[fredfjohnsen]

> While playing off sheet music and focusing on dexterity exercises can be rewarding, they are not creative activities.

Of all the idiotic things written in the comments of HN (there are plenty...) this has to be, hands down, the most idiotic. There are literally an infinite number of possible expressions in terms of muscle movement & hand / eye coordination involved in an activity like playing the piano & this is BEFORE discussing the activity of using that infinite set of expressions to actually interpret music played from memory, by ear, or from a page. The fact that you think it's not a "creative activity" says more about your lack of creativity than anything else.

[jayjader]

Ok. Not the person you're quoting, but I _do_ have ~20yrs experience playing piano, and got to a _decent_ level when I was still pursuing tutoring/classes.

There definitely is a creative aspect to interpretation, and I agree it is big (in potential if not how much it is exploited often). However you're playing with fundamentally different building blocks for your artistic expression. Interpretation is much more subtle; you're leaving your own mark on something someone else originally made whereas composition can feel much more like conjuring art out of the ether/your mind. The infinite variations on a piece one can produce are still bounded by the original melody, and are vastly inferior in count/number than the variations of music that can be created "from scratch".

In any case, the parent comment author did not seem to me to have reached a level where they felt comfortable experimenting with interpretation - and may in fact not have achieved the requisite level to begin to be able to actively choose how they interpret pieces beyond "trying to be as accurate to the sheet music as possible". In contrast, if you're improvising, or composing with some kind of software, it is much more approachable to attempt to translate a random idea into music that can be listened to (to judge how close or off the mark our attempt is from our idea).

Basically you can skip the lengthy manual skill acquisition and jump right into playing around with the entire range of sounds and melodies that can be made.

[fredfjohnsen]

I don't disagree with anything you said. I also understand that the "skip" you refer to probably is fun for people that don't have traditional musical experience. That's fine. However, anyone who thinks that typing start & stop into a terminal or text editor to trigger loops is MORE CREATIVE than playing a musical instrument is wrong.