iPhone App Digitizes Sheet Music, Teaches You Piano | Hacker News Reader

iPhone App Digitizes Sheet Music, Teaches You Piano

wired.com

76 pointsdangrover34 comments

Huge congrats on the app... with the iPad coming out, it's the perfect time for this.

A possible area for expansion (or maybe even a new app entirely). There's a whole world of classical music that is extremely competitive. Since you've got the iPad sitting on their piano, use the microphone to record yourself playing the song, and then it can be uploaded automatically and rated alongside others who've played the song.

Then you can have a leaderboard for each song, and even an overall leaderboard, like a global tennis rankings. They could challenge each other to a "duel" like a tennis match, or there could be a tournament. People can have their ranking, a profile, how old they are.

It would be hugely motivating to kids learning to play, and very disruptive/democratizing to the whole classical music world.

Like http://fretwar.com/ , but for piano instead of guitar?

Guitar Hero against other people online with real instruments could be an epic music education tool.

That's what Jesse Schell talks about in his great talk at Dice.

http://fury.com/2010/02/jesse-shells-mindblowing-talk-on-the...

I like the idea of recording, but I don't really like the idea of ranking users. For one, who does the ranking? The users themselves are biased towards their own works and wouldn't produce a fair result, and ranking the performances algorithmically sounds like a recipe for disaster.

I think a better solution is to instead try to form social networks. You could be matched with other users that like the same sort of music and have the same sort of skill level as you and you can swap performances and compositions.

Congratulations Dan. Looks like you have created a useful, highly polished little app. I'd buy it if I had an iPhone.

Have you considered making the keys on the keyboard start off a lighter shade of blue and fade down to dark blue as they are held?

Currently 6 months into learning the piano again, downloaded the app to give it a whirl.

Very first impression, but the Continuous scrolling seems to be a little jerky in places.

Edit: it's synching up with the notes as they scroll by which is your design choice I guess. Smooth continuous scrolling wasn't something that seemed appropriate?

After listening to the following TED talk, I feel that your store could do with some Chopin.

http://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passio...

There was a last-minute problem with the 2 Chopin songs that were ready to go live with the app. Hopefully have em next week.

Another comment: when playing through For Elise, it plows right through the 1 and 2 endings for each section when it should play the 1 ending before doubling back and playing through again before playing the 2 ending.

I too would prefer totally smooth continuous scrolling (like ddr when the notes are played as they hit the line).

Check the options menu. I've only watched the demo movie, but it appears that there are two options for scrolling: page turns (like traditional sheet music, seemed "jerky" to me) and smooth scrolling.

I think the option is already there, you just have to pick it.

The UI looks good, but I have a hard time imagining it in use. Isn't the iPhone screen tiny for this purpose? Why not make a general laptop app or web app?

See simplechord (Also by this company) for mac : http://wonderwarp.com/simplechord/

Get it free here: http://etudeapp.com/tweet/

Because I don't think Wired would cover it if it were a desktop/web app :)

Dan, was it your post on HN that got you on wired.com? Or how did that work?

No, unrelated.

I wouldn't have thought of sheet music as a killer app for the iPad, but now that I think about it, that makes perfect sense. Anyone working on iPad stands for instrumentalists yet?

I'm picturing entire orchestras switching from sheet music to digital displays. The article mentions the portability and findability benefits of replacing stacks of paper with a single screen synced to a sheet music library. jgilliam posted here about the potential benefits of building games on top of sheet music. But just in terms of simple usability for instrumentalists, imagine sheet music that automatically flips to the next page at the right time.

When I was in elementary school (even though I have not developed any musical talent), my favorite part of music class was when the teacher (who was a talented pianist) would sit down and play at his then-state-of-the-art keyboard towards the end of class. His actual notes would show up on a huge keyboard display where keys would light up, just like in your app. It was fascinating and mesmerizing to see the visual patterns of some songs - and that some complex songs weren't that complex.

Thanks for the beautiful app and memory trip.

When I was younger I played a cello solo of Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo. It was almost 4 minutes in length and filled, at most, half a music sheet (~8 bars). Graphically the music wasn't complex, but it was all the little details (soft, loud, fast, slow, extremely long holds) that made it interesting. Just looking at it you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. Only through playing it would the timing and pattern emerge.

I'm sure you've already thought of this, but it seems like now that you have input of OCR sheet music, you should strongly consider output of OCR sheet music.

Allow your player to set the metronome, then capture what they play on Etude. Output a sheet music transcript that they can tweak, replay, and publish in a marketplace of free music. People can transcribe public domain music, share original compositions, or (tricky part maybe) cover licensed music.

It looks like a nice app but does it actually do anything that is different from the multitude of desktop apps in this genre?

Primarily, it doesn't require a desktop - useful if you're sitting at a piano.

It's also a very polished app with a convenient in-app sheet music store.

> Primarily, it doesn't require a desktop - useful if you're sitting at a piano.

Yes I had worked that part out. My question wasn't intended as criticism. The context it appeared in lead me to believe there was something else new about this but I couldn't find it so I asked. I have an interested in this area. By the looks of things this would be particularly good with a larger screen such as the ipad.

Great idea, poor hardware choice.

Really - this would be an amazing app for an aspiring musician but the iPhone screen would make this experience much less enjoyable than it should be.

I think that's where the ipad would do a better job at simulating full sheet music. I suspect the developer has this in mind already.

You're in the money!

wired wrong again, if it's using midi I'm pretty sure the application doesn't digitizes anything.

It's digital sheet music, not audio.

The point still stands, though: the app doesn't digitize the sheet music, it displays it from sources that have already digitized it.

Unless the scores are beying keyed in by hand, the actual digitization of the sheet music is basically a specialized OCR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_OCR

Doesn't it mean it digitizes the "process" of sheet music -- the whole thing from notes to someone playing it? Not just the sheets with the notes on them. This meaning for "the app digitizes sheet music" makes sense, at least for me.

Big congratulations to Dan. Excellent app. I like it when people deliver real apps.

Fuckin baller!

Kudos.

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