Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

I had the opportunity to beta test it and while it still has rough edges my daughter and me had a lot of fun with it. Everyone learns differently but in my experience direct feedback is often such a boost in learning speed and efficiency that I wish there were more applications like this. Also the attitude towards user privacy is highly appreciated.

You may want to check out https://synthesiagame.com/ which is a commercial product that does the same thing. You don’t have to use the guitar hero style of notes, you can turn on proper sheet music.

It's funny, I've had almost the same experience: decided to start playing again during Covid, and wanted to use the midi port to gamify things a bit. I've been using Synthesia[1] on an iPad, which also lets you take an arbitrary MIDI file and practice it.

On the off-chance that this will inspire the article's author for their development, or simply for the curious, this has been my experience with it:

The primary mode of display is "Guitar Hero" style (it's hard to describe just look at this video to get an idea[2]) but it's possible to display the sheet music. It lets you practice and grades you depending on how close you're sticking to the score. It's very nice to be able to practice one hand separately while having the app play the other hand. I do fairly well reading sheet music but the first time deciphering it can be a bit tedious, using the app speeds this up considerably for me.

Synthesia is almost great but it has a lot of small shortcomings which add up to a bad user experience, for example:

- The conversion from MIDI to a readable score is very poor compared to, say, Musescore. The sharps and flats are generally off (e.g. randomly a double flat D will appear instead of a C, even though the score has a C, Musescore interprets the midi as a C, etc).

- Not enough wiggle room when playing, e.g. if a chord is not arpeggiated in the midi file, you won't be able to move forward by arpeggiating.

- The app really depends on you following the score exactly and linearly. It should also let the score follow you. For example, if you're playing at a given pace, miss, stop and repeat a bar, the app should detect that automatically instead of just carrying on expecting you to keep playing.

[1] https://synthesiagame.com/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sleZ-hzrtRY

Aside from the relatively difficult problem of creating scores from MIDI; when practicing piano as a beginner it'd be interesting to have help in positioning/finger selection. I wonder how hard it would be to compute fingering plans (maybe even with a wingspan parameter).

That's why we spent quite a bit of time on making interesting metrics that show your progress over time, even if it is small per increment the overall effect is substantial.