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I had a piano tutor from elementary school through till the end of middle school, but I never took my lessons seriously – I was unwilling to learn.
After starting college, I wanted to start learning again. The issues, however, were that (a) I didn’t have a tutor anymore, (b) I didn’t have an income to hire a tutor, and (c) I knew that I didn’t want to learn how to play songs that were meaningless to me. In fact, I wanted to learn piano again by playing songs I already loved.
Although I could purchase music books and learn how to play songs that I liked, I was painfully slow at reading sheet music. And so, I learned how to play the songs that I listened to by ear. Many times, though, I wished there was a way of having a record of these piano arrangements that I made, and that they were also in a format that is different from traditional musical notation for pianists.
For this project, I produced a series of three accordion books that I designed and bound myself.
The system that I visualized is derived from player piano rolls and programs such as Synthesia. The only difference, however, is that unlike digital programs, the book can be expanded to show the texture of the music as a whole, or isolated into different sections. Furthermore, it provides visual cues that allow the user(s) to immediately be able to identify the true length of each note without having to guess based on the length of each note/bar on the page.
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1 RADIO BALLET
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2 CHARLIE BROWN
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3 JULY
