this is wonderful! would there be a way to save the output? would be interesting to see how others interpret a piece. really also wishing that we could track keyboard velocity as well:p
At the risk of being the naysayer, I'm not sure it teaches you how to play the piano so much as it teaches you about musical rhythm and timing and note relativity and would help develop the ability to play by ear. It doesn't really distinguish between clefs or hand placement, and did the relative placement thing worked better when things were closer together anyway.
I think this could be the start of something amazing. A midi keyboard seems essential but if you could progressively introduce the different elements, using both hands, pressing enough keys to correspond to chords, different hand positions I think this could be a really great way to learn. If it could give feedback on being partially correct (e.g. highlighting two parts of the chord where you need to press 4 keys) it would be learning via gentle nudges, moving onto the next lesson once you're consisting getting it a new element correct.
But rhythm and timing and note relativity are ridiculously hard to get right (especially for beginners). This is a great exercise for one of the more challenging parts of playing music well.
Plus, the audience is much more likely to notice a mistake if the rhythm is wrong than they are to notice a note is wrong. If you can get the rhythm right you can play through your other mistakes and still have a reasonable presentation.
As interesting as it is, I don't really see a educational use for this. It's fun and all to tap along, but in the end it's nothing better than something like DDR or Rock Band. Nothing wrong with a fun app, but I doubt it's educational uses. (this coming from a lifelong pianist)
Yeah, I know what you're saying. After a bit of thinking I tried to rename the title but I think the window has passed, because i'm not able to save the change.
That said, the control over the tempo is really interesting to me. I ruined the piece by tapping away too fast.. it really guides you to correct yourself in the second take, or third, etc.
Haha, so true! All my favorite classical performers are the ones who play more evenly, favoring subtle rubato over grandiose, momentum-killing swoops. For piano, that would be Kempff, O'Conor, Leif Ove Andsnes, Misha Dichter... It's such a challenge to find people who play that way -- please suggest any others that come to mind!
With this app, I would have to memorize all the little interpolations in order not to interrupt the flow. Playing through the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata was hilarious -- I was constantly skipping beat fractions where there were a few missing sixteenth notes in the middle of a run, and then there sections where I simply couldn't type fast enough and the tempo lagged. And even if I practiced, there is a little too much latency and occasional stop-the-world pausing to achieve the kind of rhythmic precision I'd hope for. But it was still thrilling to hear the correct notes and good dynamics!
If looking to turn this into something more educational, there could be a view of the proper piano score. You would have to follow the rhythm as written, and for each rhythmic value you got wrong, there would be some form of repercussion. It would still be very similar to Rock Band, but I think there would be more merit to reading the rhythm of written notes rather than just dots on a screen.
I guess I completely disagree, as another lifelong pianist. I think it's a great way to explore using tempo to express musicality. I just had a great experience watching how thrilled my wife (untrained in piano) was to actually "perform" something that sounded musical to her ears.
I think this could be an excellent tool to learn some piano pieces with the addition of a step-backwards button, so you could practice small chunks or certain chords over and over and really analyze them.
Synthesia lets you step backwards to play a part again, with the left and right arrow keys: https://www.synthesiagame.com/. You can also use the up and down arrow keys to change the speed at which you play them.
I played the piano for years but due to a physical disability I can no longer play like I used to. Pressing the keys, maintaining rhythm and hearing the music come out is the closest feeling I got to what is now a forgotten memory.
Thank you Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, for taking me back a few years to all those fun hours I spent on the piano. Please add more pieces (Liszt!) and keep up the good work (incorporating the pedal into this somehow would be really nice)!
For feature requests, I'd love to be able just to watch them being played automagically one after the other on my iOS device (on the website or app), or computer via the website.
Sometimes I just want to lay there with headphones on and listens to good piano music.
Really enjoyed playing with this, actually still enjoying :)
You might also want to add direct links to songs for easier sharing for specific pieces, as well as putting the song name in the auto-hiding bottom bar because my memory isn't what it used to be.
Hungarian Rhapsody #2 is the first thing I went looking for. :)
BTW, one simple feature that would make this much more interesting to me would be the ability to skip back 30 seconds and try a section of a song again. Just a suggestion.
There is a similar game on iOS called Magic Piano [1] - it seems to have licensed many popular and older songs and you can play them on iPad with an almost identical UI, for a freemium cost.
When I read the title, I thought it could learn your random tap rhythm and search through a piano db and find the best match, or even better, slow & smooth morph into another rhythm according to your tap
This is awesome. Super easy to get started. I would love to see the ability to see the notation somewhere as I'm playing and the ability to rewind a bit. I could definitely see me using this to scout out a piece.
This really made my day. What a great way to blow off some steam.
Your example is wrong, I think: My eyesight can't tell me about the truck around the corner and I only know it when I hear it but that doesn't mean that I can see it next time. In comparison, when you "see" the polyphony you are one step closer to "hearing" it the next time.
Touch Pianist is one of the latest implementations of an idea that's been around for a long time: technologically-assisted musical performance; here's an historical overview on the subject: The Conductor Program — computer-mediated musical performance (http://www.musanim.com/tapper/). Aaron Andrew Hunt is about to release a professional-grade version of this which will let you use your own MIDI files.
Even for a rhythm trainer it is disappointing because you're forced to tap at a set interval, not what the notes are actually saying. And forget double-tapping when there are two notes on a single interval -- that just plays two intervals!
Thumbs down from a lifelong DDRer and casual pianist.
