Touch Pianist – Tap in Rhythm and Perform Your Favourite Music | Hacker News Reader

Touch Pianist – Tap in Rhythm and Perform Your Favourite Music

touchpianist.com

320 pointsfaramarz100 comments

This made me shed a tear.

I played the piano for years but due to a physical disability I can no longer play like I used to. Pressing the keys, maintaining rhythm and hearing the music come out is the closest feeling I got to what is now a forgotten memory.

Thank you Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, for taking me back a few years to all those fun hours I spent on the piano. Please add more pieces (Liszt!) and keep up the good work (incorporating the pedal into this somehow would be really nice)!

Yes, it should use spacebar for pedal, very good idea.

It sort of does. Holding down any key will sustain notes longer, even as you press other keys.

Thank you too, I'll be adding a bunch of Liszt soon.

For feature requests, I'd love to be able just to watch them being played automagically one after the other on my iOS device (on the website or app), or computer via the website.

Sometimes I just want to lay there with headphones on and listens to good piano music.

Really enjoyed playing with this, actually still enjoying :)

This is awesome! The tutorial is a good touch!

You might also want to add direct links to songs for easier sharing for specific pieces, as well as putting the song name in the auto-hiding bottom bar because my memory isn't what it used to be.

Hungarian Rhapsody #2 is the first thing I went looking for. :)

BTW, one simple feature that would make this much more interesting to me would be the ability to skip back 30 seconds and try a section of a song again. Just a suggestion.

Very cool, well done! I just showed it to my wife and 3 year old and both spent 45 minutes playing with it.

Some suggestions:

- the ads on iPad are really obtrusive. Please remove them. I'd gladly pay for the app or the individual packages. ( I deleted the app within 5 minutes)

- a "buy everything" option would be nice

- I think a two handed mode would be really great: perhaps you could consider generating two timelines with separate even handlers so that you can play multiple rhythms at the same time. Would be a nice "advanced mode".

- eventually , an option to include scoring would be nice. You could compare the actual rhythm offset with the"ideal" rhythm to train user rhythm. The current "sandbox" mode really should stay, though, since I really enjoyed watching my kid playing with it :-)

Other than that, great work!

Yes, a two handed mode + scoring would be great. That would make it a fun program to practice rhythm. There are similar music training software such as Earmaster but they're not really engaging.

Why is the iOS app free? After playing with the in-browser demo for just a minute that would've been an extremely easy $2 to part with!

EDIT - oh, it's got ads in it. Removed. Sorry, if you ship your software stuffed with some 3rd party crap that most certainly nobody wants and then offer to disable that part for money, then it's an instant No. Please make a proper paid version with none of this nonsense and I will gladly pay for it.

Agreed. I installed the app, played a piece, but when I tried to play something else I got a video ad blasting out at twice the volume of the music. Deleted the app.

You can wish for a perfect world all you want, but any developer who wants to earn money with an iOS app knows that the basic version has to be free. If you like the app, pay the in-app purchase and be happy... It's pretty unfair to punish the developer for the realities of mobile app markets. http://www.marco.org/2013/09/28/underscore-price-dynamics

I don't demand that he abandons his ways. I'm asking for another version that is paid and cruft-free.

You do realize that Apple discourages multiple versions of the same app since releasing in-app purchases, right? It clutters up the App Store having paid and free versions of apps. I wish they would just release a proper app demoing system...

Any specifics on how they discourage this? Geniune question. There's plenty of high-ranking apps with both paid and free-ad-supported versions, e.g. Cut The Rope.

Here is a discussion on the topic between a few developers with Apple's reason for rejection, from a few years ago. http://iphonedevsdk.com/forum/business-legal-app-store/93228...

I believe Cut The Rope pre-dated the push for keeping apps singular with IAP to unlock additional content.

I admire your stance against ads.

However, you are refusing to pay the developer $0.99 (correction: $0.70 to the developer) for the exact same product which you said would "easily" pay $2 for.

If you are genuinely so against this business model, why do you own an iOS device? It's Apple pushing this, not the lone developer you've arbitrarily decided to punish.

Right, after playing through a whole song on the web, my first reaction when I saw that there was an app version available was: Oh, that's brilliant, the web app (which I thought was the end of the story) is actually an interactive demo for a paid app. So I was surprised to see that the app itself was free -- but perhaps this is the first time the web version has gotten any traction, so the developer was unprepared for customers with this set of expectations.

