Show HN: Dodeka Music – piano keyboard and easy-to-read sheet music in one app
dodeka.info
dodeka.info
I love innovation and experimentation in this space.
I am confused about why you feel it is easier to read the "sheet music" in your app than traditional notation. I feel the tight spacing of the note indicators does overtly show rhythmic values, but at the expense of easy readability.
They are also misleading unless they show how varied an actual note duration can be. Do you show staccato notes as short? How short? These are determinations left to the player.
The lack of stems makes the use of the term "sheet music" rather misleading/confusing, in my opinion.
Having a chromatic keyboard that gives equal space to all twelve tones is a cool idea, but as someone who plays such keyboards primarily, as well as "normal" piano, I can assure you it is not necessarily easier to learn or to play traditional music, including modern pop music, on such a keyboard.
I am genuinely curious whether you have tested any of the assumptions behind your reworking of these conventions, many of which probably exist for reasons that go beyond just inertia.
I feel like I keep seeing products that try to do away with what's "hard" about reading sheet music, but that is solving one of the smallest hurdles confronting people trying to learn music. Sure, it looks like hieroglyphs to the uninitiated, but once you learn the basics it's actually pretty easy to work with. Do you have a plan in place for gradually introducing the learner to stems and rests and other sheet music notation, or ... how does the learner move on from this?
Regardless, would love to hear about how things go and how people respond to your ideas.
To answer your questions about additional notation marks, please feel free to check our documentation here http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Presentation/ and http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Resources/. These will show you how we notate rests, staccato, and other notational marks.
As for the advantage dodeka brings, it's really about the synergy there is between the keyboard and the sheets. There's only one way to write one piece, which means that players can easily learn how to play a song in every tone. Our tests showed that people usually take between 1 to 3 minutes to read and play an easy piece in all different tones. This is fast right? :)
For rhythms - we believe it's easier for one's mind to see the value rather that to compute it.
Also, we are not targeting musicians, but rather beginners and people who'd like to learn/play music in an easy way.
Finally, I'm not sure that I understood what you meant with the stems and sheet music.
I'd love to see an application that could capture audio from an instrument and act as a real-time theory aid/teacher. For example:
* the note you are playing is this
* the notes you've just played in sequence belong to these scales. here are possibilities for next notes
* try these chords
* the chord you've just played is comprised of these notes
* the next chord in the scale could be this
* popular songs with these chords or in this scale areI say the more tools the better. People will outgrow their instrument fairly quickly if it's too limiting and then just move on to something new.
I don't see the problem in an alternative notation if it's easier to read (I don't know if it is, I've never used the app).
But... learning to read music is an effectively insurmountable obstacle for many people who might otherwise enjoy playing music in a limited capacity, or in musical styles that don't make much use of reading. For this reason, I appreciate development of alternative notations. There is already an extensive literature of written music for guitar and electric bass, that uses "tabulature," a notation based on numerically identifying finger positions on the instrument. Percussion notation is a kind of tabulature.
The problem with alternative notation is that standard notation represents a symbiosis between composers and performers. Composers know that if they use a particular notation system, then there will be plenty of people who are capable of reading it. Performers know that if they learn standard notation, then they can tap into extensive literature and performing opportunities. Nothing like that exists for any alternative notation. Even with guitar tabulature, very few composers know how to write it unless they're guitarists, and nobody can "sight read" it, so it's use is limited to learning material that will be performed from memory.
Granted, I've just made a lot of generalizations, but they hold pretty well, most of the time.
I look forward to the day when I can don a pair of high-tech glasses, look at something written in standard musical notation, and have it "transnotated" on the fly to something easier to read!
But I don't know how much of the problem is our notation, versus the fact that learning to read is hard. It's almost like becoming fluent in a foreign language, which we know gets harder as we get older. I started learning to read music when I was 6. I don't know what it's like to learn reading as an adult.
I suspect that that is part of how it is with our standard musical notation. The people who already know it have no interest in learning another system, even if it were demonstrably "better" (for some definition of better).
It is my opinion that our current system expresses a lot of irreducible complexity, but also has a lot of incidental complexity due to quirks of history. Accidental marks, in particular, strike me as making a backwards-compatible change that is easier for the people already locked-in to the system, but has made it more difficult for learners in the centuries since.
There's a really simple change that would roughly halve (!) the effort to learn to play music written with a grand staff. Right now, it is, from the bottom up, composed of a bass staff, one ledger line, followed by a treble staff. Simply changing it for a treble staff, two ledger lines, and another treble staff, would make it so much easier for people learning to read the music.
Going one step further, if every octave looked the same -- why should half the Cs be on lines, and half on spaces? -- that would make it far easier to learn the notation.
(And don't get me started on the timing system!)
I heard of a fluent sheet reading kid who was introduced to Klavarskribo. Apparently after 45 minutes of learning, he (she?) was able play pieces he'd never played before, just because the incidental complexity was reduced.
Perhaps another thing that saves standard notation from itself is that most of the time, we're not actually reading all of the notes. In my case, working within a particular musical genre (jazz), my brain knows what the next notes will be, even if I'm not looking at the page. And when working up a classical piece, you've memorized it after a couple weeks, and the chart is just a place to annotate special things like fingerings and problem areas.
There was an article about a famous piano concerto, where someone discovered a mistake in the accepted transcription, and nobody even knew about it because everybody just instinctively played the right note.
I am a noise musician, among other things. It's an entire career. And whether music is about conveying emotion ... I don't know if that covers all the edge cases.
My favorite definition of music is "sound arranged over time."
However, I totally agree with what you are getting at. Learning music is really about learning conventions and common language, which allow you to communicate emotions and mental states, especially at the beginning.
As a long time musician myself I am always intersted in learning about new instruments. The video you post in the bottom is it purely to increase the span of how many octaves you fingers can span or what's the purpose?