Coloring-in P a Piano That Allows a Perfor on Musical Expr

In a piano lesson, a teacher teaches a way of performance by providing indirect cues, e.g., metaphors and singing. A model performance is one of the important cues. Meanwhile, it is difficult even for the teacher to perform a very technical piece without enough practice, even if he/she had formerly performed it. However, the teacher still retains his/her knowledge for performing the piece. Accordingly, we propose “Coloring-in Piano (CiP)” to support a piano lesson. CiP frees the performers from heavy labor of accurate reproduction of described melody and miss-touches. Therefore, CiP allows them to immediately concentrate on musical expression that is essential for the performers, which facilitates the teacher to show his/her musical knowledge to the pupil. We conducted experiments to subjectively evaluate the performances with Coloring-in Piano and with a conventional piano. These results demonstrate that the performer can perform music with CiP as felicitously as with the conventional piano. Moreover, we could find that CiP can facilitate the teacher to perform even an unpracticed piece to his/her own satisfaction. Considering the experimental results, we discuss what is necessary and essential for the performers is to express “indiscrete elements,” e.g., "articulation," "agogik," "dynamik," and so on based on her/his individual interpretation and impressions of an opus, than the correct reproduction of the sequence of notes.