Translator: Lisa Thompson Reviewer: Zeddi Lee
(Music: Intro accompaniment of The Beatles' "Imagine")
(Singing) Imagine I was a piano.
(Laughter)
(Singing) I'd be a very sad soul.
I'm actually so easy to play -
(Laughter)
(Singing) But few of you really know.
Imagine all the people
play me like a computer -
(Laughter)
(Singing) You ... you would say I'm a dreamer,
but it's no more just a dream,
because now there is the Hao Staff -
(Laughter)
(Singing) You will know Hao to play the piano.
(Music ends)(Applause)(Cheering)
(Speaking) Thank you.
I decided about 10 years ago to play some piano,
and ...
I swear I never touched one before that.
The reason was simple: it is incredibly cool, isn't it?
and it seemed incredibly fun,
and I'm incredibly good at typing.
But there is a problem, or there was a problem for me:
although the piano keyboard looks simpler than its computer counterpart,
it is actually much harder to find the keys to press.
The notation that we all use today
is actually called the "grand staff."
It's used by all the music students, teachers, and musicians,
and it's been around for hundreds of years, we all know.
Although the grand staff is not extremely difficult to explain and understand,
it is very hard for somebody like me, an adult beginner, to learn,
or for anyone who did not pick it up natively as a child.
Proof?
If you search YouTube with the words "piano tutorial,"
you will actually see close to three million tutorial videos,
and most of these videos
are actually just showing you simply how to find the keys to press.
If music scores were easy enough to read,
these videos should not be existing in such a big number,
or they would have been done differently.
They would have been made to teach you how to play better
instead of just finding which keys to press
because it's much easier
for you to find what to play from a piece of paper.
But I was not a member of the YouTube generation,
so I had to find some other way of helping myself.
I used Excel spreadsheet a lot for my work,
so I opened one on the computer.
And this is actually what I did:
I just dragged one piano keyboard onto the spreadsheet,
manipulated it until the piano keys are all perfectly matched with the rows.
Then I selected the rows that go through the black keys
and colored them gray.
And there you have a giant piano keyboard.
And let's make some music notes on this keyboard.
And these are actually the first notes produced on my invention, yeah?
(Singing slowly) Twinkle, twinkle, little star.
(Speaking) Yeah, that simple.
And this is actually the illustration that went to the U.S. Patent Office
and was included in the patent certificate
that was finally approved and issued in October 2008.
As you can see from the references cited and examined by the patent office,
I wasn't the first one to try to reinvent music notation for piano.
The serious efforts are dated back all the way to the year 1870.
I gave the name Hao Staff to my invention, to the spreadsheet drawings,
and ...
this is what the actual music sheet looks [like].
By the way, they are not made by Excel spreadsheet anymore.
(Laughter)
Yeah.
And there you have the higher notes written by Beethoven himself
to be played by the right hand
and lower notes to be played by the left hand.
And you also have the finger numbers
to indicate what fingers to use to play the notes.
The Hao Staff sheets carry all the information
that the traditional grand staff sheets carry,
except that they're laid out
on the background of elongated black and white keys
instead of the abstract system
of lines and spaces, key signatures, you know -
if some of you study music, you would know -
sharps and flats.
It is effectively a "what you see is what you get" version of grand staff.
(Laughter)
So we have a good product, and let's make it spread.
I started to build a website, and I enlisted some help.
(Video) Narrator: What is Hao Staff?
什麼是郝氏譜？
Jeff Hao: Those are the voices of the young Haos in the house.
(Laughter)
And they were -
(Murmuring)
They were not much bigger than that.
And, by the way, they now look like this.
In the time between these two pictures,
while the young Haos were morphing from one picture to another -
(Laughter)
I started to transcribe all sorts of piano music onto the Hao Staff:
classical, classic work of pop, rock, jazz, folk, ethnic, whatever.
And the purpose of this effort is to help people like me,
who have never learned music before,
when I was young.
And I must make it clear:
it is not recommended to the young children
or the professional music students.
And I also took it to some internet piano forums,
expecting the welcome of a hero.
(Laughter)
But the welcome part did not quite come,
and in its place, skepticism, sarcasm,
criticism, and pessimism,
and even insults and anger on top of all the isms.
(Laughter)
Yeah, and that went on for quite a while,
and then one day, I saw this post from one of the Chinese websites,
by someone called Pazu.
I think that's a character name from the Japanese cartoon movie.
Anyway, there are multiple stories in this post, and they're very long.
I'm just going to read some of it.
"I found the iPhone app, which included 'Canon in D Major.'
It was easy to understand.
I was able to play a few measures immediately,
which surprised my elder sister.
She is a piano teacher.
She always liked to tease me about why the brother,
while sharing the same genes,
had no music talent at all.
In the past, she had tried to teach me to play something by hand,
but it did not work.
I guess one has to have the help of a score
to be able to practice and memorize.
After playing with Hao Staff for about a month,
I mastered the whole piece.
Although it took a month
for me to learn to play something that only lasts a few minutes,
it felt great.
Some people say, Why not just learn to read the five-line staff notation?
But I only want to play something for fun;
I don't want to go through all the trouble just for that."
As it turned out,
this Pazu was a travel book writer
who went all the way to Lhasa, Tibet, and opened a coffee shop there.
More similar, positive feedback started to trickle in.
It is working.
It is changing people's lives.
And just imagine how many people in the world fancy playing the piano.
I don't know how many; I just imagine it has to be a huge number.
(Laughter)
And today, a group of people sharing that imagination,
they have got together and formed a venture,
and the mission
is to make all the people in the world know how easy it is now with Hao Staff
to play the piano.
We are also going to transcribe
any piano music that anyone is interested to play onto the Hao Staff.
Why reinvent the wheel?
We have all heard that many times before.
Yeah, it has to be the wisest wisdom around,
given the number of times that we are told about it.
Yeah, why reinvent the wheel?
If we followed that wisdom to the letter,
there would not have been tires around the wheel,
and without the tires,
there would not have been cars and even airplanes in this world.
And Pazu would not have played "Canon in D Major" like this.
(Video)(Music: "Canon in D Major")
(Audience)(Laughter)
JH: Thank you very much.
(Applause)