The Piano Pod Season 3 Episode 4: Mark Murtagh & Hunter McGranahan from Forte, a virtual conference platform for music lessons

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Welcome back to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song and Clara Zhang. For anyone listening or watching our show for the first time, welcome! Clara and I are both classical pianists and piano teachers from New York City. This podcast is for anyone who plays the piano for fun, loves listening to piano music, or for someone who is currently pursuing a career in piano who works in the industry professionally.

In each episode, we interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting new ground in the music industry. Before getting started, we want to thank our amazing fans and listeners for tuning in. Please rate our show and review it on Apple Podcasts because every rating and review will help people find our show.

So today we have Mark Murtaugh, CEO of Forte and the Hunter Grenahan. He is a chief product officer from Forte.

That's right. Uh, yeah, it's a music teaching online platform for students and teachers to connect more easily.

Oh, that's right. And actually, you know, a few weeks ago we tested this platform together and it worked like magic, right? I felt like, yeah, we were playing for each other and I felt like you were really playing the piano right next to me.

That's right. We were playing a chorus together. You know, we got so excited. As much as I love using Zoom for online lessons, you know, I'm always looking for a better option, you know, especially in terms of the audio quality, especially the students are getting older, more mature, you know, the pieces are much more complex. It's always cool. Yeah.

Yeah. Audio quality really matters, right? So yeah, I can't wait to interview Mark and Hunter from Horte.

That's right. Well, they're here, so let's get the show started.

Yay!

You're listening to The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.

So we are excited to invite two special guests for this episode: co-founders of Forte, a virtual music lesson platform, Here we have Mark Martell, Chief Executive Officer, and Hunter McGranahan, who is the Chief Product Officer of Forte. Its website says in 2020, Mark and Hunter saw acute need for a purpose-built online music education platform. Forte is their solution to that problem, and they are thrilled to see teachers from all over the world using it to do their best teaching online, end quote. So today we will discuss what Forte offers and how they are helping music teachers and students and how we music educators anticipate the future of music lessons to look like in a post-pandemic era and so much more. So welcome, Mark and Hunter. Thank you for being on our show. Yay!

Welcome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having us. It's a thrill to be here.

Great. Oh, thank you.

Glad to be here. Thanks for having us.

Thank you so much for having me. So from where are you joining this interview today?

I am at Forté's offices in New York City, in the Nomad neighborhood in Manhattan.

Oh, we're close. Okay.

I'm at Forté's satellite office in Portland, Maine, which is also my house in Portland, Maine.

Well, we're at The Piano Pod headquarters on Upper East Side and in Williamsburg as well.

But welcome. And so, you know, this is very interesting to me, this topic of online lessons, because, you know, we are reaching nearly 3 years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. And obviously since then, not only has the demand for virtual music lessons increased, but also more importantly, our mindset, like music teachers' mindset and students', has shifted tremendously. I also imagine that for both of you, the pandemic was part of the significant factors in starting your company. So tell us, what is Forte? Mark, can you start?

Sure. Forte— I'll tell you what Forte is today and what Forte will be in the very near future. Forte today is an online platform that is purpose-built for music teachers to allow them to do online live instrument instruction with a student, one-on-one live music lessons. We built Forte because we saw an acute need for a purpose-built platform, a platform that was built specifically for the hard work that music teachers do. We know it's not easy to teach someone to play an instrument, and existing video conferencing platforms, general purpose video conferencing platforms, do doing a poor job with it, in particular with the audio quality. And we thought that we could do better, and we thought that music teachers deserved better. And we partnered with some top conservatories around the world, including the Royal College of Music, Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, Berklee in Boston, and others, to say, hey, look, you know, it's— you know, this was in early 2020 when all lessons had suddenly just been shoved online. And we said to them, look, hey, you know, what do you need out of an online platform? What are you doing now that all the lessons have moved online? And what can we build that would make it better? And those institutions kind of gave us our marching orders. We need audio of this quality or higher. We need something that's really easy to use for teachers and students. And so we built it to address that need. But we had been thinking for a while about the bigger need, which is access to better music education. I've worked with some of these conservatories for a long time, and everywhere I went in the world, I saw bottomless demand from families for access to better music education. And it's because most students don't live near the best teachers, right? The best music teachers tend to be in big cities, and if you don't live in a big city, you might be stuck with a piano— you know, whatever piano teacher lives in your neighborhood, and that person may be terrific, or that person may not be great for you. And so, uh, by solving the immediate problem presented by COVID, we were also solving that bigger access problem. And we launched that, uh, about a little over a year ago, and teachers are using it all over the world today on every continent except Antarctica to teach lessons. What we're working on now is to build into the platform the ability for students to come to Forte and find a music teacher who's great for them. And we expect to launch that in early 2023.

Amazing, wonderful, thank you. Now Hunter, is there anything else to add to this?

No, I think you covered it. Um, yeah, the— there was a very apparent issue at the beginning of March 2020 when everyone all of a sudden had to move online and everything that did video calling online suppressed the noise of instruments. You, when you still hear it today, 2 years later. Um, and we asked these conservatories Mark been working with what was going on, and, um, it was very clear that in order to solve the much greater issue of allowing better access to high-quality instruction, you first had to solve the tech. And we spent pretty much the last 2 years focusing on that and honing that with those conservatories., and we're at kind of a pivotal moment right here working towards the greater vision.

