Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

jacquesmattheij.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 179 posts

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

#31

Post by jacquesm »

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…

Good idea, it is already on the list but not in that context, I will increase its priority.

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

#32

Post by jacquesm »

weinzierl wrote: post #30
drchopchop wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely, Pianobooster has some rally neat concepts.

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

#33

Post by jacquesm »

drchopchop wrote: post #28
save_ferris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you notice the video linked (you really should not be downvoted for good input like this), then you'll notice that my son Luca is playing a piece which is fairly repetitive, but he did not have any instruction at all, the app helps you figure out what is where all by itself, 'random' keys will quickly guide you to the right keys. and then from there once you get the hang of it relative movement should come fairly naturally. The biggest hang-up is the piano keyboard itself with its unequal spacing between adjacent white keys.

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

#34

Post by weinzierl »

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…

> 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.

As using MIDI will probably never be perfect, have you thought about using the score in a suitable format, like LilyPond, directly?

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

#35

Post by tgb »

block_dagger wrote: post #3

I enjoyed PianoMarvel

I used that too for ~6 months some years back and definitely got something out of it, though it was imperfect. There's too much lag in any such MIDI system for it to truly correct your timing and PianoMarvel doesn't even attempt to judge your volume or the duration of notes, if I remember correctly. But it gives you a reasonable progression of pieces from easy to harder and forces you to actually play them. Also some scores were poorly typeset, particularly things like trills. Overall, it helped me improve my ability to read sheet music fluently, which is what I primarily wanted out of it. I learned more with a teacher, of course.

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

#38

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

This will not teach you to play piano. It will teach you how to play beginner piano badly, and then will create intense confusion if you try to learn harder pieces because you will not have learned basic finger techniques - which include counter-intuitive finger-over/under moves and unexpected hand position changes that anticipate what you need to play next.

Piano sheet music includes these finger position hints. Unfortunately they're not optional.

It's hard to include correct fingering in the model without some kind of camera and image recognition system, or special keys and finger sensors, or something equally obscure.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of gameifying piano, but it's a really hard problem to solve well. The usual result with piano teaching apps of all kinds - as someone else commented below - is kids get up to Grade 1 (maybe 2) and then hit a brick wall.

The reality is that playing any instrument with non-trivial competence is really fucking hard. It takes everyone a ridiculous amount of time and effort to get good at it - even those with talent.

So there's a trade off between trying to offer easy but limited success with some entertainment value, and going the whole way and doing it properly - which all but the most musical kids get very bored by, because it's such hard work.

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

#39

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

rzodkiew wrote: post #37

Regrettably it's not working on Firefox[1], but hey at least I can report wrongthink YouTube videos. [1] https://pianojacq.com/firefox.html

> Unfortunately, because Mozilla is too busy improving the world instead of their browser and WebMIDI is not supported on Firefox you have to use Chrome

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

#40

Post by jacquesm »

murbard2 wrote: post #23
jacquesm wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fingering we have a pretty good hold on already, so I'm not too worried there.

Importing alternative formats (xml for instance) is definitely an option worth looking into, but because the bulk of the material that is out there that people can freely access is in midi format we chose that one first.

Post reply on HN