Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano • Hacker News Board

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#21

Post by save_ferris » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #14

This 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…

> Will you be able to improvise after enough of this? Play songs by ear?

How many Herbie Hancock's have you come across after finishing a grade 1 piano book? Of course a single exercise app or book isn't going to create the perfectly rounded musician. For a child or beginner player, this looks like a great tool.

Advanced musical skill is entirely composable. Having solid improvisational skill or technical ability largely depends on how much you practice those various facets of your instrument. The reality is that probably 95%+ of people who pick up an instrument in their lives never make it to that point anyway.

You're trying to critique this tool with the expectation that a single learning resource should address all aspects of playing an instrument, when that's never been true of any musical learning resource ever.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#22

Post by onion2k » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #14

This 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…

Not everyone wants to become a composer. A lot of people just want to be able to sit down at a piano and play music they enjoy. Learning by rote works very well for that.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#23

Post by murbard2 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:50 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #13

murbard2 wrote: post #6

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 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 sen…

Musescore does do a great job and is open source, so there's that. Another option is to have users manually upload midi with a proper score attached to some store or community repo with user reviews. It's less satisfying as a solution, but it means all it takes is one motivated user for everyone to enjoy the score.

For my final point, you can model this as a hidden markov process. You're observing notes, but not the user moving his mental "cursor". Classical filtering algorithms should do well here.

Ah, one more missing feature, good scores have fingering, but it gets lost in the midi. I'm pretty sure fingering can be infered though and this would be pretty powerful. Amusingly, it can also be seen as a filtering problem:

- At any given point, a hand can have a finite number of fingerings, and that number isn't that large. Give each of them a difficulty.

- Now, make that difficulty conditional on the previous hand position.

- Run Viterbi's algorithm on the score to minimize the difficulty.

The difficulty can be obtained from an expert or through some physiological model, but they could also be inferred from an existing body of music sheets.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#24

Post by tekkk » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:51 PM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #14

This 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…

I'd wager it can't teach you abstract concepts but since abstract concepts are much easier to learn with the practical knowledge of using them, it would definitely be helpful. Also honing motoric skills is a key part in doing many things - arts, sports - so getting accustomed to that is a big plus too. The downside of doing only that is yes, you will be quite lost with the abstract and also reinforce some bad habits.

So no cynical HN commentary from me! If it works, it is definitely a big help for learning to play piano.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#25

Post by weinzierl » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:52 PM UTC

mattstudio wrote: post #4

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.

Synthesisa is awesome. I think it is not a direct competition to pianojacq because while similar in some ways it is different in many ways too. murbard summarized some differences in another comment better than I could. In my opinion the two apps and a piano teacher complement each other.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#26

Post by drchopchop » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #17

drchopchop wrote: post #14

This 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 bu…

I do like that you are showing the score, instead of doing some sort of Guitar Hero style / abstract grid. That will definitely help people that want to translate this into reading sheet music. And you may be right in that doing this enough will give you a sense of what keys make what sounds, which then can clue you into to how songs work "under the hood".

Since you're rendering the score in realtime, you could let users transpose songs up and down which would really help them learn scales.

Very nice project, though.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#27

Post by jtwaleson » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:56 PM UTC

Wow, thanks for creating this @jacquesm! I'm going to give this a spin tonight with my kids!

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#28

Post by drchopchop » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

save_ferris wrote: post #21

drchopchop wrote: post #14

This 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…

> Will you be able to improvise after enough of this? Play songs by ear? How many Herbie Hancock's have you come across after finishing a grade 1 piano book? Of course a single exercise app or book isn't going to create the perfectly rounded musician. For a child or beginner player, this looks like a great tool. Advanced musical skill is entirely composable. Having solid improvisational skill or technical ability lar…

It's a nice tool, didn't intend to come off that negatively. More of a thought experience about the limitations of these types of tools.

I'm not sure it's quite beginner level, as I don't see anything that shows you where the note is on the keyboard? You'd have to start with a bit of reading knowledge, or be willing to just hit random keys until you figure out the mappings.

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#29

Post by nitrogen » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #15

jl2718 wrote: post #11

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.

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!

I once wanted to build something like a graph of chord transitions from thousands of different songs, with weights based on how often that transition occurs in a genre given the previous N chords. Maybe something like that would help with giving chords natural names for their context?

Re: Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

#30

Post by weinzierl » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 1:59 PM UTC

drchopchop wrote: post #26

jacquesm wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bu…

I do like that you are showing the score, instead of doing some sort of Guitar Hero style / abstract grid. That will definitely help people that want to translate this into reading sheet music. And you may be right in that doing this enough will give you a sense of what keys make what sounds, which then can clue you into to how songs work "under the hood". Since you're rendering the score in realtime, you could let u…

> I do like that you are showing the score, instead of doing some sort of Guitar Hero style/abstract grid

This and the way it shows these little lines when you hit some wrong keys is really helpful if you are just learning sight reading. Credit for this should go to Piano Booster probably though.