And there, you know, there were some things that weren't— I think, you know, going into this period where suddenly everything was shoved online, I think there were some things that weren't obvious to music teachers or to music students that would be really hard about teaching online on these general purpose platforms. So for example, Zoom is built for business meetings, and in a business meeting, in in theory, everyone should be speaking at the same volume. And so Zoom is always adjusting the volume, uh, for each of the participants. Well, what that means is a teacher, a music teacher, can't teach dynamics on Zoom because they can't tell actually how loud the student or softly the student is playing. And so if we took out that filter and we allowed for the teacher to actually hear that, then that's a musical concept that could be taught online that previously it wasn't possible.

You may already have answered, but sounds like you had this idea even before COVID you know, to bring this more like democratizing music education, high-quality music education, right? Basically. So, but how, what's the really point where I, we're going to do this, we're going to, you know, get together. So Hunter and Mark, maybe you've known each other for a long time. I don't know. But how did, Hortae Lesson come to be, and then, you know, starting the company in 2020 or 2021?

So Hunter and I met when I was working at the Juilliard School, and at the time Hunter was working for Magic Leap, which is an augmented reality company, and he was overseeing music education apps on that augmented reality platform. And we had talked about ways that the Juilliard School and Magic Leap could work together. And that's how we met. In 2019, I started to develop the idea for Forte. We didn't call it Forte at the time. I started thinking about, you know, about that access problem I mentioned. And that was before we knew what COVID was. And I was actually very busy in 2019. I was working with a bunch of different schools, including Berkeley College of Music, helping them open their branch campus in Abu Dhabi. And a lot of smart people whose opinions I trust were telling me, gosh, that idea you had for Forte is a really good idea. When are you going to get that going? And I just didn't have enough time. I told myself, you know, once some of these big projects I'm working on, you know, get finished and I have a little bit more breathing room, you know, I'm going to take a pause and I'm going to start really focusing on Forte. And then of course COVID, you know, provided the mother of all pauses for everybody. And I sat down to work on it and around the same time Hunter called me and said, hey, you know, the work we were doing together was cool. The work you've been doing since seems really cool. What are you working on now? And I said, well, I've actually got this idea. And, you know, the light bulb went off over Hunter's head that there's really no— you know, if you wanted to learn to speak German tonight, your brain would auto-populate with Duolingo or Rosetta Stone or other brands. There's really no trusted consumer-facing brand to find a guitar teacher, to find a piano teacher., it's worked the same way it has for a long, long time, which is, you know, you kind of rely on poorly informed parental word of mouth. You ask around the neighborhood, you're, you know, you cut— your choices are kind of limited to whoever lives in the neighborhood or lives nearby. And we thought, you know, that moment when Hunter called, we thought, you know what, this is a really big problem and we want to try and solve it for a lot of people. And that was March 2020, and Forte was born.

Amazing how everything just came to be, you know, so smoothly almost. Yeah, I mean, we all— I post— Yukimi and I went online in March 2020, and I remember it was just like this one day I had this concert, and then the next day it kind of just— no, this is the time, you know. So, but before we go any further, and it's just amazing that you have been working with these institutions. We have actually interviewed quite a few faculty members and from Juilliard, from Berkeley, and— but I want to know The two of you, did you guys have any music background when you were, you know, did you play instrument? How did you become so curious, interested in this music industry?

I took piano lessons when I was young, but because my parents forced me to, I wanted to quit.

Oh, parents, right?

And then, because who wants to do what their parents tell them to do when they're that young? And, you know, and I was like grew older and fell in love with music and, and, and started seeing a ton of concerts, I realized, oh my God, I want to be able to do this. And it's just, it's not that easy. I mean, I guess in my mind it's, it wasn't something that I had the, you know, my, I've been told my brain isn't as malleable as it used to be because of, you know, age. And there's not, there wasn't something out there that I could, that I believed in that I could start using, you know, instead of asking around the neighborhood who the best piano teacher is. And That's the work we started to do at Magic Leap was building apps. You could put glasses on and digitally overlay instruments and learn that way in kind of a gamified way.

That's so cool.

But I guess I am our own target audience. I'm someone who wants to believe in technology that I can pick up something, that I can be musical. You know, that's the— I think I do believe everyone is born musical and that they can be musical if they spend the right time. It's just, It's a ton of time, you know, it's, and it's a, it's a big lift, I guess. So, um, allowing a new technology to let people believe that is kind of the whole vision here.

That is so cool. Oh my gosh. You know, I, we have a lot of young students that, you know, that I, I think, you know, even when we were growing up, sometimes I think my parents tricked me and they said, don't become a professional. And then they will sign you up for class. So I was like, all right, then I guess I have to be a professional now. You know? So, but, you know, it's like young, young generation, sometimes after years, years of practicing, sometimes You know, I see my own students, they're also into tech and they— but, you know, in high school is the time they want to connect the dots. But so you're setting an amazing example for them to see, oh, this is a possibility, you know, going forward. And so thank you so much, Hunter. And Mark, you worked, I know, at Juilliard and the Royal College you mentioned earlier and Berklee.

