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Comment by dpkonofa | Hacker News Reader

This is really neat. I like that they mention Rock Band and Guitar Hero as those are the first things I immediately thought of for this.

Serious question, though, that I hope will start some debate:

I know some people that would consider this to be a hinderance to music but I, personally, think it's great that this could potentially be used to bring people into music that normally would be too intimidated to consider it. Is this still considered "playing music" since the person using it is still making choices and decisions even if those choices are aided by the computer algorithm?

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At this point, there are so many ways that a person can go about making music that I (as a person who makes money every week playing music) don't feel comfortable saying what "counts" as "playing music"... if people enjoy it and it's musical, then it's a win.

Of course... I agree. I just constantly see people say things online like "DJ's aren't real musicians" and "people who play those sample pads aren't really making the music, they're just picking the order it's played in" or things like that. Just curious as to whether people who think that have an actual argument behind it.

> Is this still considered "playing music" since the person using it is still making choices and decisions even if those choices are aided by the computer algorithm?

Think about hang drums, diatonic harmonicas, or about the Tenori-on. They make it basically impossible to play a "wrong" note. But a normal piano was already a step in this direction.

A piano restricts the pitches to discrete ones, making it harder to play a "wrong" pitch. Violins, and to some extent, guitars, have continuous pitches. And there are indeeded some pitch nuances that piano players can at best hope to hear (e.g C# vs Db), and some pitch effects that a piano player can only mimic (glissando, vibrato).

However, nobody today would argue that a piano player isn't really "playing music".

> this could potentially be used to bring people into music that normally would be too intimidated to consider it

And this is where the real issue lies IMHO: playing or making music shouldn't be "intimidating", but the way we teach it certainly doesn't help.

This doesn't invalidate the point you're making, but saying that it's 'basically impossible to play a wrong note on a diatonic harmonica' is simply false, as anyone hearing me play one will attest to.

Pianos evolved from older instruments where each string had fixed pitch - probably psalteries, which are related to harps - so there was no stepping towards removing wrong notes. They were simply different instruments. In fact the stepping went in the other direction, from a limited note selection in one scale to a full chromatic scale that could play in any key, wrong notes included.

Many things that humans do are intimidating - such as running a marathon, climbing Everest, or inventing Smalltalk.

Removing challenges devalues the personal satisfaction of mastery. Making any art simple makes it trivial and unexpressive.

So you can't say anything of interest or value with machine music that does most of the musicking for you. You can make some sort-of-music-like noises, but that's all.

> Pianos evolved from older instruments where each string had fixed pitch

Interesting. But my point is actually unrelated to history. It's related to the tradeoff between "easy to play" and "expressive power":

There are some steps you can take, as an instrumentist, in the "easy" direction, while still keeping enough expressive power.

> Removing challenges devalues the personal satisfaction of mastery.

Surely. It's unclear, though, how instrumentist mastery correlates with musicality:

Some virtuoso guitar solos can be considered "non-musical". To the other extreme, some great composers don't use any musical instrument (from classical music composers, to Amiga sequenced-music composers) - some of them can't even play their own compositions properly!

> Making any art simple makes it trivial and unexpressive.

This reminds me of an old a running joke on french TV, starring a fake David Guetta having a custom piano built, with only one key ( a reference to the intro of "I Gotta Feeling" ). I think it's safe to say that you can't express a lot with a such a piano :-)

However, a smart 10-key "piano" opens new horizons: because now it's reasonnably possible to "play" multiple pianos at the same time. I can certainly see new forms of mastery and non-trivial expressiveness here (e.g a setup of 4 "smart keyboards", each of them using a different sound).

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