I did a lot of tab in my youth, but got nowhere with it; I think because I didn’t understand theory like chords, scales etc, and when exposed, I never recognized them. Ear players seem to be able to chord along to just about anything and then add detail until it resembles the original. There must be some way to help the learner recognize the theory while teaching rote.
Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
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Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#12You 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.
I find it really bad taste to promote something this way. So a developer comes here to tell his story and open his mind a little about a great tool he developed and this is the only thing you have to say?
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#13It'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 mod…
That's an interesting comment. So, the midi->score conversion is indeed one of the harder parts, I spent a lot of time on that and I'm not yet satisfied with the results. There are quite a few ways in which this can be improved further, there is a long list of 'todo's' where I basically have worked out how to make the improvement but I have not yet gotten around to actually implementing it.
Midi is 'lossy' in the sense that it flattens a bunch of knowledge about how a piece is to be rendered into note-on/note-off pairs. You then have to do all kinds of tricks to even begin to approach what the score looked originally. Lots of enharmonically (identically sounding) combinations may have looked completely different on the original score, and when you start adding the various chord combinations it gets even more complicated. Even so, I'm strongly convinced it can be solved and we have made considerable progress on this already.
The 'wiggle room' aspect of it has been addressed to some extent. For instance, we build up a map of all the notes that are sounding at a given time, and will ignore notes that are technically 'wrong' but that are still sounding. This allows for much smoother restarts after mistakes.
Your final point is a bit tricky, but thank you for the hint, I will definitely add it to the list of things to look at to see if we can find a way to make that work.
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#14This may teach you to "play" piano, but the real question is whether this sort of rote memorization will really teach you how music fundamentally works. Seems a bit like re-typing Javascript programs in order to "learn" programming?
Will you be able to improvise after enough of this? Play songs by ear?
There are a few fundamental musical concepts that I'm not sure you easily pick up by rote memorization:
* Most music is based around "chords", which have non-obvious mappings to physical keys. (They're linear intervals in frequency space, but that doesn't make it easy to realize that D/F#/A and Ab/C/Eb are two representations of essentially the same thing)
* Likewise, songs can be transposed up or down without affecting their fundamental attributes. (They just sound "higher" or "lower"). However, to do that, you need to be able to shift +/- N keys which is tricky given the difficult layout of a piano. To really do this well, you need to understand the concept of scales/modes.
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#15I did a lot of tab in my youth, but got nowhere with it; I think because I didn’t understand theory like chords, scales etc, and when exposed, I never recognized them. Ear players seem to be able to chord along to just about anything and then add detail until it resembles the original. There must be some way to help the learner recognize the theory while teaching rote.
This is something that is very high on my wishlist, what I would like to do (and some of the code is already in the project) is to detect chords as they are played and annotate them. But because there are a lot of ways to express the same chord this is not so simple. Work in progress!
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#16There’s a cottage industry of piano learning apps, and an equivalent amount of people getting frustrated at the lack of progress and quitting
I had good experience with Android app made by soft²cat, but it long gone. Unlike other guitar-hero like apps, it waits for the note to be pressed, so I cannot miss it, and the app discards the note when I press the note earlier. It allows me to play melodies at my own tempo: slower or faster than the original, which is much easier for me.
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#17This may teach you to "play" piano, but the real question is whether this sort of rote memorization will really teach you how music fundamentally works. Seems a bit like re-typing Javascript programs in order to "learn" programming? Will you be able to improvise after enough of this? Play songs by ear? There are a few fundamental musical concepts that I'm not sure you easily pick up by rote memorization: * Most music…
No, it teaches you how to read the scores pretty good actually. The 'rote memorization' can be pushed as well but that's not the goal here, the goal is to learn to read notes fast enough that you can actually play the music. (See attached video).
As for improvisation and playing songs by ear: improv requires some knowledge about how music is structured, I have some ideas on showing what the underlying structure is but these have not yet been implemented, we are for now concentrating on accuracy of the rendering of the score (which is still plenty of work) and fingering.
Playing by ear is mostly to have a good association between the keys and the sounds they make, this gets harder with chords. As with everything, practice makes perfect and doing this frequently seems to help me quite a bit by picking out songs by ear. So even if it isn't a direct goal of any of the modes of operation of the software it does seem to be a side effect. We will add an 'ear training' module at some point.
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#18You 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.
I find it really bad taste to promote something this way. So a developer comes here to tell his story and open his mind a little about a great tool he developed and this is the only thing you have to say?
It is relevant to the discussion. I agree the tone and content could be a bit different, but then so can yours.
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#19You 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.
I find it really bad taste to promote something this way. So a developer comes here to tell his story and open his mind a little about a great tool he developed and this is the only thing you have to say?
I think you're being harsh, It was in no way a critique of PianoJacq and I personally appreciate getting an overview of what similar things are out there that I could also be interested in and how they relate
Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
#20There’s a cottage industry of piano learning apps, and an equivalent amount of people getting frustrated at the lack of progress and quitting
I had good experience with Android app made by soft²cat, but it long gone. Unlike other guitar-hero like apps, it waits for the note to be pressed, so I cannot miss it, and the app discards the note when I press the note earlier. It allows me to play melodies at my own tempo: slower or faster than the original, which is much easier for me.
The rate at which piano teaching apps come and go was one of the factors in our decision to ensure that the app would also work 'stand alone', it's just straight javascript and will work from a zip file taken from the repository. Just unzip and play, no toolchain required.