I've worked with— I worked at Juilliard. I've worked with Royal College of Music and Berklee as a consultant on some strategic initiatives like, like the branch, Berkeley's branch campus in Abu Dhabi. I always say I wasn't born with a strong performer's gene. I was born with a strong applause gene. And but, you know, when I was, you know, through the work that I've done, I mean, I've had the great privilege of seeing some amazing piano teachers work with young students, you know, folks like, um, Veda Kaplinsky at Juilliard, or, or Michael Chin at Boston Conservatory, or Vanessa Latarsha at the Royal College of Music. And when you see what they do with their amazing students and you see the power of the connection between a great teacher and a student with whom they really click, you really do understand that there's something magic going on there. And so I totally agree with Hunter. Anyone can be musical, and anyone who aspires to be musical should try. And the world's a better place if you fill it with music. But I would also say don't stop until you find a teacher that you really click with, that you find a teacher that you enjoy, that you find a teacher who really gets you and gets what you want to, you know, gets what you want to achieve artistically and helps you develop your own voice. Because I think that's a big part of what's missing with the way lessons work today. Um, you know, families are kind of stuck with whatever teacher lives near them, and they don't know how to assess whether that teacher is great or not, and great for, you know, great for the student.

So, um, well, teachers too, we, we look for certain qualities of, you know, students as well. And so that's something that word of mouth can't take care of itself because we have to actively do our sort of, you know, as small as, you know, social media, but marketing to really attract certain quality of students. So I am very curious to know more about how Forte can help, you know, teachers as well. Now, there are, you know, honestly quite several virtual music lesson platforms we encountered before. And in fact, in season 1, we interviewed one CEO of this company that offers a virtual music lesson platform. So we want to know what's so unique about Forte. What sort of features do you have that stand out from others?

I think the first thing that differentiates the product isn't one of the bells and whistles features. It's the DNA. The fact that we spent from late mid to late 2020 until September of 2021. We didn't release it to anyone in the public to use. We ran pilot programs with teachers from the Curtis Institute and students across the country, and then teachers from the Royal College of Music and students across Asia. And, you know, version 1 of Forte in early 2021 is something that no one outside of those groups ever saw because it wasn't great yet. And then it got a little bit better for the next pilot program and Berkeley. And then by the end of the pilot program, the Royal College of Music, we'd had enough feedback from those teachers. And those are the teachers who can hear things that Mark and I can't, that our engineers can't, but they will tell us like, that note, you know, after 7.8 seconds is dropping off faster than it would in person. And that's not us. That's not my student. That's your technology to go fix it. And we'd be like, what are they talking about? And then we go play it. So we go, oh, they have a point, and we go fix that. So it was really the audio, which we call Forte Pure Audio, that took us longer than any other feature. And that's kind of the foundation which Forte is built on, is that full duplex audio. I know we all know right now you see the green talking stick around my screen and I can only talk. You guys can't talk. And if you try to talk, we wouldn't be able to hear you. It's not good for instruments. So we allow all data to go through both pipes. So you can pause your student and vice versa. After that, we had a little community of teachers and it started growing through word of mouth. And we talked to the people using Forte about which features they wanted next. So we didn't just try to copy Zoom or the other tools out there. I would say some features that differentiate our product. First was the shared notebook. There's a dedicated— think of a Google Doc. Where there's a live notebook. You don't have to bring your personal notebook to lesson anymore. You can type to each other in the lesson and it live edits or in between the lesson. And that's always there for the teacher and student to come back to and communicate through. We have the ability, you know, if you're using a laptop or desktop across from your piano or guitar or violin and you want to have, you know, the camera on your face and your instrument, but you also want a close-up of your hand or a bird's eye view, you can point your mobile device at Forte's QR code. We call it the second camera, and it automatically launches another camera angle from the front-facing camera. You can attach that to a boom to show the bird's eye view. You can have it on a different kind of stand like this to show a close-up of a hand, whether you want. We haven't seen that anywhere else. Our chat automatically downloads afterwards instead of having to take a screenshot or write it down yourself. Mark, what are some other ones that are differentiators? Our screen sharing is a little different than other platforms. We know that it's really important for, you know, if we were to share sheet music on Zoom right now, we would all be relegated to these tiny little thumbnail headshots. And when you're teaching a music lesson, you want to be able to see your teacher and your student, vice versa, at the same time as you're sharing the sheet. So the student or teacher can resize it as much as they want to. See, we have some cool screen sharing features, but Mark, I'll let you keep going.

