PAINTING MUSIC™- FUR ELISE - "OOM Sketch Explained"

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Check out the video above demonstrating my program Object-Oriented Music™ (OOM™), which generates what I call an “OOM Sketch” — a visual map of the symbolic instruction set I use when I’m playing the piano.

This is not a visualization of sound.

It’s a visualization of thought — how I actually remember and execute a piece.

Over the past two decades, I taught piano, guitar, voice, and ensemble performance at Mountain View Piano, my private studio in Silicon Valley.

I worked primarily with:

• students who were highly capable intellectually 
• but struggled—often dramatically—with reading traditional music notation 

This was consistent across:

• children 
• adults 
• engineers, scientists, and highly trained professionals 

The pattern was clear:

The majority of people do not successfully learn to read music—and many never do.
 

Rather than forcing the question:

“Can you read this page?”
 

I asked:

“How do you remember this?”
 

or

“Can you draw the song?”
 

or

“Paint the music.”
 

What came back was incredibly consistent:

• visual patterns 
• color groupings 
• spatial relationships 
• symbolic shortcuts 

Each student built their own internal system for representing the music.

In my studio, traditional notation was not treated as:

• a requirement 
• or a measure of intelligence 

It was treated as:

a historical system from the Western European tradition
 

That’s all.

We would look at materials like The History of Western Notation and study how those symbols evolved — and then we would build our own.

The OOM Sketch is my formalization of what was already happening:

turning internal symbolic thinking into a structured, visual system
 

This work is built on a few core ideas:

1. The diatonic structure (1–7)

• chords are the container of meaning 
• the 12-tone system is an overlay 

2. Replace non-obvious symbols with obvious ones

• ♭ → “−” 
• ♯ → “+” 

3. Align the data with the instrument

• rotate the traditional score 
• separate left and right hand flows 
• remove unnecessary notation 

4. Normalize into time-based structure

• equal time units 
• forward-facing layout (top → bottom) 
• a clear “instruction set” view of the piece 

Instead of:

a page you try to decode
 

You get:

a structured map of how to play the piece
 

That’s what the OOM Sketch is.