Suggested feature: assign colors to fingering hints

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morryll
Posts: 2

Post by morryll »

First, wanted to say that I admire the work the developers are doing with Synthesia. I'm still a little bit on the fence over whether this is a good method for learning/teaching piano... but if you're going to use this type of software program, Synthesia is clearly light-years ahead of the competition (I've looked at lots of the other programs of this type, and they are mostly just godawful).

Currently, Synthesia lets you assign different colors to each of the MIDI tracks (or gives you the option of hiding them). This is clearly useful. But what if you had an option where instead of assigning different colors to different tracks, you assigned different colors to different fingering hints? For example thumb=red, index=orange, middle=yellow, ring=green, pinky=blue. (Assignment of colors would of course be user customizable). I'm guessing that this would be fairly simple to program. Personally, I think it would make the task of learning fingerings much easier.

And as long as I'm suggesting things, I think it would be great to have a piece of hardware that allowed keys on a physical keyboard to light up in different colors (like the ONE keyboard, but with multiple colors instead of just one). You could, for example, build a strip of RGB LEDs which attached to an existing keyboard. As far as I know there is nothing like this currently on the market! If you combined this idea with the idea of colors for different fingers, you would allow the student to practice good fingering technique without having to lift their eyes from the physical keyboard. I'm convinced it would immediately out-sell the competition.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

morryll wrote:... and they are mostly just godawful.
I have noticed the same! :lol:
morryll wrote:But what if [...] you assigned different colors to different fingering hints?
I like this a lot. The more common suggestion is per-pitch color, but that one is mired in all sorts of (ridiculous) patent trouble. I don't remember running across anything for per-finger coloring. And, like you, I believe it would be a great learning aid.
morryll wrote:As far as I know there is nothing like this currently on the market!
The ONE's new "Piano Hi-Lite" product has two colors now, but my understanding is that it's more to indicate left/right hand... which doesn't seem like a hugely challenging distinction to make, even without the lights.

NI's Komplete Kontrol S-Series keyboards can do it in theory. They have rather nice RGB lights above every key (and they've even got an 88 key model), but after talking with them for a bit, they admitted that there isn't an official API for controlling those lights outside of "make your app a plugin for ours". (Worse, the whole line is pro MIDI gear that starts at $600.) An industrious Synthesia user went as far as reverse-engineering the protocol used by that keyboard series and made a utility to control them using signals from Synthesia. We've since added "Finger-based channel" as an option for key lights to Synthesia 10.4 to expose all of the finger hint information, in the hopes that they'd update their utility to show fingers individually on the Komplete Kontrol series.

In any event, despite incomplete hardware support, just getting per-finger colors showing on the falling notes on the screen would be an improvement. I'll see where I can fit this on the task list.

EDIT: The only thing that makes this a little more challenging is that today you'd need to have a finger hint on every single note. That leads to a bit of clutter. (Although, your suggested color cue would go a long way to making it more reasonable again.)
morryll
Posts: 2

Post by morryll »

Thanks for the reply! I wanted to add a further suggestion: if you assign colors to fingering hints, I think it would also be a good idea to have a separate color assigned to notes that do *not* have fingering hints. As you point out in the Synthesia documentation, one doesn't want to assign a finger hint to every single note-- only to the notes where a shift is taking place or where the optimal fingering is not obvious. Thus, for example, you could have all the (non-finger-hint) notes appear in grey, so that the fingering hints pop out in different colors. Much easier to see at a glance and much less visual clutter.

Interesting to hear about the NI S-Series. It looks like a nice piece of kit (reviewers are saying good things about the feel of the Fatar-manufactured keybed). I see that there is also an RGB-illuminated keyboard called the McCarthy Illuminating Piano, but it looks like it's been discontinued and there is no sign that they are planning to make a new model.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Having the rest of the notes appear in some neutral color like gray is a nice idea. I was worried about going all the way in the other direction: trying to build some algorithm to infer the fingering of every note from the notes that do have hints. That way everything could be colored correctly, even if the hints didn't appear on the inferred results. That's a lot of work and risks adding false positives. Your solution keeps things simple.

This is a small enough task (with enough value) now, that it makes sense to add it a little higher up on the list.
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