I mean, we all know that the most important feature of a music lesson is the teacher. And so we've always struck a very careful balance between trying to load up the platform with, with new bells and whistles and new technology, which may or may not be super useful. Versus creating a platform that really puts the teacher and the teacher's teaching style front and center and allows that to come through. And, you know, we, we feel like we succeed when the technology disappears and you're in the lesson, you forget you're using it, and you have nothing but unfettered beautiful two-way communication between yourself and your student. And so, yeah, we've had a lot of fights with the engineers, like, no, you may not add another button, it's too much clutter, it's too much distraction. And so happily, a lot of teachers have come to us and are very, you know, very supportive of what we're doing and want to help us make it better. And we do stay very, very focused on some of those teachers. Some of them, as Hunter mentioned, come from these world-class institutions And, you know, you know, we feel very lucky to have the artistic and educational excellence of those institutions that are baked into our, the early DNA of Forté. But then just everyday teachers telling us what they really need, what they really want, and what's not working for them. You know, we've got a great team of engineers, we've got a big team of engineers, and we just keep iterating around that feedback from teachers.

Yeah, really important point there. The, the secret sauce for Forté, hopefully for people, is that they don't have to think about it. You know, you don't have to think if you're in an in-person lesson, you don't have to think about a piece of a wall between you. You know, the goal is for people to forget that they're using, you know, you're on your phone talking to someone. You don't think, oh, this iPhone's incredible technology. You just, you're just talking to someone.

Right.

So that's, that's the goal. And it's, it's tough to keep it simple, like Mark said, but we've been striving for that since day one.

But, you know, honestly, I tried that with Clara Forte, and we were like, whoa, we feel like we're like right next to each other. Exactly. It was a very amazing experience. And, you know, honestly, it was pure and simple, but that simplicity, but being like really someone right next to me is so important, especially in this music lesson, especially when you're dealing with someone younger, you know, that keep their attention. And also me as a piano teacher is the brand, not the platform itself. I mean, of course this platform itself should have its own, but it really makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, the— I love the way you phrase that. You are the brand. We shouldn't be putting ourselves between you and your student at all. We should only be facilitating that connection.

Right. Wow. That's, that's, that's amazing. That's, that's really cool. Now, so then, you know, obviously like, Hunter already explained to us like Forte Pure Audio you mentioned, so we can go a little deeper into it because, you know, honestly, I right now have— I have— I'm giving like hybrid lessons right now. And, you know, so half of my students are still online and honestly, we— I still use Zoom and then the— I know what I mean. I'm switching over. I'm switching over.

We're switching after this.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, I have 7. But, you know, the— obviously the most frustrating part of this platform is, I mean, it's built for something else, so obviously not for music lessons. Then it's that latency or the, you know, while I am speaking, you know, my student's voice or the audio will disappear and it takes a few seconds for them to come back if especially if they don't use any external microphone. It's just terrible, right? And also, I've tried FaceTime, for example. Now, FaceTime is another different thing. I don't know, I'm not an engineer, so I have no idea with terminology. But when my student is playing, I am like, you know, I want to stop in the middle of his performance because he's making lots of mistakes. I'm yelling at him, but he can't hear me because The audio, I think it's a channel, it goes just one way or something like that. Yeah. So yeah, can you tell us, explain to us a little bit of those engineering terms?

Or— well, again, Zoom is built for business meetings, and in theory, in a business meeting, only one person should be speaking at a time, and that doesn't work for music lessons. Uh, we have a piano teacher in Southern California who is a grandmother. She comes from a very musical family. And during COVID she had to be very, very careful about COVID because she was a caretaker for her new granddaughter, her beautiful new granddaughter. And, you know, the infant, you know, couldn't be vaccinated. So she moved all of her teaching online. And stayed online, um, for a long time. She was using Zoom, and she was shouting at her students so much to try and be heard when the student was playing that she actually hurt her vocal cords, and she had to— she had to go into vocal therapy, uh, to rehabilitate her voice. And we got her on Forte Now she can do what you guys want to do when, when you're teaching. You want to be able to talk to someone like, you know, you know, okay, watch your tempo, and you want the student to be able to hear that. It was clear to us that that was a big issue that needed to be solved. It's expensive to solve that because it requires a lot of bandwidth going in both directions full time in order to facilitate that. You know, the alternative are these other platforms that are they essentially turn off your microphone and they wait for you to start talking until— and then when the algorithm hears you start talking, it turns the microphone on and it starts to transmit. The problem with that is you lose the attack on the note. You lose the first part of the first consonant when you're speaking or the attack on the note when you're playing. And so the teacher can't hear the student play well.

Right.

We knew if we left the audio running full-time both ways and we ran it at a maximum amount, you know, we were pushing it as much data as possible so that it could work effortlessly for someone with a standard internet connection. We could make that experience feel a lot more natural and a lot more effective for a music lesson. And we could save teachers' voices from, from, from the shouting. Latency is a, is There are kind of 3 issues. There's that full duplex audio that I just mentioned. There's the quality of the audio, which we have fine-tuned over time. So we're pushing very high-definition audio that captures all the nuance full-time both ways. The third issue is latency, which is the delay in the line. That is a much harder thing to solve because when I'm speaking over Zoom here, the sound comes out of my mouth, goes into the microphone, goes into my computer, goes through the consumer internet, goes to your computer and out your speakers. And there's just a lot of things that can happen along that path that can slow the signal down. And there's a lot— and you just can't control for that. If you have a lot of software running in the background on your computer, it slows down the processing of the signal to push it out to the internet. One way to improve that is to use higher quality servers to facilitate the connection, which we do. But there is a natural limit to what you can do there. Now, having said that, there are some amazing audio technologists at places like Stanford or in Germany who are working to kind of fix this problem. And we're close to those folks and we're watching what they're doing. And sooner or later, it'll get better. Teachers tell us that the latency is better on Forte than it is on other platforms.

