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If posters aren't allowed to be anonymous, I for one won't be here, and I suspect quite a few others more learned than me won't be either. I have a sensitive job which is unrelated to music, and I have no wish to be recognized in my place of work as a regular poster at any public internet forum. That would only leave people who are in the music profession and looking for publicity (as many PW regulars are), and many others who just couldn't care less how they're perceived by others - i.e. including trolls with gigantic egos, like the one we're referring to.

There's always been a simple solution - ban such people immediately. I'm not the only one who keeps wondering why, even after countless good threads have been completely derailed by one troll (who has contributed nothing of any significance for pianists in PW, and whose specialty is insulting everybody) in the several months since he joined, he's still around........

Outlawing anonymity would be a very bad move for this forum, as it would do away with most of their business. I do, however, think a small fee for membership, say $5 a month, would be a good idea.

And the ban of a single member, which I am sure almost everyone who has observed his behavior would advocate, would improve the quality of the forum by several orders of magnitude.

+1.

Yes, I'm in the same predicament. I rather visible in my industry and I regularly speak at events (not music related). What I say is already analyzed and dissected by customers, peers, and critics alike, and I have no desire for my hobby to be thrown into it since Piano World is full of bots crawling all over it mining info.

I think getting "harsher" comments as you advance is pretty normal and part of the education required to perform... get used to hard comments, otherwise later on you will REALLY get hurt.
At beginner level they are horribly discouraging but later on you need to learn how to handle it.

I got a comment by my previous teacher about my double thirds how they weren't together... and at the beginning did hurt.. then I just put my head down, listen more and polish more...

I saw my wife getting a somehow harsh comment about her violin playing by her sister... mostly fueled by jealousy... my wife didn't touch the violin for almost a month :-\... took a lot of encouragement from me and the teacher.. and few phone calls to the teacher to explain the situation and why she wasn't practicing...

PC reflects more or less the caustic environment of higher level of playing.
ABF if the social always encouraging side....

I haven't posted as much recently..


I think you and I have similar instincts there. I pretty much have a fight-fight-or fight CNS response, too. lol


I think this might have the same effect. There are lots of free venues out there, unfortunately.

One can only wonder. The last time I questioned said troll, I was told that I was probably autistic. What was most surprising was the the mods didn't do anything about it.

I myself have sometimes wanted an anonymous account at Piano World so that I can say what I really think in some instances (as with the Tchaikovsky vs. Rachmaninoff discussion) . . . yet maybe the only purpose would be that it would feel good to me to state such things, but there wouldn't be any practical or other utility to the most candid posts?

So, sure, I fully acknowledge many good reasons to have an anonymous account here.

Some forums on the internet have the other model, with no access by non-members or search engines, one i.p. address allowed per member, with proof of all members' identity in hard copy on file, and no one at these forums ever issues an insulting or ill-considered remark, and there are no moderators. And there are multiples more active and engaged members than here at Piano World, with the forums financed entirely ad-free. At these forums personal insults are against the terms of service, one would be banned for life as a result of doing that.

I don't mind personal insults ("sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me"), but the trolling at Pianist Corner, with at least one bot programme involved, is off the charts.

Maybe we just have to accept this until the poster loses interest, gets bored and goes away.

As with these other forums evidence of a bot might be discernible by examining server records to see if a poster regularly opens a thread and then responds in very regular intervals of time regardless of the depth and complexity of the subject and the number of words in the response. There are other things one can check as well - I don't know what these are as they deliberately are kept secret.

If too many one sentence responses use the same amount of time as too many 20 sentence responses then there is an issue.

There is supposed to be a statistical spread to the response time which makes bot use very separable from non-bot use. Known human-only posters are used as the control for the evaluation.

Michael - I thought the mods were pretty good at catching bots. They've caught several in the last, oh, 3 or 4 months. You think there was a bot in the Chopin thread? I didn't notice that particular issue, tho I've reported others that I thought were.

