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)