That's amazing.

Which is great, right? But we want to be honest, we haven't 100% solved the problem yet. There are some amazing people who are working to solve it, and once they do, we'll incorporate it.

Hey guys, we are now officially on Patreon.

Yay! I'm so excited about our next step on this podcast journey.

Same here. So dear TPP fans, we love what we do and it's been an boat journey for both of us for the last 2 years, and we are now in season 3. And more than ever, we need your support to continue our work by bringing you highly valuable content biweekly by interviewing the A-listers in the industry.

So please go to patreon.com/thepianopod and become part of the TPB community by subscribing to us. With your subscription, you will receive a monthly subscriber-only exclusive content from our show.

That's right, and once again, it's patreon.com/thepianopod with Yukimi Song.

We can't wait to connect with you on Patreon very soon.

Now let's continue with the episode. I mean, I think as a classical pianist, sometimes we accidentally become geeks, you know, whatever we immerse ourselves into, right? So Yukimi and I, like, we have so many gears ever since we started our podcast, and And myself, even, you know, when I first opened my studio on the Upper East Side, I was actually— I had a collaborator, a partner. He was actually in technology. So I was always trying to figure out ways to connect the dots, you know. So this is just so exciting hearing guys saying actually coming with a product that actually works. And so I want to ask, what sort of equipment do you normally recommend when using Forte? Um, you know, my experience, I still have majority of my students are online, and they are amazing students. They are very, you know, reliable. They go to the best schools, and, you know, when I'm traveling, they're always— they never mess up. But one thing I realized is that to make everything easier, everybody, they're teenagers, they all have the greatest iPhone, so they all just use the phone rather than like computer these days. Do you think they need to upgrade? Like, if we're gonna switch over to Forte, do they need to download the app, or do they need to get an external, you know, microphone? Would you—

So there's no, there's no app to download. There's nothing, no software to download. You just go to fortelessons.com. It's all based on the browser and Google Chrome. You don't need anything other than a decent internet connection and a device to access Forte Pure Audio. You don't need to buy anything extra than, you know, your laptop, your computer, your iPad. We highly recommend headphones. Not even the ones I'm wearing, the ones you're wearing. Bluetooth these days is, is really tricky. I'm shocked I was able to get these connected to my Zoom as quickly as I was a second ago. It sounds better with headphones on, as all things do. If you have an external microphone, that makes it even better, like the one Mark's using right now. But to access it, you don't need to upgrade your setup at all. You know, the better, the more up to date computer software operating system you're running, the better it's going to be. But you can, you could be on an old laptop with no external microphone and no headphones and you can still access Forte.

A lot of these amazing teachers who helped us hone the audio were using MacBook Airs with no external speaker, no external microphone. And you don't need a great external microphone to, to get a big improvement. You can buy a $50, $60 microphone that, you know, USB microphone just plugs in and it makes a world of difference. So we do encourage that and we encourage headphones for, you know, for the instruments where that works. But you absolutely don't need it.

Got it. Yeah. Quick question. So then, you know, without an app, so do you use certain browser? Like, can you use any browsers? Like, Firefox, Google Chrome, right?

Chrome.

It's Chrome. Yeah.

It's Chrome.

Okay. Runs, runs best in Chrome now.

Okay.

Yeah. I remember I had to download that. Yeah. When we were trying and, uh, yeah. And also, do you think the dream of finally doing a duet, you know, is a possibility? Like that's something we have always been exploring with the older students, you know, that they live far apart.

Like Mark said, we hear it's better. Like we're not I'm not sitting here saying that duets are possible on Forte. It's kind of like on a case-by-case basis how good the internet connection is. We had a teacher and we met with a bunch of our teachers yesterday and the teachers said they did a duet on Forte and they said it was amazing. We're not writing that on the website that you can do it. You know, it really is case by case. But, you know, because of the full duplex audio, we've heard teachers like trumpet teachers say they can play a drone note long drone note and their, their student can play off of that because they can hear it at the same time. I know that's not a duet, but there are different things you can do. Um, like Mark said, we are, we're staying close to the incredible people solving for the latency issue. Again, they're battling with the speed of light and it's, it's tough, you know, it's a big problem. We do have, there are much larger companies, um, investing in that solution as well outside of the ones we're talking about because The massive video game market wants zero latency, so they will probably solve it first. And none of the low latency music solutions are very consumerized yet. They're not exactly easy for even engineers to operate right now. But once they are consumer ready, we are ready and well positioned to— we know that's the Holy Grail. We know the ability to play at the same time as people across the world from you is the goal. I would guess it's a couple years out.

That is so exciting.

That's exciting because that sounds like unreal, you know what I mean? If that happens, it's like a really dream come true.