As for anonymity - well, I know folks who have had stalkers, and never use their real names online. For good reason :\ I'm really not hard to find from my PW posts if one really wants to, but I've had PW posts quoted in other forums, not piano related, and while I didn't say anything, it did seem a little out of line to me. So I'd just as soon not be entirely transparent here.

Cathy

I'm not sure what was hinted at, but I think I'm with you 100% here. I enjoy a debate, we all have our own methods of doing things. But when someone gives out bad information (or worse, completely wrong), it does a great injustice to anyone trying to learn. I also don't like people who attack someone for their opinions or discourage players based on the music they like. I have no problem calling out those people.

I do, in fact, know about that kind of computer-aided analysis, not least because I went through something like that myself at the age of fourteen. I have cerebral palsy, which means the joints in my lower limbs don't move the way they should. I underwent multi-level orthopaedic surgery (basically, several surgical procedures all at once) as a teenager, to correct the worst of my problems. Prior to that surgery, my movement pattern was meticulously analysed with the help of a computer, in order to determine exactly what interventions I would need.

So I know from personal experience that this can be a powerful approach, and I think it's an intriguing idea to perhaps apply it to things other than athletics and neuro-motor disorders. I'm just not sure the existing equipment is quite there yet: it strikes me as something that serves the purpose of analysing "large scale" movements very well, but perhaps it can't (yet) be applied to something as subtle as playing the piano. I don't know. An old friend of mine is an electronics engineer who spends about half his time working on this kind of stuff. I'll ask him about it, if I ever get the chance.

This sort of reminds me of vocal teachers who use computers to analyze the vocal quality and try to teach from that instead of knowing what a good sound is and leading the student to free up bad tensions and create a free sound. What happens is you often end up with less than desirable sound if led by these methods.

The science of things is fine, and a good teacher knows enough of this to help them understand what muscles a student may be engaging to create the sound they are producing. However, in the end, it is about the sound and ease of use that is paramount. When these two things exist simultaneously, then the student is able to focus more on expression because the technique is out of the way and assisting them.

If you are going to insist on science as a means of doing things, then you'd better be able to produce results. If you can show proof of how that approach helps, then you will have a lot of interested people. The 'person' in question cannot after many people asking them to do so, and so the content of what they say must be dismissed, IMO.

I wonder if this is a better approach rather than just ignoring the offending posts. Even if you choose to ignore it doesn't ensure that someone else will reply and then the thread starts to go south.

I only learned about the 'notify' feature recently.

My intuition tells me that this might indeed be what happens when you pursue "objectively perfect technique", which is why I said that I don't currently believe it's possible to build an automaton that plays the piano truly musically.

There is an episode of Star Trek: Voyager in which the ship's doctor, who is himself an elaborately programmed machine (an emergency medical hologram in the process of becoming "a real man") acquires instant fame when the locals hear him sing during an away mission. By the end of the episode, though, he's been replaced with a "better version" of himself, which is programmed to go beyond a normal human being's vocal range.

The message: at a certain point, "perfection" can become so perfect that it becomes alien to us. I think that if human performers are inevitably somewhat flawed in their execution of virtuoso music, that's an important part of their charm. Perhaps it's possible to eliminate the flaws by pursuing "peak efficiency" in piano technique. But even if it were possible to do that (which I'm still not sure it is), should we really go there?

I'm inclined to think not.

Honestly, I like the posts. I think it IS good to challenge status quo. I think a lot of piano teachers just teach "what they were taught" not because they have trial and errored it to be the best thing, but because they know no other methods. I like my teacher because he says things like "well i was taught XYZ, but i'll have you do it a bit differently". That tells me he uses his critical thinking skills to determine what was relevant and what wasn't vs blindly just teaching what he was taught.

