learn all the main songs you want to learn any way that is the best for you, and find a small and simple score online once a day to help you with sight-reading. Just look at the score for a minute or two, and get an understanding of the notes, the fingerings, the articulations, and the dynamics. Then, play the song slowly to see how it sounds. You may mess up quite a bit, or maybe not. It all depends on your sight-reading skills and the difficulty of the score. Also, if you feel it would help further, take another few minutes to learn how to play the song a little better until you learn it (I don't follow this approach because I want to expand my ability of being able to learn how to play a song the first time. Afterwards, it's just fine-tuning, and then later, nitpicking.).

Also, when it comes to Synthesia, I like it when it also shows the player's hands while the notes scroll down. I don't think these are as common online, but it helps me understand how I can play the song with my hands. It's almost like reading fingering numbers on your sheet music.

That's my advice. Happy playing!

Answer 9

Something people aren't considering is the accuracy of the transcription in the first place. This problem of course isn't limited to synthesia, but it is definitely a lot more prevalent. If I look up the most popular synthesia videos on Youtube, a large portion of them will have extremely ridiculous mistakes, including wrong chords that any trained musician can spot from a mile away, and even a non-musician could easily hear if given the accurate version for comparison. Sheet music will generally be free of mistakes if it's from an official source, but if it's some random person doing the transcription, it is subject to the same risk. Your playing will only be as accurate as the ear-training skill of the person doing the transcription.

Answer 10

from My non-traditional journey into music.

No formal lessons, no music reading, no piano in the house... somehow I got to the point of wanting to produce music.

When you learn a song on synthesia... It can help to see the chords. But, if you try to memorize an entire composition just by remembering every single note... this could be seen as trying to remember a human being by every single cell.

I have found by far the most progress in my musical journey when I understand enough to ask myself “why”.

Why can some people play 10,000 note songs? It isn’t because of synthesia. Is it because they understand the building blocks?

Actually, there are only 12 tones in western music. That is more simple than the alphabet. So, you can definitely learn it!

Answer 11

Synthesia is a good way to learn songs on the piano if you know enough music theory to understand the bigger picture of what's going on in the song. If you are familiar with all the concepts, you can basically watch the synthesia video a couple of times, and be able to play it without having to learn every single note from the video.

If you're only able to take away the individual notes being played in the video, I would recommend spending more to learning music theory, chord theory and ear training first.