It's happening fast. Think just, you know, 3 years ago we weren't used to doing what we're doing right now, talking to each other through a computer. So the tech for what we're doing is still in its infancy and it's just rapidly progressing. Every month, it seems like.

Yeah. Wow.

I mean, I may not get these statistics exactly right, but, um, you know, when a signal travels over the internet, it's on fiber optic cable, so it's traveling at the speed of light. And light traveling at the speed of light can travel from New York to London in 17 milliseconds. 20 milliseconds of delay is long enough that your brain detects it and it breaks a live performance between two performers, particularly mid-tempo and higher. So that 20-millisecond threshold is important. So now, in theory, a signal could go from New York to London in less than 20 seconds, but like I said before, there are a lot of things that can get in the way of that. Bluetooth, um, has huge latency. That's a problem. Traffic jams on the consumer internet, huge problem. So, but in theory, one day two musicians ought to be able to play mid-tempo or higher with each other, one in London, one in New York, and it should work.

Wow.

The companies we're talking to have solved, completely solved for that under— I think it's up to 600 miles right now. Yeah. So San Francisco to LA works great, New York to DC, but expanding that is going to take time.

Yeah. So honestly, so maybe you may have already answered that, but we have no crystal ball here and then we can't predict the future, but it's exciting to hear something like this. And then so how do you see the future of music lessons? I mean, yes, we get it. Like the audio quality is amazing. Like, you know, you feel like you're, you're right next to each other, right? But in a much bigger scale, in terms of maybe even like the people's awareness to a marketing per se, what do you think the future of music lessons?

I would like to help usher in a world where anyone who wants to learn to play an instrument can easily be connected to a teacher who is right for that student, right for that student's level of ambition, right? You know, some, some people just want to jam with their friends. Other people want to perform with New York Phil. So any student, regardless of their level of ambition, their skill level, their talent level, their genre preferences, can easily find a teacher who's a good match for them. And therefore they stick with it longer and they get further and they become better. That's— that world is within reach because I think, you know, what we're seeing is online music lessons are effective. In some ways they're easier and better than in-person. It's a lot easier to record an online lesson than it is to, you know, have a tripod and set it up for the in-person lesson. There's really interesting research out of the UK that eye contact between the teacher and the student is greater, materially greater, in an online lesson, things like that. But the main thing is you get connected to a teacher who's better for you, and that's, that's what I want the— that's what I want the world to become, right?

So how exactly are you going to, or you maybe you are already, so you're— the Forte will help us do that?

We're starting to see it. Um, the, um, 78%, so the teachers who are teaching on Forte now, and, um, you know, we had, um, something like 3,500 hours of instruction on Forte in the past month. Teachers who are teaching on Forté now, nearly all of them had never taught online before COVID Right now, today, 78% of the lessons on Forté are between the teacher and student who are in different cities. And so what that tells me is that students will always choose the teacher who's better for them online versus just any teacher who happens to be nearby. And that's, you know, you know, 3 of us are in New York, right? There's no shortage of teachers around that, you know, great teachers around if you're in New York. If you live in a rural location, this is a real problem for you. And, you know, we always talk about, you know, what if the world's most promising young guitar student lives in Seward, Alaska? Like she might be limited by the quality of the guitar teacher who lives within an hour of where she is. So how do we fix that? Well, we make it possible for teachers to do their best teaching online, and that, you know, that exists today, and anyone can use Forte for free today to do that. Stop paying for Zoom.

Oh, so this is free?

So this is all free.

Is there a time limit?

No.

No. Wow. You're generous. That's very nice. Yeah.

That's cool.

Wow. That's cool.

But, um, but what we will do, and I, yeah, this is what I mentioned earlier about what Forte will become. We're going to release the ability for teachers to come to Forte and find a teacher online. If we facilitate that connection, if we help a teacher expand their, their, their lesson studio, then, then we will take a small fee on that.

The ability for students to come to Forte and find a new teacher.

Yeah. And that is— yeah, that's the core of our business model. We also want to make everything about learning to play an instrument easier, right? So easier to get sheet music, easier to buy the instruments themselves, all of those things, virtual recitals, all of that's down the road for us. But the ability for teachers to— I'm sorry, for students to come to Forte and find a right teacher for them is something that we're working on and we'll release relatively soon. There are places where you can do that on the internet now.

Yeah.

Um, but they, they, it's not a great experience. You type in piano teacher and suddenly you're shoved into this long list of, you know, $25 an hour, $125 an hour, like little thumbnail headshots, and you have no idea, is this teacher good? Is this teacher good for me? Is this teacher a creep?

Um, has this teacher passed a background check?

Yeah. You know, like all of that is, you know, like you're just overwhelmed with the choice. And so Forte, when we release, we're gonna call it Forte Connect. Um, when we release this, it will be a more guided, more curated experience to make sure that, um, you're finding a teacher who's right for your skill level, your ambition level, um, the kind of music you really like. And we hope that as we scale, we'll be able to continue to use data to make that matching algorithm even, even stronger. We're never going to tell you this is the one right teacher for you. We'll always give you a choice of teachers, but hopefully it will be better than the way it works today.

