Etude sheet music app coming to iPhone, iPad
loopinsight.com
loopinsight.com
From the looks of it you get the game like elements of a Rockband, but a longer term benefit of learning to read music. I imagine it will be kind of lame on the phone due to size, but with an iPad or keyboard accessory it will be amazing.
I'm not sure how big the market for sheet music is. However, consider the kind of people who learn to play instruments: children of well educated, affluent parents. The addressable market could be bigger than a lot of markets that seem large on PowerPoint slides, but are unaddressable because of market limitations (e.g. iLike).
If you can pay for a kid's piano lesson, a few dollars for sheet music will be nothing.
I'm really looking forward to this!
"Ask HN: Guitar Tabs Online"
I like yan's suggestion of detecting the music in the app and scrolling along as the person plays.
Imagine reading along with a marquee. Yeah, it's that annoying. I'd much rather it flip virtual pages than scroll along.
Pages "turn" by scrolling up, and there's a reminder of the previous page at the top.
Whaddaya think?
The same thing happens in music. Dividing things into measures and lines allows our brain to "chunk" it. Part of the chunking mechanism is returning your visual focus to the beginning of the next line.
Part of reading is the connection of eye movement to new information. If you no longer need to move your eye to get a new measure/phrase/note, it's patently more difficult to notice the change. That's why marquees are useful for short lists of phrases that repeat often - and not entire articles. Maybe scrolling music might be decent for karaoke or games like guitar hero - but the information encoded into one bar of classical staff is orders of magnitude greater (and one of the reasons I despise, say, piano rolls in most digital audio authoring software).
Disclaimer: I have only been reading sheet music for two decades; this may or may not qualify me to comment on the benefits or detriments of an autoscrolling marquee of sheet music instead of paginated sheet music.
(Disclaimer: I've been playing piano for over 15 years of my 21 year existence on this planet, is that enough to comment on my personal preferences? ;) )
On the other hand, throughout the years I spent singing in choirs and with specific situations like guitar hero, a marquee style method of presentation never posed a problem as long as I could see at least a measure or two ahead at a time. Likely because of the information density you mention - singing and guitar hero never felt as demanding as playing piano.
Reading music seems to be very interesting - after you truly know a piece, the notes seem to simply be reminders for muscle memory. It's not like reading a book - you do that when you learn the book. Sight reading is fairly difficult!
As for duration of experience, it's not necessarily the length of time.. but whether you've ever truly learned a piece.
It'd be tricky if you have a changing tempo though.