bitflipper
This was pretty cool. They had two pianists, one a seasoned pro and the other his student, wear cameras that track eye movements to record what they're looking at while playing.
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And now, it's time to go listen to Rachel Flowers.
I'm not sure, and I do not believe it, that most music is "eye" dependent. It would take out Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and so many others ... for some, it's about something else, and when you hear Rachel do the complete "Tarkus" on piano, and so many other pieces of music, including live performance doing Frank Zappa, and then doing Robert Fripp and then ... it's ****ing insane.
There is a side of the "arts" that is not visual for some of us ... it's internal ... and how Rachel even does all this, is not something that she can even explain clearly on some of the interviews ... in the meantime, we could say that she has an amazing memory ... but I seriously doubt it's all memory ... there is more of something else in there ... that we can not relate to at all!
Very cool, though ... but we can easily take this to guitarists ... when I saw Stevie Ray Vaughn, he almost never looked at his guitar when he was simply flowing along ... it was sort of like he had to have a particular feel, and when he got it, he had to follow it. Robert Fripp, though, seems to keep his eyes on the monitor, which seems to suggest that is his "keyboard" and he can adjust his hand on the guitar as needed ... but this is strange and different for so many of them ... I was just watching Edgar Froese do a solo with Linda Spa, and he had his eyes on a basic position, and then he would close them while playing some parts, as if wanting to get a specific feel from his fingers that his eyes watching them would take away. Manuel Gottsching, is a bit different, in that it looks like he is looking at his fretting hand, but it seems like it never moves, and yet his hands are all over the place, and when he solos with Klaus Schulze in those really long pieces, it's like ... what is he listening to and what is he seeing? It's hard to tell ... I think he is more concentrated on listening to Klaus at that point than he is concerned with his fingers even though he is doing something with them ...
Nothing is the same ... it's all very different.