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

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

#61

Post by nmy » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:55 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #57

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

Yes, very much regrettably, I now find myself using Chrome when I really would like to avoid that. But unfortunately there is no way around this right now that I've found to be reliable enough and easy enough to the point that I would advise users to go that route. Sorry. Note this 8(!) year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897 It's embarrassing.

> Mozilla is too busy improving the world instead of their browser and WebMIDI is not supported

That is misleading. Mozilla chose not to implement it for security concerns. More context: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58#iss...

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

#62

Post by y7 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

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…

> There's nothing wrong with the idea of gameifying piano

I wonder whether that's actually true. Or maybe it depends on what level you're trying to achieve.

If you want to become a good piano player, the feedback mechanism that corrects your playing should actually come from listening yourself. A large part of the challenge in becoming a good player is figuring out what to listen for -- this is also why you need a teacher, because you simply do not hear your mistakes yourself in the beginning.

Of course here I'm mostly referring to musicality, and not just whether you're hitting the correct notes. When learning the piano one usually starts with the latter, but I wonder if you make piano more game-like it causes you to underdevelop your own feedback and reward systems, leading to more problems at a later stage.

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

#63

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

necrotic_comp wrote: post #53

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…

This is an excellent point- as mentioned below, MIDI files do not take into account stuff like key, time signature, etc. , all of which are quite important to understanding a piece ; Western music notation is both incredibly dense and concise, with no information wasted. Part of the art of practicing is the mental work of abstraction and internalization of the music - breaking it into smaller sections, understanding…

> MIDI files do not take into account stuff like key, time signature, etc.

They actually do.

What they don't take into account is whether a particular black key is a sharp or a flat, and this causes all kinds of headaches. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enharmonic

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

#64

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

apankrat wrote: post #60

Had nearly the same idea for the exact same reasons, but wanted it to work on an iPad. Safari has no WebMIDI, so I ended up using WebAudio paired with pitch detection by consensus instead. Here's the result - https://github.com/apankrat/note-detector It's not without issues still, but tends to do a reasonably good job at what it aims to do.

Oh, neat! That's very nice, we were actually discussing doing this the other day using FFTs to make it work with real pianos that do not have a silent option installed.

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

#65

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:02 PM UTC

nmy wrote: post #61

jacquesm wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, very much regrettably, I now find myself using Chrome when I really would like to avoid that. But unfortunately there is no way around this right now that I've found to be reliable enough and easy enough to the point that I would advise users to go that route. Sorry. Note this 8(!) year old bug: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=836897 It's embarrassing.

> Mozilla is too busy improving the world instead of their browser and WebMIDI is not supported That is misleading. Mozilla chose not to implement it for security concerns. More context: https://github.com/mozilla/standards-positions/issues/58#iss...

Security concerns that Chrome seems to be able to deal with just fine. If that's the issue then block sysex but allow the rest, the midi (v1) protocol isn't that hard.

Meanwhile, there are 100's of WebMIDI capable applications now and Mozilla still claims there is no demand for a feature they do not support. That's backwards, of course a feature that you do not support is not in demand because people simply go elsewhere.

The cumulative effect of a lot of little crappy decisions like this is part of why FireFox' market share eroded (the other is Google's anti competitive behavior).

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

#66

Post by murbard2 » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:04 PM UTC

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…

> This will not teach you to play piano.

I agree, but tools like this or Synthesia can potentially help you practice the piano, which is what you should be spending most of your time on.

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

#67

Post by wazoox » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:05 PM UTC

That's an interesting tool. As a former professional pianist, I'd repeat what I feel like the limitation of such a program: it does teach you note reading, which is nice, but really basic piano technique is a necessary preamble. You mentioned that your boy spent a whole day on this; with a bit of guidance, a full beginner after a few hours should be able to play this very simple melody with one hand, and to add a couple of bass notes with the other, for a much more satisfying result (for the player and for the audience). I know it because I've done it with many children in the past.

So you should probably add something like some introduction material / tutorial... maybe a couple of videos.

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

#68

Post by kzrdude » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:06 PM UTC

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.

Do you mean guitar tabs? (By "tab")? Seeing the music theory and logic behinds chords and scales is a lot easier with keyboard instruments.

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

#69

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:09 PM UTC

person_of_color wrote: post #50

jacquesm wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We purposefully chose not to make 'an app' right now but to work in the browser, this gives us a different form factor to play with and some pretty powerful tools to get to the point where we really understand the space well enough to make a move. Think of the present project as a study, a way to have a zero-tooling set-up that allows us to work on this without having to worry about platforms and other fast moving targets. The idea is to first make it work very well and to address all of the valid concerns raised in this thread (of which we for the most part were already aware, but HN wouldn't be HN without its brutal reception of any piece of work). Then when it is bullet proof against such criticism it can be launched to a much larger audience.

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

#70

Post by jacquesm » Fri, Oct 16, 2020, 3:11 PM UTC

tgb wrote: post #35

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…

Trills and decoration in general (rolled chords) for instance are another area where anything midi based will fare poorly, because the 1:1 correspondence between note-heads and keys played is lost. We intend to try to reverse engineer such decorations and to show them properly. With trills and such it can be quite hard because it is perfectly possible to write out the same sequence, a trill is essentially a macro that expands to some number of notes (and some trills can be quite complex, for instance the first few bars of Partita 1 by JS Bach will throw you for a loop if you listen to them and then look at the score).