[john61]

Piano fingering is a very subjective matter, because every hand, finger, arm and taste is different. I doubt that a robot fingering is of any use. You have to find it out for yourself under guidance of a teacher and maybe inspiration by fingerings of master pianists written in the score. The Henle app has a feature to show them separately. They differ vastly for the same piece.

[platers]

What if you could upload a photo of your hand and the RL agent learns the optimal fingering for your hand?

[john61]

My taste, my pianistict abilities, my arm, shoulder and body movements and my musical idea for the interpretation and imagination of the sound of the piece can not be seen in a photo of my hand. Not even a good teacher can give you a finished perfect fingering for you, I doubt that a dumb machine can do any better, especially if it plays that bad as the examples sound in comparison to a even beginner human. You have to find the fingering out for yourself and this is part of the great joy of playing / learning piano.

[montag]

It's not quite that simple; everyone has different dexterity and innervation (how strong is the wiring between your pinky and ring finger?)

[martyvis]

What if the AI gets to see you playing sample pieces or even if you have say a weighted keyboard that it gets to see the forces you can apply? I mean I've seen the Australian Sports Academy do all sorts of video and biomechanical instrumentation of elite athletes with the aim of improving their technique and provide a customised training regime. I can't see why it can't be used in music performance which in many ways is just as much athleticism as it is art.

[kibibyte]

Given sufficient information about your personal biomechanics, a sufficiently advanced AI may be able to suggest the right fingering for you. But the main problem with this (and I think this is something that many in this thread simply don't have the familiarity with) is that fingering is simply a 2D projection of the multiple-dimensional problem of how you need to move your entire upper body to play a piece.

I'll use a piece that I am practicing right now to illustrate: Chopin Etude Op 25 #1 ("Aeolian Harp").

Sheet music: https://imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/112921 (the Herrmann Scholtz one) Performance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob0AQLp3a5s

For intermediate pianists (perhaps even beginners), the possible fingerings are actually really obvious just from looking at the notes, especially when using the suggested fingerings as a guide. This piece is structured around playing broken chords in circles, so there aren't really any fingering tricks here.

Notice the chords like the first right hand chord on the second bar on the second line, or the simpler left hand 4-note chords on the third line of the second page. Despite the obvious fingerings, somehow you need to figure out how play a broken chord that spans 15 keys, a distance that no one can comfortably cover by just stretching thumb and pinky. And that is because this piece is a study in the circular motion of the wrist (and really, the entire arm). If you do not realize this and try to simply try to stretch your fingers to go from key to key, not only will that limit your ability to increase your speed, but will build tension in your wrist as you go through this piece and eventually lead to injury. Not to mention that it really hurts to stretch your fingers with a static wrist.

(In my Jan Ekier edition of this piece, some of these ~15 key chords have two fingering suggestions that you can play with to decide which one you prefer.)

It may eventually be solvable, but this is a multiple dimensional problem, and a useful AI for this will need to give you a solution in multiple dimensions. If an AI can teach me all the motions of Chopin's etudes and allow me to just think about how to voice these pieces, maybe I won't need a teacher anymore.

[john61]

Most of the information a pianist uses for fingering are the feeling of the hand and the sound of the piano while playing. This is not visible. Eyes are of little use for musicians. There are blind master pianists.