Synthesia started life as 'Piano Hero', obviously trying to cash in on the Guitar Hero genre of music games.
The more sensibly named Synthesia is meant to be a gentle introduction to playing the piano on your Mac, although it's hardly a beginners tool. Firstly, you should note that without a real keyboard to plug into your Mac, playing it on your keyboard isn't much fun at all. To avoid any copyright problems, most of the songs in Synthesia are taken from old computer games such as Zelda and Bubble Bobble and you have to follow the falling bars on the keyboard to press the right keys.
This is extremely hard when key strokes can be within a millisecond of each other so you end up rapidly mashing your fingers into the keyboard. After you've finished, you get a nice little appraisal of your performance with a grade such as A, B and C etc. The program is simple to use and well presented but without a proper piano or synth keyboard, you can't do it justice.
If you're a piano player and have an external keyboard, you'll enjoy Synthesia - but without one, it's not much use.