Mandatory link if you don't know this: https://www.youtube.com/user/smalin/

Seconded. The videos in that channel are a great help in seeing polyphony and how complex music can be behind-the-scene.

Seeing polyphony is an oxymoron; yet a so true one. It's a pity that our sense of hearing is not as strong.

(same goes with pretty much all of them though)

I don't mean to nitpick but your hearing has strengths and your eyesight has strengths.

For instance, your eyesight is terrible at telling you a furniture truck is coming around the corner.

If you were good at separating the individual elements of music without much effort, perhaps music wouldn't be nearly as appealing. Who knows?

Your example is wrong, I think: My eyesight can't tell me about the truck around the corner and I only know it when I hear it but that doesn't mean that I can see it next time. In comparison, when you "see" the polyphony you are one step closer to "hearing" it the next time.

Was telling someone else about it and realised it's a slightly unfortunate name when saying it aloud.

This is a really terrific app. In many ways is nicer than siting back and listening to music, as it makes you think more about the flow and melody of a piece. I enjoyed this very much.

Absolutely agreed. Very nice, congrats!

It would be good paired with a movement sensor, like kinect, so you could do mock conducting.

There is a similar game on iOS called Magic Piano [1] - it seems to have licensed many popular and older songs and you can play them on iPad with an almost identical UI, for a freemium cost.

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/magic-piano-by-smule/id42125...

How much would the melody of any given song played on piano need to be modified before it would no longer be legally considered a cover?

It's also on android and this is basically the same but easier.

Is there anything like this for Android? Nexus 6 here.

I couldn't believe that the Waldstein Sonata (first movement) was an option! I've listened to that piece I don't know how many times by so many different pianists (favorites are Wilhelm Kempff and John O'Conor) but I'm not a pianist and could never dream of climbing that mountain. And I tried it and of course made a dire mess of it but it was still SO MUCH FUN!

At the risk of being the naysayer, I'm not sure it teaches you how to play the piano so much as it teaches you about musical rhythm and timing and note relativity and would help develop the ability to play by ear. It doesn't really distinguish between clefs or hand placement, and did the relative placement thing worked better when things were closer together anyway.

Agreed. Not to mention the name is a little unfortunate. Say the name too quickly, and you'll probably end up in a database somewhere... :\

LOL at that last part.

I think this could be the start of something amazing. A midi keyboard seems essential but if you could progressively introduce the different elements, using both hands, pressing enough keys to correspond to chords, different hand positions I think this could be a really great way to learn. If it could give feedback on being partially correct (e.g. highlighting two parts of the chord where you need to press 4 keys) it would be learning via gentle nudges, moving onto the next lesson once you're consisting getting it a new element correct.

But rhythm and timing and note relativity are ridiculously hard to get right (especially for beginners). This is a great exercise for one of the more challenging parts of playing music well.

Plus, the audience is much more likely to notice a mistake if the rhythm is wrong than they are to notice a note is wrong. If you can get the rhythm right you can play through your other mistakes and still have a reasonable presentation.

"Chrome highly recommended"

Brings me back to the 90s. "This page is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.5".

Chrome highly recommended

No thank you, I prefer Firefox.

I started by trying it out on Firefox (nightly), but after a few minutes, my laptop's fan started ramping up as the CPU usage climbed and then the sound became all distorted until it was unplayable. :/ I was playing the first Rachmaninov piece when it happened.

I love things like this that convey some sense of what it feels like to be a musician. A game like Space Channel 5 is another example; the gameplay is extremely simplistic and would be boringly repetitive if the game didn't make you feel like the star of a musical.

A fun, easy-to-use implementation of the conductor program (see http://www.musanim.com/tapper/ for an historical overview of this idea). Not a professional-grade tool, but a good introduction. I played through all the fugues in the first book of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier --- I ALMOST know them well enough to do this perfectly (except, of course, for the ornaments; I almost never guessed those right). The one thing that surprised me: after playing for a while, my fingertips felt really bruised (this is on an iPad); I've played the piano for 54 years, and I've never had this sensation playing a real keyboard instrument.

.) Love it.

.) I can imagine teaching playing piano changed to use something like this simply because it provides such a pleasant and so rewarding experience of accomplishment in contrast to what the "usual" way of learning the instrument tends to be. Who would drop lessons if this was the experience?

.) I see it as a very strong, supportive set of crutches. Currently only guiding the tempo of play but which could easily be extended to support other parts of play: reading notation, mapping to keys on the instrument, left/right hand coordination etc. etc.

