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Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano

jacquesmattheij.com

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

#41

Post by jacquesm »

weinzierl wrote: post #34
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…

> 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?

Yes, absolutely, and we will add more import formats.

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

#42

Post by yorwba »

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…

> 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.

Musescore already has such a collection of sheet music https://musescore.com/hub/piano so it'd also be possible to allow users to import from there, going from sheet music to midi instead of trying to reverse the process.

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

#43

Post by cscheid »

jacquesm wrote: post #9
microcolonel wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

We are working very hard on solving this in a very interesting and beautiful way. Stay tuned.

I’m super curious, if you don’t mind my prodding. I looked into doing this for my own version of a JavaScript midi teacher a while back. Any chance you’re doing it via the neural nets sequence to sequence translation algorithms that are super popular in NLP right now? I think that’s a practical way to do it, except for needing a training corpus. I was going to reverse engineer synthesia’s data to try it out, for what’s worth...

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

#44

Post by jacquesm »

nitrogen wrote: post #29
jacquesm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, that is one avenue. I made a - hopefully exhaustive - list of chords the other day and I was surprised at how much I did not know. The next step is to analyze my midi file collection to see what kind of graph can be constructed and how the edges can be annotated. It's a very interesting problem. And in a way that is why I love this project: it combines both of the things I love.

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

#45

Post by rednum »

This seems a bit similar to Melodics[1], except open source and it actually uses the standard notation.

I know how to read music and started taking classical lessons as an adult. Some time last year a friend recommended me to check out Melodics. It has 3 instruments: keys, pads (finger drumming), drums. I've played pads for few mont;hs, that was good, I've felt it improved my timing and rhythm skills quite a bit. Then I switched to keys. I didn't really like that; it felt like I'm mindlessly repeating whatever is on the screen instead of internalising music. OTOH, when playing pads it felt that something stays in my head after playing. So I guess this may be useful to some people.

For me it'd be more interesting to have some sort of memory trainer - I play something on screen few times, then I replay from memory and app shows me a diff maybe? Or when I'm learning a piece, it would give me a challenge "play bars 21-25 both hands" or "play bars 19-23 left hand only".

[1] https://melodics.com/, I'm not affiliated in any way

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

#46

Post by hashkb »

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.

HN can be weirdly sensitive to comments about music being hard; fundamentals being mandatory, etc. I bet if we criticized the code on Music News (not a real thing) it'd be the same way.

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

#47

Post by jacquesm »

cscheid wrote: post #43
jacquesm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are working very hard on solving this in a very interesting and beautiful way. Stay tuned.

I’m super curious, if you don’t mind my prodding. I looked into doing this for my own version of a JavaScript midi teacher a while back. Any chance you’re doing it via the neural nets sequence to sequence translation algorithms that are super popular in NLP right now? I think that’s a practical way to do it, except for needing a training corpus. I was going to reverse engineer synthesia’s data to try it out, for what…

We do not think that it will need a neural net in order to be able to do this, but we need to prove that in order to make it stick and we're not quite ready to do that. Keep in mind that this is in every sense of the word a side project, we only work on this when we do not have technical due diligence work for customers and that still continues quite strongly. But on 'off' weeks we work on this and the project progresses quite rapidly when we do.

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

#48

Post by jacquesm »

yorwba wrote: post #42
murbard2 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Musescore already has such a collection of sheet music https://musescore.com/hub/piano so it'd also be possible to allow users to import from there, going from sheet music to midi instead o…

Yes, but then you would still lose quite a bit of information. Besides that, musescore is pulling a bait-and-switch on the user generated content that makes gracenote look good.

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

#49

Post by speedgoose »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #38

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. Unf…

I'm an adult beginning to learn piano using Flowkey. It's criticized by the experts but I feel like it does a relatively good job at teaching basic piano finger techniques. I have no wish to become a piano expert anyway, I play music as a hobby.

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

#50

Post by person_of_color »

jacquesm wrote: post #20
drran wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Search piano on iOS! It's depressing.
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