THE GAME
Piano Wizard offers several distinct levels of difficulty, each of which incrementally moves the student one step closer to sight-reading fluency. At the most basic level, the game offers the choice of four lush, well-illustrated backdrops or “worlds:” a futuristic city, an underwater reef, outer space (complete with aliens and asteroids), and a prehistoric dinosaur landscape. Across the top of the screen runs a virtual piano keyboard, each of the twelve notes in an octave color-coded to match stickers applied to your physical MIDI keyboard. Allegro Rainbow sells packages that include MIDI controllers, if you don’t already have one.
After you choose which song or exercise to play, the game begins: Various objects fly from the bottom of the screen towards the keyboard at the top, and you can choose from four options in each world; in dinosaur-land, for example, the objects can be eggs, ladybugs, beetles, or centipedes. Play the correct note on your MIDI keyboard just as the object crosses the corresponding key on the screen and you’ve got it: The note sounds and the object transforms, say, from a dinosaur egg into a flying pterodactyl. Oh, and if you hit enough of the objects at just the right times, you might just hear yourself inadvertently playing a song. Cool, no?
Once you’ve got the basics down, the next level of difficulty comes when the whole screen is rotated 90 degrees counter-clockwise, with objects streaming from right to left. Resembling a typical piano-roll MIDI data environment in bizarro world, this intermediate level aims to familiarize players with reading musical notes left to right, as they appear in traditional notation. The third level of difficulty replaces the cartoon objects with real musical notes. They can still be color-coded to ease the transition, and the notes still move like they did in the first two levels.
Master that and you’re ready to ditch the colors altogether in the fourth and most advanced level, where traditional notation moves across the screen as if it were scrolling sheet music. Two small areas for improvement: First, when Piano Wizard translates a song’s MIDI data to notation, it doesn’t know the difference between C# and Db, so awkward spellings can occur in songs that have a lot of accidentals. Also, Piano Wizard’s sharp and flat symbols are small and, to my eyes, a little hard to read.
In Use
Navigation within the program was intuitive and very much like using a web browser. I also dug the excellent slideshows and narrated QuickTime tutorials — especially the one titled “Secret Agenda” that explains the designers’ teaching strategy — as well as the overall design and architecture of the game. Vibrant colors, big buttons, and engaging visuals are everywhere, and the level of artistry put into the worlds and objects is impressively high. Allegro Rainbow definitely nailed the “Ooh, shiny!” factor.
After getting the hang of Piano Wizard myself, I brought in the real experts: Ruby and Grace Robinson, aged seven and nine, respectively. Both girls sing in a chorus, but don’t read music or play the piano. Piano Wizard captured their attention, though, and they spent upwards of 45 minutes playing enthusiastically. At first, I adjusted tempos, changed songs, and did other managerial tasks, but after a brief while, they handled everything on their own. “Do you think this is something you’d get bored with after a few hours, or a few years?” I asked after they’d played a few rounds. “Years,” replied Grace. “I want to get it right.”
About halfway through their time on the program, Grace and Ruby discovered a clever way of . . . well, bending the rules: Mash all the keys up and down quickly for the duration of the song and, chances are, you’ll get a relatively high score. The harder and faster the song is, the less effective this technique becomes, though, and a teacher’s supervision (or the student’s desire to do it “the right way”) can also thwart it. Allegro Rainbow told me they experimented with negative feedback for wrong notes, but took it out because it caused children to play less, and also that their play-testers quickly tired of getting a high score by “cheating.”
Another expert witness to try Piano Wizard was 23-year-old event planner Lauren Armas, a self-described non-musician. “It was fun, and would have been more fun if I’d been playing it with a kid,” she told me. “It seemed way more interesting than any piano lesson I ever had.” Ernie Rideout, who taught music in public schools for many years before becoming Keyboard’s editor in chief, was also impressed. “It improves kinesthetic response,” he said. “It helps build the connection between a musical idea and fingers.” Technical editor Steve Fortner added, “The transition between levels is so clever that you don’t realize how much you’re really learning, and it holds your attention well. That’s unique among the video-game approaches to keyboard instruction that I’ve seen.”
One final warning to teachers: If you have a color-blind student, be aware that Piano Wizard’s effectiveness could be diminished, as the physical sticker colors are more pastel than vibrant, and might be difficult to read.
Conclusions
Fun and engaging, Piano Wizard has the potential to help young (and even not so young) beginners have a blast while interacting with a keyboard instrument on a regular basis — and this is no small accomplishment. Does it make traditional piano lessons obsolete? Not at all: There’s a tremendous amount of knowledge of musicianship and technique that isn’t covered here. Does the program excite kids about music and keyboards, help them build essential musical skills, and reinforce that practicing can be fun? Absolutely.