For some time now i’ve been interested and have been thinking about learning and video games. When i first played guitarhero a long time ago it was clear to me that, especially with the drum kit, i was actually learning useful hand-foot coordination skills which would pply directly to playing a real drum kit. Unfortunately the guitar was entirely ridiculous (5 button controller) and had nothing to do at all with playing a real guitar except your general body posture. Surely i thought the next step is to have people actually play a guitar. Or a piano for that matter. Why hasn’t anyone made a game like that ? I started playing around with MIDI and OpenGL and made a very rudimentary piano hero kind of game.

But, of course, people have thought of this stuff well before me.

The oldest incarnation of such a thing i found was “Keyboard Mania”, a game developed by Konami in 2000 as an Arcade game.  A simple 24-key piano keyboard input device, notes fall from the top, you have to hit them as they reach the bottom.

A much modern version, less of a game and more of a tutor, was until recently called PianoHero (Until Harmonix sent the developer a cease and desist letter) and is now called Synthesia. This is a well written, slick looking program that can be fed with and MIDI file and is totally fun! It was OpenSource until recently but is still free which is fabulous.

Similarily for guitar, people are trying to make gaming software controlled by the actual instrument.The problem here of course is much harder since rather then having a clean stream of input MIDI notes, you have to interpret an audio stream and discern which notes were played. THis is difficult because the the same note can be played in different locations on the guitar especially when multiple notes are played together such as when playing chords.

However, next year a product called Guitar Rising is expected to come out. They seem to have done a pretty good job! These guys have even filed a patent application (pending), quite a broad patent actually which as far as i can tell would include the above piano programs.

A free version of exactly the same concept though is called LittleBigStar or soon to be known as Offbeat, apparently.

Dhani Harrison, the son of Beatle George Harrison, very recently remarked that he’s  “working on Rock Band 3 and making the controllers more real so people can actually learn how to play music while playing the game.” He claims: “Give me a couple years, it’s going to happen.” Clearly it’s already happened. But what’s maybe more interesting is that if you read comments and forums about the statement, people are of two minds about that. Many people express a sentiment along the lines of “if i wanted to learn an instrument i’d do it – but i just wanna jam along to my favourite tunes with my friends not having to learn anything complicated”. This is something to think about: Its all good ‘n great to make games or software to teach humans do things more efficiently then was possible before, but they have to want to.