If you don't own one, you will soon. This is a product that slices and dices and does everything short of the dishes. It builds confidence, improves skills and may help you lose weight. It's uber-modern, sleek and digital, and comes with a host of bells and whistles, and it's ... a piano.

That's right, the 300-year-old pianoforte is getting a functional facelift.

With the advent of digital files and the Internet, keyboards are showing up on shelves that store songs in their memory and then light up the keys with the proper sequence and time signature, allowing you to learn songs in virtual 0/0 time.

And we're not talking perfunctory Frere Jacques here; choices range from classical to contemporary, with Ben Folds Five, Norah Jones, and P. Diddy among the latter (even more are available on the Web).

When I first learned about this new trend I thought to myself, "Cool, now I can learn to play all my favorite Billy Joel songs." But when I discovered they were also marketing guitars, I felt more ambivalent. Since I took it up a few years ago, before the advent of this technology, I had to learn guitar the hard way: memorizing notes and chords, struggling through notation and tablature. Now any Joe Schmo can become as good as me in a fraction of the time. Part of me envies them, but another, more prevalent part thinks they should stick to easy-Macs, Cliff's Notes and Game Genies.

I can imagine that real musicians would be even more annoyed. These inventions circumvent the need to learn musical notation, time signatures, keys and stylings; all skills that they've honed for years.

To make matters worse, progams such as GarageBand allow you to go straight to songwriting without even having to learn an instrument.

Add one guitar track and a dash of drums, sprinkle in some bass and bake at 350 degrees; when it comes out of the oven, call it your own. This musical preamble begs the question: Is technology making music too easy? Will people trained on these instruments be considered musicians, or just jukeboxes?

You may think these trends won't change music all that much; people will just become musicians faster. But what about other technologies? I attended an art show recently with my friend, who is a teacher and artist.

Many of the works utilized digital photography and were edited with Photoshop. I asked my friend if he'd ever consider using the similar methods. He remarked that digital techniques were too easy and traditional methods presented more of a challenge.

In other words, real artists don't use computers. While I respect this view, I think that the aversion to computers is a little unfair.

Artists use whatever canvas they have, whether it is an easel, lump of clay, or a digital file. If anything, I think the use of computers is enabling works of art and music that couldn't have been conceived before through a kind of symbiotic relationship.

But I understand there is a point where the artist can become obscured or overtaken by the technology. For instance, in writing this column, I have made use of an online dictionary and thesaurus, which most people would agree is rather innocuous. But what if an intrepid computer science student crafted a meta-thesaurus, one that would search for synonymous phrases instead of words?

It could search all great works of literature and replace my paltry phrases with more descriptive and imaginative ones. With a little more computing power you might be able to extrapolate this idea to meta-sentences or paragraphs. Now we're treading into the territory that makes each writer unique. Because while the words are cut from the same cloth, their combinations are give each writer his or her voice.

For the time being, it seems modern instruments and programs are only aiding in our visions, helping materialize what we see or hear in our heads.

But as technology improves, there may come a time when it isn't so easy to discern between the artist's hand and the artist's tool. Then, perhaps, this column could write itself.