Piano Ergonomics_Prospects

In this article, I would like to share some thoughts on what I felt after completing the piano solo album Piano Ergonomics, as well as some thoughts on its future prospects. Some parts may overlap slightly with the content covered in the overview article, but I hope you will understand.

【For Those Who Would Like to Perform These Pieces】

This album was composed with the intention of being performed.

This is not limited to this work alone, but rather something like a personal principle of mine: my compositions are not primarily intended to communicate my own image or ideas. Rather, I hope that through music, I can help listeners and performers recognize or express the emotions, feelings, and things they themselves already carry within them. My aim is for the listener’s or performer’s own musical initiative to remain at the center. That may sound somewhat abstract or complicated, but if I were to compare it to something, I would like you to think of it as being like clothes or shoes that lift your mood a little when you wear them. For that reason, I would be happy if performers feel free to express themselves in whatever way they wish throughout this album.

The commentary for each piece includes a section called [Performance Notes], but these are not instructions. They are simply small annotations added to the medium of sheet music, which consists only of notes and symbols. I hope you can think of the score as a small script for expressing your own music, or perhaps like a script for performing a kind of role through performance itself.

This album has only just been completed. Nothing has yet left footprints in the snow, and what happens there is entirely up to you.

【About the Sheet Music】

This time, I released the scores in the form of YouTube videos and PDF files, but I would also like to publish them as printed sheet music in some form if possible.

Although we live in an age where scores can be viewed on PCs, smartphones, and tablets, I do not believe that this completely replaces the advantages of printed sheet music. Of course, there are many benefits to viewing scores digitally. However, there are also disadvantages, such as needing to worry about battery life, limitations in screen size and the number of pages visible at once, the need for external storage media for long-term preservation of data, and on top of that, these devices are certainly not inexpensive. Printed sheet music may not have the advantages of digital formats, but on the other hand, it also does not have the disadvantages of digital ones. I think there may be quite a few people for whom paper may simply suit them better.

This may be a rather grand wish, and since I did not grow up in a home where the piano was part of everyday life, I do not really know what that experience is like in reality, but perhaps one of the charms of printed music is the possibility of something like: “There was an unfamiliar score on my grandfather’s bookshelf…” That really is just a small personal wish of mine.

【Audio Production: About MIDI Programming】

When programming with the goal of recreating the performance of a real professional pianist, I did everything I could within my abilities.

As I mentioned in the article about the audio production process (link here), I used a piano virtual instrument from Vienna Symphonic Library for the audio production, but there was actually another candidate when choosing the software. That was the piano virtual instrument Ivory 3 German D by SYNTHOGY, which supports the MIDI 2.0 standard. I thought that if I created the performance using MIDI 2.0 — a standard with far higher resolution than the current MIDI 1.0 — it might be possible to achieve an even more realistic performance. However, the DAW I used for programming, Digital Performer, did not support MIDI 2.0 at the time, and among the DAWs that did support MIDI 2.0, I could not work at the same high level of resolution that DP provides. So in the end, I weighed the two against each other and chose the higher resolution offered by DP.

If MIDI 2.0 becomes more widely adopted in the future, I think it may become possible to create virtual instrument performances that are even more realistic and expressive. I cannot say for certain how capable it will be, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try it myself, but perhaps by combining MIDI 2.0 with a DAW that offers high resolution, it may become possible to achieve a dynamic range and timing precision comparable to those of an actual piano. If that happens, a new style of piano recording may become possible, where professional pianists perform at home using MIDI 2.0-compatible MIDI keyboards and piano virtual instruments, and then edit and mix the performances afterward. If so, perhaps pianists would be able to record more casually, and composers might also find it easier to request performances. (Although perhaps this is already being done.)

In any case, I am excited by the thought that future technological developments may still leave plenty of room for further evolution.

That concludes my thoughts on the future prospects of this project.

【Final Words】

With this, all of the commentary for the album Piano Ergonomics comes to an end. Thank you very much for reading all the way to this point. I realize that the content here is quite niche, but I hope some part of it may be useful in one way or another.

If there is anything about the individual pieces, the production process, or anything else that caught your interest — any thoughts, opinions, or questions — I would be very happy if you feel free to let me know.

Until then, I hope we will meet again with the next album.