One thing that was said was the sound a piano will make is solely determined by how hard or soft the hammer hits the string... basically the velocity of the hammer is what creates the sound. I'm not sure how some people argued against this as it isn't even a matter of opinion, it's just true. I think where people were getting confused is there are most DEFINITELY easier ways to control this velocity than others. For example arm weight I find easier to have hammers strike at the same time and I find I have more control vs just using fingers. But by no means does differing tones/sounds come from ANYTHING other than how fast/soft the hammer hits the string.

You see I think perfection would be nice to strive towards.... I don't personally think its attainable for a human to be perfect 100% of the time but I do think it's silly to say you prefer things flawed vs not flawed. The entire point of a flaw is something that is derogatory. Concert pianists put countless hours into their work in order to get RID of anything they view as flaws. To say that people enjoy music because of flaws I can't really get on board with . I think its just a defensive mechanism because we CAN'T be perfect, not because we SHOULDN'T strive for it. I think people SHOULD strive to the do the best they can do, not take solace in the fact that they CAN'T do it. The more you think you can't, the more true that becomes

I must have missed the part where people were arguing that different sounds or tone come from something other than the velocity of the keys striking the strings. This is common knowledge, and while the tone does change if you play a note p vs. f (and tone can be marginally changed also by use of the pedals, especially una corda), it's all about the hammer hitting the string. The rest is how you press the key down, and those are internal things that do not have an effect on the sound except to give the performer better control and thus more expressive capability. I didn't see where anyone was stating otherwise, but I did sift through a lot of the posts.

This is true, of course. I never saw anyone argue against that in this particular thread. I did, however, see someone argue once that vibrato is something that can be achieved on piano which, obviously, it cannot. Once the hammer has hit the string, that's it. You can influence the duration of the sound by controlling the dampers, but other than that, it's out of your hands.

To me, the musicality and the humanity of it is mostly in the decisions the performer makes on the spot, though. Play softly here, and a little bit louder on the next repetition, or in the next measure. A little bit of rubato on this particular scale run, and a little bit more of it on the next one. There is probably going to be some unevenness, some measure of "unpredictability" in the way these decisions get executed during any given performance of a piece, which, to me, is part of what makes that performance interesting ... and human. Maximum efficiency involves, I think, doing away with that unevenness. I'm just not sure that's something we should be striving for.

there was a big back and fourth between atrys telling someone that velocity is the ONLY things(lets remove pedal as well because as you stated that has a subtle effected via ringing of all the other strings) that can change the sound/tone. He was arguing that he struggles with "play this warmer" because he'd rather hear, "play this softer" because its not abstract and vague. I see where he is coming from but believe he was trying to be difficult because most people would interpret that as playing softer = warmer. Someone else argued that there are other ways to control tone which is simply... wrong lol. Velocity of hammer hitting the string is the only way to control sound. My belief is this person was confusing WAYS to control the velocity with what he was stating.

I think perfect technique would be great but its ultimately unattainable because humans are imperfect creatures!

@sayanoya i didn't interpret anything as attaining "maximum efficiency" in regards to a performance. Just thought the argument was about maximum efficiency regarding the movement of your hands in order to REPLICATE that performance. Ultimately I think its a moot point because if the end result is a piece of music that sounds good, what do you, as the listener care how the pianist moved in inefficient ways? Sure it could have made the player less tense or more confident or whatever, but if the end result is the piece of music sounding good, who cares what path they took to achieve that?

To compare it to me playing a game. Sometimes I'll get a perfect score on a game, but I'll still watch the replay to see what I could have done better. My desire for doing this is based on the fact that it won't always be as "easy" thus I won't get as much leeway for silly mistakes even tho ultimately, I still got 100% and won anyways.... if that makes sense haha

That is true only if you are playing that one note and only that note in isolation.

Which isn't what happens when you're playing music. Because what happens before and after that note is played changes the sound of that note.

If you read that thread again, you'll find that I challenged the troll repeatedly on this issue, but because he's unable to think outside his box, he got quite nasty - and then tried to bluster & bully his way out of his predicament.