.) Over time "the crutches" could become less and less supportive and in the end I could play my beloved "Chopin Nocturne Op.9 No.2" without them and later start even interpreting it...

That teaching aid you describe already exists: https://www.synthesiagame.com/. It’s like Guitar Hero for piano. You can give it any MIDI file to play.

To the naysayers: playing notes at the right time is way harder and more important than playing the right notes. Rhythmic confidence is key.

Indeed, on a piano, the notes are fixed (you cannot play any note between two notes), so the only "interpretation" a performer can add to an existing piece of music is a change in the timing of the notes, and the loudness (attack) of the notes.

Of course, on other types of instrument, this may not hold.

There's also duration (legato vs staccato) and "smearing" notes to achieve that 'in between' sound. Very common in jazz, rock and blues, but not unheard of in classical.

Duration is part of the timing, I guess. What do you mean by "smearing" exactly?

Have you ever played an acoustic piano?

I think the GP means 'sluring'

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slur_%28music%29

This is not really so much true today, but adding trills and other ornamentation used to be a central part of performance. Also, on a real piano, the touch each note is played with is far more nuanced than simply "loudness".

this is wonderful! would there be a way to save the output? would be interesting to see how others interpret a piece. really also wishing that we could track keyboard velocity as well:p

I have Audio Hijack Pro on my Mac and set it to save the system audio while I was playing. I guess any hijacking app on your OS should do the same.

Excellent work! I'd love to integrate this into my product Soundslice (soundslice.com), which is web-based notation/music education software.

Great idea. As an occasional pianist, this would be fantastic right at the start of trying to learn a new piece, where I don't have a feel for the sound of it yet. I could have the sheet music up and "play" the correct rhythm while hearing the notes.

Once I mastered the piece I would never play it on here again though, for fear that it would interfere with muscle memory of the actual keys.

Does anyone know this for ableton?

I'm searching for that for quite some time to humanize metric beats / midi tracks.

maybe I need to fiddle something together....

As interesting as it is, I don't really see a educational use for this. It's fun and all to tap along, but in the end it's nothing better than something like DDR or Rock Band. Nothing wrong with a fun app, but I doubt it's educational uses. (this coming from a lifelong pianist)

Yeah, I know what you're saying. After a bit of thinking I tried to rename the title but I think the window has passed, because i'm not able to save the change.

That said, the control over the tempo is really interesting to me. I ruined the piece by tapping away too fast.. it really guides you to correct yourself in the second take, or third, etc.

We changed the title to the HTML doc title. (Submitted title was "Beautiful music app that teaches you to play the piano without playing the piano".)

Also too much opportunity for excessive rubarto with the web app, oh dear!

Haha, so true! All my favorite classical performers are the ones who play more evenly, favoring subtle rubato over grandiose, momentum-killing swoops. For piano, that would be Kempff, O'Conor, Leif Ove Andsnes, Misha Dichter... It's such a challenge to find people who play that way -- please suggest any others that come to mind!

With this app, I would have to memorize all the little interpolations in order not to interrupt the flow. Playing through the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata was hilarious -- I was constantly skipping beat fractions where there were a few missing sixteenth notes in the middle of a run, and then there sections where I simply couldn't type fast enough and the tempo lagged. And even if I practiced, there is a little too much latency and occasional stop-the-world pausing to achieve the kind of rhythmic precision I'd hope for. But it was still thrilling to hear the correct notes and good dynamics!

If looking to turn this into something more educational, there could be a view of the proper piano score. You would have to follow the rhythm as written, and for each rhythmic value you got wrong, there would be some form of repercussion. It would still be very similar to Rock Band, but I think there would be more merit to reading the rhythm of written notes rather than just dots on a screen.

That being said, it is still an enjoyable app!

You could also associate a key (as in, letters, or even symbols for the programmer crowd) with each note,

would be a nice touch-type learning software

I guess I completely disagree, as another lifelong pianist. I think it's a great way to explore using tempo to express musicality. I just had a great experience watching how thrilled my wife (untrained in piano) was to actually "perform" something that sounded musical to her ears.

Unfortunately the latency (at least on my system) makes subtle explorations of tempo variation fairly impossible.

Very cool Idea! I was playing around with this. If you want autoplay (at least on desktop) c/p content of http://pastebin.com/0n14HS11 in console. (tested on chrome)

Objectively flawless experience

Thanks for making the world a better place, all the way

Without anything wrong with it

And it being perfect

At the end of each piece there was this "Applause!" at the end - it would be cool if it were to be converted into a button which actually plays an applause when clicked (I thought it was a button when I first saw it).

