You can just play the piano

Something I read online exhorted that one "practice an instrument" as a sort of mental exercise. Now that I think music is basically safe, inspired by a few friends who can play piano, on 2025-078, I took this remark a bit too seriously.

One of my homes has a small piano. I looked up sheet music for a couple tracks — two 2000s Japanese songs, something from a video game, and an anthem — and a reference for how sheet music works. From these, I figured out what to do, and thus can now play songs by piano.

On the one hand, ubiquitous recorded music makes playing instruments practically obsolete, except as it may help you make new music. On the other hand, this is convenient to show off and — more compellingly — surprisingly fun. It now seems to me apt that, by the same word, we play games and play instruments. Sans internet, often sans electricity, wherever a piano is available, I can summon real music, evoking great joy in myself and, I may hope, anyone nearby.

"Can play the piano" connotes more skill than "can play a couple short memorised songs" connotes more fluency and completeness than I actually pursued. But that level suffices for the fun I care about, and is very achievable with just access to the instrument, the internet, and a bit of effort. That was my first time playing a musical instrument, at least since I was nine, which is too young to matter. Despite that, I play coherently, in a flow-state, after about two days learning alone. It probably helped that I vaguely knew some music theory, but most music is simple enough that it'd be tedious, rather than truly hard, to make up for that and study from scratch.

I went along the study-practise cycle four times.

1. Find sheet music.
2. Skim to find the start of the complex, fun, widely-recognised part.
3. Look at a reference to understand which staff-heights map to which keys.
4. Play the notes shown for one time-point.
5. Repeat step 4 (and, decreasingly, 3) thruout the song.
6. Repeat the whole song, or less familiar segments, looking at the sheet music less and less as the procedure encodes into memory.

That process is much easier than it looks. Music uses a lot of patterns, so I can compare note-sets to others seen earlier in the same song, shifting as necessary. The songs I studied were all ones I had heard plenty before, so I could play them in my mind. Mental playback is too vague to explicitly guide me here, but it lets me intuit when I messed up, and gives a structure by which to remember the exact notes. After I memorise it, what practice remains serves to shorten my gaps between note-sets.

Other aspects that surprised me:

• Did I mention this was fun? Sans outside pressure, my practice-sessions often ran to multiple hours.
• It's vastly harder to coordinate two hands to a timed song than one, especially if the note-boundaries differ between hands, as they often do. This is why I only really learned one-handed, melodic versions, which typically include enough by which to recognise songs.
• Before, I thought of music as a continuous, unified stream of sound. Only after playing it on an instrument can I vividly grasp that it's all made of an arrangement of small, separable parts.
• As I memorised songs and played them faster, I had to compress them to fit in my mind, by inventing abstractions and describing patterns. Thus I got to watch an unsupervised learning algorithm train from the inside.