Music On: Learning Piano

Genre: Application / Misc.

Players: 1

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Review:

Music On: Learning Piano is a Content Creation Application uses the Nintendo 3DS touchscreen to have players play the melody of 15 classical piano themes. This game was originally released on the Nintendo DSi via the DSiWare service in 2010, and it was later grandfathered into the Nintendo 3DS eShop when the Nintendo 3DS released.

The presentation here is simple and not especially impressive, showing the music notes against a black screen on the top screen and piano keys on the bottom screen. The software plays synthesized versions of the songs and waits for players to play the piano key in question before moving on, giving a rating after each song based on… er, it’s not quite clear. It says “accuracy”, but even playing all the correct notes seems to result in less than perfect accuracy, so clearly timing plays a part too.

Of course, that’s not even addressing the elephant in the room here – in no way is this software actually teaching anyone how to play the piano. There’s nothing here about hand movements and positioning, in fact nothing about chords or anything like that. This is surely a limitation of the hardware, as the Nintendo 3DS touchscreen can only detect one point of contact at a time. However, limitation or no, it’s silly to expect to learn anything from this software, except a very very basic version of a portion of the melody of 15 classical music themes. Even then, the teenie-tiny size of the keys on-screen means that this software is best played using a stylus, something that clearly is not analogous to playing a real piano.

Beyond that… there’s not much to talk about here. There’s no mode here to play the piano “freestyle” to recite what you’ve learned without help, no tools or exercises to use with an actual real-life piano, nothing like that.

It’s hard to judge Music On: Learning Piano too harshly, despite how misleading this software’s title is. Given the limitations of the Nintendo 3DS, this software was never going to teach anyone to play the piano.It may be a fun distraction to learn the notes of portions of 15 popular classical music tunes, but even that is somewhat limited. Either way, whatever you’re looking for in this software, I doubt you’ll find it here.

tl;dr – Music On: Learning Piano is an Application that has players follow along in the melodies of portions of 15 classical music pieces. Unfortunately, the Nintendo 3DS hardware is poorly-suited to simulating a piano, so it’s dubious that you’ll be “learning” anything using this software. It may be briefly entertaining, but I expect that most will find that this doesn’t really work the way they likely hoped it might.

Grade: C-

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