Yeah. Well, I am really almost completely sold, but there's one— okay, but there's one, one thing I have to ask. Ask, right? No matter how, you know, it's free, oh my gosh, it's too good to be true, and the audio quality is great, and then, you know, even the networking purpose, it sounds amazing. Now, challenge, I assume, is for you to convert all the music teachers, including us, to start using Forte rather than other platforms, because honestly, like, most of us are so used to using Zoom because it's been there whether you like it or not for the last 3 years. It's just everything is sort of set up and, you know, every meeting you go to is Zoom usually. And then so I wonder what is— do you feel the challenge of converting us or is there anything that I can do to help the music teacher?

Well, I mean, look, I mean, Zoom is an amazing tool and, you know, we should all be incredibly thankful that a lot of people worked 24 hours a day for a long time early in COVID so that we could all use Zoom and connect to people that we couldn't see live, right? And it works amazing for webinars, it works amazing for business meetings, it works amazing when I just you know, want to talk to, you know, my relatives. It's great for that. It's not great for musical lessons. And, um, your point is a really good one. There's a lot of entrenched behavior in, um, you know, that, that came about because Forte did— sorry, Zoom did such a great job through the— I mean, we, none of us had heard of Zoom before, right? You know, March or April of 2020.

Yeah.

Um, so that is a challenge for for us. Um, happily, if a teacher uses Forte twice, there's a 90% chance that they just keep teaching on Forte. They abandon whatever platform they were using before, and they recommend it to their peers in the music education community. So all the growth we've been seeing— we grew 80% in the last month in terms of usage the platform. Nearly all of that is word of mouth. It's teachers telling other teachers. I imagine those conversations say, look, it's a little bit of a hump to get over to get your students off of where you were before and onto this, but trust me, it's worth it. You won't strain your voice anymore. You'll be able to hear better. You'll be able to teach musical concepts that you can't on Zoom. It's just better. And, um, and soon we'll be adding the, you know, and if you're teaching on Forte, you'll have the opportunity to get more students.

Yeah, well, we're looking forward for that. I mean, I think that's, uh, you know, part of being a musician. Sometimes we don't really know how to sell ourselves, you know. We're very just used to locking ourselves in, in the practice room and practice. And in fact, I have a one, you know, follow-up question that you might— you guys might have already answered this, But, um, are, you know, are people in other countries able to just download or get on the website to Forte? Because you said there's no apps, right? So basically what I actually probably was one of those, uh, first teachers who start teaching online long before COVID started, and it was just by, by chance, you know, because, um, well, I think now I'm thinking maybe there's a couple factors. One, I opened up my own business when in my 20s, so I relatively good with technology. Two, my father kept on getting sick and they kept on having these open heart surgery in Asia that my mother was like, you have to fly here now. And yet my students, I have these policy, they're not allowed to miss any lessons. Some of the students are on the scholarship, they have to have full attendance, and they're so busy in New York. So the parents were like, the only way for us to have these lessons done— so I have taught lessons while I was sitting outside the my father's like, you know, operation room, and my students are here, like, you know. But the quality obviously was not great. And eventually— so I actually knew of Zoom because of some other things that I was doing as well. And to compare with all the other platforms, Zoom I was able to open in China. You know, in China there's a lot of things that we were not able to open, right? So is Forte also the same? If I have like— I have one student, I have some students that are students of our kids of diplomats, you know, they, they get shift around from country to country. And, uh, you know, it lately has not been easy for them to open everything right over there. So what about Forte?

We have a lot of students in China using Forte. Um, it seems to work well.

Okay, that's great.

And the, um, yeah, like I said before, like every, every continent. And, you know, it's, it's great fun and kind of energizing for me to look at our usage logs and just see Ulaanbaatar, Nairobi, Havana.

That's cool.

Rio de Janeiro. Um, the, the 33% of the usage is international. Um, 67%, it varies a little bit, but yeah, it's roughly that. Um, 10% of the lessons are between a teacher and a student who are in different countries.

So it does work everywhere, and we haven't even started matching new students to teachers yet. That's just from people meeting themselves.

Are there also translation features or something like that that Zoom has? You know, I, I also— yeah, not yet. Well, that might be the new thing, right? Because the parents want to know what's Oh, right. That's— yep, cool. Well, thank you.

I mean, we're not going to build that ourselves, but that's certainly technology we can incorporate to the messaging. Um, and, you know, and when we do— when we do release Forte Connect, you have the ability for students to find teachers on the platform. Uh, we're going to have robust features for parents because we know there's a correlation between parental engagement and educational achievement in music education and elsewhere. And so parents will be able to set up their own accounts. Parents will be able to communicate directly with the teachers. Parents will be able to watch videos of the lessons if they want live or, um, um, you know, live and incognito or after the fact. Uh, yeah, we, we know parents are a big piece of the puzzle. We're going to make sure we've got features for them.

Oh, great.

Exciting.

That's very good. Exciting.

Very exciting.

Uh, yeah, we are completely sold here. So So yes, Hunter, would you like to say, add anything?

I actually want to go back to your two questions ago where you said you weren't completely sold yet.

