Personal Essay Sample on The Piano Law

“C-C-G-G-A-A-G-F-F-E-E-D-D-C.” Just looking at individual letters, it is difficult to determine what these letters represent. However, with the context of music, analyzing the patterns, and seeing the overall composition, I can easily identify that this is the note sequence for Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. It also matches the sequence of tones in the alphabet song. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was one of the first songs I learned to play on the piano, and patterns of repeating notes are something that occurs in more advanced piano songs as well. When learning to play the piano at five years old, finding recurring patterns throughout the piece helped me with memorizing and putting more feeling into my piano playing.

The importance of patterns and rhythms is all part of the musical law of creating a melodious piece. Different combinations of chords create feelings ranging from gentle to discomfort. Other sequences include climbing the stairs represented with an ascending chord progression, and failure as a sequence of descending chords. Another pattern that can drastically alter a piece is the pace of the song. This pace, known as tempo, is a constant beat that is kept through the musical piece. 

Tempo is the “law” of music, and playing at the composer’s intended pace makes the piece more captivating. Maintaining the same pace over a long session of time was something I found continuously difficult to manage as a hyper 2nd and 3rd grader. Thus, I was introduced to the metronome, a mechanical device that beeps in time to maintain pace. This device was like a person watching over me, catching me when I went wrong and broke the law. To perfect the law, I would slow down to analyze the parts that went wrong and gradually speed up until I could play through smoothly.

Upon taking a computer class in freshman year, I discovered that similar to music, there are “laws” to follow in coding. In Computer Science, the “law” are the keywords and parameters needed to format programs. In the case that I break the “law”, my program would crash, not run, or do a task different from how I envisioned it. Unlike a metronome, which showed me the exact moment when I was caught, coding was not that straightforward. 

In one project, I coded two pairs of feet to move in a dancing pattern within the confines of a window. The issue was over a long time, the two feet went off the screen. At first, I spent hours hunting through hundreds of lines of code. Eventually, I realized that constantly staring at my computer and lines of code was time-consuming and not effective.

Thus, I developed a process to solve my coding problems. First, I stepped back to take a broader view of the requirements, which are that the two pairs of feet move in sync and remain on screen. Then, I laid out the different occurring cases and solutions to the question. The cases were that different genders have different foot sizes, and therefore, each step would be incremented in different amounts. Finally, I compare my handwritten solutions to my programmed solutions. The root of the problem was a small rounding error that accumulated over time. After fixing that error, the program finally worked, and I felt a tremendous amount of achievement from solving the problem. By analyzing the big picture, my process was faster and prevented me from getting too detailed and straying from the task at hand.

Playing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was the beginning of my examinations of the big picture, through the search for patterns and laws of music that exist around me. These patterns show up in Computer Science. I continue to study programming and learn new things knowing that whenever I get stuck if I can take a break to examine the overarching problem, I can solve the issue.