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Let’s discuss the original digital technology. I mean the piano, the 17th-century ivory and wood instrument that you play with the digits on the ends of your hands. In my opinion, the piano will never be eclipsed as a transmitter of deep, evocative human emotion. There’s an almost direct line from piano sheet music to player-piano rolls to punch cards to modern computers. Each successive device was supposed to mark some kind of improvement in translating "code" into meaning, be it artistic or business-oriented. So, modern computers should represent the apex of this. Yet they can’t match the magic of live "program" music, like Beethoven’s "Moonlight Sonata," to create vivid moods. The first time I "noted" this was more than a decade ago while working with Steve Jobs to start Next. I was part of a small team developing digital audio applications for speech and music. I had arrived from MIT, where I’d been working on ultra-high-end computerized player pianos. The piano I had been tinkering with was a nine-foot, six-inch gleaming black Bösendorfer Imperial Concert Grand. That’s the Rolls Royce of pianos, except it costs more than a Rolls and you can’t parallel park one in Cambridge. I lobbied Bösendorfer, and it sent one to Next to hook up to our computers. The effect was magical. Amid the usual whiteboards and cubicles, not far from the popcorn machine and the motherboard printouts, was this gorgeous, gleaming grand piano. Simply as an icon of design and engineering it was uplifting. Every once in a while, Bud Tribble (who ran the software-development operation) would sneak over and plink out some show tunes. One day, a violinist turned up and played some duets with a computer "accompanist" that played the Bösendorfer. Just having a little music in the air raised our spirits immensely. It also seemed to stir our creative juices. It’s been said that science is a discipline you practice with passion, and art is a passion you practice with discipline. The two aren’t really very different, yet they are segregated in our society, our lives, and our businesses in ways that can be problematic. There is a kind of harmony when art and science coexist in balance, as they did at Next. Years later, I heard Mike Vance (one of Walt Disney’s star designers) tell a story about how he had helped Jobs design his office at Pixar. The first thing Jobs did was replace the chief executive desk with a piano, so that every meeting could be more like a jam session. Recently, I played an obscure little piece, a chorale prelude by Bach called "Ich Ruf zu Dir" (I Cry to Thee, Lord Jesus Christ). You cannot listen to this music to the end without tears. It made me marvel: Here’s a piece of software, some basic instructions, that’s 300 years old. And it still works. The cultural context is gone (listening to this is like hearing a John Williams soundtrack but never seeing the movie). The Steinway concert grand I played it on is something Bach never dreamed of. But his code still runs. Will any software today still work in three centuries? As a design artifact, and part of the evolution of musical instruments, the piano has proved to be a pretty robust specimen. In the 1850s, before television, movies, and home stereos, there was the piano. It was sort of the Macintosh/Windows interface of music. Just about everything "ran" on it, from solos to symphonies. In fact, most people heard Beethoven’s symphonies by playing them as duets. The piano was the home computer and Internet of its day. It was the glue that held communities together. The quality-of-life differences between pianos and computers are telling: Two people can snuggle up on a piano bench and really play together—a true duet, not just the duel of sitting on the floor fighting with joysticks. As with marriage, you get something out of a piano only if you put something in. Seymour Papert has called this sort of interaction "hard fun" because you have to invest yourself. You make progress through play. Gaining mastery makes you feel better about yourself. Your feelings radiate. And that is a highly infectious process. Everyone picks up that positive energy. It is impossible to sit in a room with someone playing the piano and not be lifted up. This fosters a creative culture, not one based on passive entertainment or consumption of goods. A new Steinway concert grand costs about $80,000. That may sound like a lot, but it’s about the price of a beefy computer server, and a Steinway in the office might do a lot more for the company. Besides, if your dot-com goes belly up in a couple of years, you can resell the piano for almost exactly what you paid for it. Try doing that with a server. When people really surrender to music, there’s a phrase that’s used: The music washed over them. It happened to me recently. The date was June 7, 2000. The scene was the Van Cliburn International Piano Competion. This contest is for outstanding amateurs. The main requirements: You must be at least 35 years old, be out of practice, and have never earned your keep as a professional pianist. A hundred people showed up from dozens of countries. There was the caterer from Colorado. The ambassador from Brazil. The auto-glass repairman from Kansas. The mad scientist from MIT. (That would be me.) The blackjack dealer from Reno. The assistant manager from a Starbuck’s in New York. All of us were united by the quaint hobby of piano playing. We were true amateurs in the best sense: people who do what they do for the pure joy of it. I won a prize despite a few "uninvited guests" (Liszt’s pet phrase for wrong notes). Actually, everyone won. What transpired was really a celebration, not a competition. The audience listened to people who were absolutely in love with the music they had chosen to play. Most of the audience were closet pianists anyway, and they were enthralled, hanging on every note. Personalities and perspectives—and real passions—came leaping off the stage. When Deborah Saylor, a blind voice coach from Iowa, found her way onto the stage and played "Clair de Lune"—even though she’d never seen moonlight—the audience was spellbound. Those lucky enough to have heard her will remember those moments all their lives. In one way, the piano remains just a lump of old technology—cast iron, wood, steel, felt, brass, plastic—a dinosaur in the family tree of communication tools. But pianos still are a wonderful way to help people and companies be more creative. Maybe even more whole.
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