Okay.

There is the challenge of asking people to change behavior or leave their comfort zone. I'm very comfortable with FaceTime. I'm very comfortable with getting on Zooms. We still have Zoom for our group meetings internally as well because of the use case, because of, you know, you can't— people sign up Forte and they can go into the demo student room when before they've connected a student or a peer to test it. But because of our use case, you actually have to have a human on the other end in order to hear Forte Pure Audio, right?

We can't—

when we have the video showcasing Zoom's high-fidelity music mode versus Forte Pure Audio, you can watch on YouTube. But in order to like use the second camera feature in order to do screen sharing and see our experience, you have to go through the effort of getting someone else to sign up and connect to you and meet. As Mark said, the data shows if you actually try it with someone else, people just start using it habitually. But that is, that is the big challenge, is getting people to actually take the minute and 30 seconds to set up an account and have someone meet them on Forte. So if you're listening to this, just try it.

Yeah, well, set up was so easy. Yeah. Go ahead.

Yeah, you know, www.fortelessons.com. You can set up your own, you know, free virtual lesson studio. And if you want to try it with a live human being, just email us at info@fortelessons.com and a real musician on the team will do a session with you to help you walk through it.

Amazing. Go to fortelessons.com and you can create your own teaching studio online on Forte Lessons. Lessons. And plus, uh, you mentioned that if you need someone to try out the audio, you can go to info@fortelessons.com. Yeah, great, wonderful. Okay, so let's go to rapid-fire questions. So we're gonna end our— this show with the really fun questions. This is a tradition, so you just have to do it. We want your very short answers, silly, silly questions, and we want the shortest answers as possible. So let's get to it. I'm gonna ask first. What's your comfort food?

Oh, dim sum. I love dumplings.

Woohoo!

Good choice.

Mark?

Pizza.

Cats or dogs?

Dogs. We're both dog people.

All right.

My brother's a cat person, I'm a dog person.

Are you cat people?

Oh, I'm both.

I'm a piano person. It's the only thing I can take care of.

Good.

Okay, what is your word or words to live by?

Uh, do right by others. Or only people only remember how you made them feel and not the words you said. So focus on making people feel good.

Yeah, I would, I, I would, um, I would say some variant of that.

Yeah, got it. What is the most important quality you look for in other people? Empathy. Hunter?

That was my word.

Ah, you guys are stealing each other's words.

I'll change. Relentless optimism.

Oh, ah, yep, you're the first.

That's great. What is the worst quality in people you want to stay away from?

Maybe self-involvement, selfishness, people who aren't aware of, you know, the energy they affect others with.

Yeah, I would say selfishness. In all its forms.

Great.

Name 3 people who inspire you, living or dead.

Um, Rick Rubin, Steve Jobs, and Andre 3000.

Hunter's from Atlanta. Yeah, and I, I would say Steve Jobs also. And, you know, we lost him, I think, 11 years ago yesterday.

Oh wow, yesterday.

Yeah. Um, the, uh, um, gosh, 3 people inspire me. Steve Jobs, Harvey Milk, who was a politician in California, United States.

Cool.

And I don't want to hold everybody up, trying to think of a third. My mother.

Okay, beautiful. Moms are always so great. Name one piece in current playlist?

A piece that—

Yeah, like a music piece.

I'm guessing it's a piece of classical music.

It doesn't have to be classical. It can be, uh, we had a great pianist who told us Blackpink, you know.

I, uh, yeah, we lost Loretta Lynn this week, um, you know, an American icon, uh, in country music. And so, um, I started listening to some of her music that I love and I remembered a song she did a few years ago. She recorded when she was 70 years old with Jack White of the White Stripes called Portland, Oregon. It's just a really great, fun country rock song.

And Hunter?

I've been listening to Led Zeppelin this week, so Fool in the Rain.

All right.

Beautiful.

So the last question, music is blank. Fill in the blank.

Everything.

Great. Mark.

Music is blank. Music is what makes the world better.

Ah, beautiful. Ding, ding, ding. You won. Thank you.

So amazing.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much. So this concludes this episode of The Piano Pod with Yukimi Song with Mark and Hunter for joining us today and sharing the latest news about your company Forte and your expertise. And you can find more information about Forte on their website at fortelessons.com. And of course, you can sign up and create your virtual music studio there. And we want to encourage all the music teachers who are watching, listening to this episode to sign up for Forte, which is free, and start experiencing fun online music lessons with high-quality audio far superior to existing platforms. All the links are listed in the description.

Thank you to our wonderful audience and the fans for tuning in today. If you enjoyed today's episode, please rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform you use. If you're watching us on YouTube, remember to hit the thumbs up button and be sure to subscribe to our channel. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. The links are in the description below.

If you're interested in being the guest or you're recommending someone to be on our show as a guest, or you'd like to sponsor, collaborate with us, shoot us an email at thepianopodnyc@gmail.com or send us a DM via social media.

We will see you for the next episode of The Piano Pod. Bye everyone!

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Hunter!

Thank you, thank you, thanks for having us, for being on the show. That was fun.

Oh, that was fun.

Thank you.

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