I think this could be an excellent tool to learn some piano pieces with the addition of a step-backwards button, so you could practice small chunks or certain chords over and over and really analyze them.

Synthesia lets you step backwards to play a part again, with the left and right arrow keys: https://www.synthesiagame.com/. You can also use the up and down arrow keys to change the speed at which you play them.

Select Eric Satie's Gymnopedies and just hit the keys as fast as possible at a regular tempo. It sounds like a free-wheeling jazz version (think John Coltrane)! :-)

I need this computer now http://imgur.com/sLF40FF

beautifuuuul

I'd love to get more insights on how to properly play, some sort of music notation tips or best figured bass, I understand the spacing means tempo, but adding such info could help those of us who can read music

Also, I'd like to play with many fingers multiple notes! It feels natural to press all once you know there a chord coming.

Finally, thanks for such great piece of art!!

I agree that you should be able to play a chord by pressing multiple keys at once. I tried that, and was confused when suddenly the music jumped ahead by a few notes, because the page interpreted each key in the chord as another press.

I'd love to be able to upload my own MIDIs.

Touch Pianist is one of the latest implementations of an idea that's been around for a long time: technologically-assisted musical performance; here's an historical overview on the subject: The Conductor Program — computer-mediated musical performance (http://www.musanim.com/tapper/). Aaron Andrew Hunt is about to release a professional-grade version of this which will let you use your own MIDI files.

This is absolutely stunning. I bet elementary school music teachers would love this as a teaching tool.

Another thought for you - I wonder if you could plug into a music website like noteflight.com? If you could, then people could search among many thousands of pieces to play. Just a thought! Keep it up - it's a beautiful project. Thank you for sharing.

In peace, Mike

This is awesome. Super easy to get started. I would love to see the ability to see the notation somewhere as I'm playing and the ability to rewind a bit. I could definitely see me using this to scout out a piece.

This really made my day. What a great way to blow off some steam.

Never made it to the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata this quickly ... albeit a bit unevenly.

Cool, I like it.

BTW, cool music visualization: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ipzR9bhei_o (you can't play there, but it helps o perceive music better)

When I read the title, I thought it could learn your random tap rhythm and search through a piano db and find the best match, or even better, slow & smooth morph into another rhythm according to your tap

It turned out to be different, still cool though.

Very cool. On a somewhat related note (pun not intended):

I have created an app to learn the music staff notation. Web version: http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes

Pretty impressive app. But mainly, this is demonstrating to me how hard it is to sound like Vladimir Horowitz while using a mouse.

Very cool.

Does anyone else experience an optical illusion where it appears their screen is moving when they finish a song/leave the page?

same here. very dizzy after staring at it for 30 minutes (it's super fun).

Drive-by suggestions -- 1. make the background image fixed so only the notes are moving, 2. make the notes circles smaller, and the notes bursting animation a bit slower, might help reduce the dizziness.

This is educational from the perspective that it really teaches you 'rhythm'. This is beautiful piece of web app :)

This is insanely fun :) Wow. I totally can see how this can help us learn to play. Can't wait to show this to my kids.

Hey it's one button guitar hero!

Doesn't work on Chrome 43, MacOS X 10.6 iMac8,1 -- graphics are completely corrupted.

turning off WebGL fixed it...

Funny since it "highly recommends chrome only" on the page

(seems to work perfectly fine in firefox tho..)

It's a WebGL issue, works perfectly on Safari though.

Would be amazing to have the note to indicate timing length appear along with the dots.

Even for a rhythm trainer it is disappointing because you're forced to tap at a set interval, not what the notes are actually saying. And forget double-tapping when there are two notes on a single interval -- that just plays two intervals!

Thumbs down from a lifelong DDRer and casual pianist.

Though idank's comment is nice to see!

> Even for a rhythm trainer it is disappointing because you're forced to tap at a set interval, not what the notes are actually saying.

As far as I can tell, you're wrong. You're supposed to tap at the same rhythm as the distance between the notes conveys.

Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 - Allegro makes it very obvious. Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 makes it obvious too since you have to hold the key.

I can't find a way to share it... Is that only my dumb me?

What's the name of the piece (played on touch device)?

There's a bunch of pieces. The tutorial is Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata.

Where did you get the piano score for the Tocatta?

is it happening to anyone else that mouse click makes the music louder?

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