This is a really terrific app. In many ways is nicer than siting back and listening to music, as it makes you think more about the flow and melody of a piece. I enjoyed this very much.
same here. very dizzy after staring at it for 30 minutes (it's super fun).
Drive-by suggestions -- 1. make the background image fixed so only the notes are moving, 2. make the notes circles smaller, and the notes bursting animation a bit slower, might help reduce the dizziness.
I couldn't believe that the Waldstein Sonata (first movement) was an option! I've listened to that piece I don't know how many times by so many different pianists (favorites are Wilhelm Kempff and John O'Conor) but I'm not a pianist and could never dream of climbing that mountain. And I tried it and of course made a dire mess of it but it was still SO MUCH FUN!
Why is the iOS app free? After playing with the in-browser demo for just a minute that would've been an extremely easy $2 to part with!
EDIT - oh, it's got ads in it. Removed. Sorry, if you ship your software stuffed with some 3rd party crap that most certainly nobody wants and then offer to disable that part for money, then it's an instant No. Please make a proper paid version with none of this nonsense and I will gladly pay for it.
Agreed. I installed the app, played a piece, but when I tried to play something else I got a video ad blasting out at twice the volume of the music. Deleted the app.
You can wish for a perfect world all you want, but any developer who wants to earn money with an iOS app knows that the basic version has to be free. If you like the app, pay the in-app purchase and be happy... It's pretty unfair to punish the developer for the realities of mobile app markets.
http://www.marco.org/2013/09/28/underscore-price-dynamics
You do realize that Apple discourages multiple versions of the same app since releasing in-app purchases, right? It clutters up the App Store having paid and free versions of apps. I wish they would just release a proper app demoing system...
Any specifics on how they discourage this? Geniune question. There's plenty of high-ranking apps with both paid and free-ad-supported versions, e.g. Cut The Rope.
However, you are refusing to pay the developer $0.99 (correction: $0.70 to the developer) for the exact same product which you said would "easily" pay $2 for.
If you are genuinely so against this business model, why do you own an iOS device? It's Apple pushing this, not the lone developer you've arbitrarily decided to punish.
Right, after playing through a whole song on the web, my first reaction when I saw that there was an app version available was: Oh, that's brilliant, the web app (which I thought was the end of the story) is actually an interactive demo for a paid app. So I was surprised to see that the app itself was free -- but perhaps this is the first time the web version has gotten any traction, so the developer was unprepared for customers with this set of expectations.
Very cool, well done! I just showed it to my wife and 3 year old and both spent 45 minutes playing with it.
Some suggestions:
- the ads on iPad are really obtrusive. Please remove them. I'd gladly pay for the app or the individual packages. ( I deleted the app within 5 minutes)
- a "buy everything" option would be nice
- I think a two handed mode would be really great: perhaps you could consider generating two timelines with separate even handlers so that you can play multiple rhythms at the same time. Would be a nice "advanced mode".
- eventually , an option to include scoring would be nice. You could compare the actual rhythm offset with the"ideal" rhythm to train user rhythm. The current "sandbox" mode really should stay, though, since I really enjoyed watching my kid playing with it :-)
Yes, a two handed mode + scoring would be great. That would make it a fun program to practice rhythm. There are similar music training software such as Earmaster but they're not really engaging.
107 comments
[ 1208 ms ] story [ 2465 ms ] threadPlus, the audience is much more likely to notice a mistake if the rhythm is wrong than they are to notice a note is wrong. If you can get the rhythm right you can play through your other mistakes and still have a reasonable presentation.
That said, the control over the tempo is really interesting to me. I ruined the piece by tapping away too fast.. it really guides you to correct yourself in the second take, or third, etc.
With this app, I would have to memorize all the little interpolations in order not to interrupt the flow. Playing through the third movement of the Waldstein Sonata was hilarious -- I was constantly skipping beat fractions where there were a few missing sixteenth notes in the middle of a run, and then there sections where I simply couldn't type fast enough and the tempo lagged. And even if I practiced, there is a little too much latency and occasional stop-the-world pausing to achieve the kind of rhythmic precision I'd hope for. But it was still thrilling to hear the correct notes and good dynamics!
That being said, it is still an enjoyable app!
would be a nice touch-type learning software
would be a nice touch-type learning software
I played the piano for years but due to a physical disability I can no longer play like I used to. Pressing the keys, maintaining rhythm and hearing the music come out is the closest feeling I got to what is now a forgotten memory.
Thank you Mr. Batuhan Bozkurt, for taking me back a few years to all those fun hours I spent on the piano. Please add more pieces (Liszt!) and keep up the good work (incorporating the pedal into this somehow would be really nice)!
Sometimes I just want to lay there with headphones on and listens to good piano music.
Really enjoyed playing with this, actually still enjoying :)
You might also want to add direct links to songs for easier sharing for specific pieces, as well as putting the song name in the auto-hiding bottom bar because my memory isn't what it used to be.
BTW, one simple feature that would make this much more interesting to me would be the ability to skip back 30 seconds and try a section of a song again. Just a suggestion.
[1] https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/magic-piano-by-smule/id42125...
(seems to work perfectly fine in firefox tho..)
It turned out to be different, still cool though.
This really made my day. What a great way to blow off some steam.
(same goes with pretty much all of them though)
For instance, your eyesight is terrible at telling you a furniture truck is coming around the corner.
If you were good at separating the individual elements of music without much effort, perhaps music wouldn't be nearly as appealing. Who knows?
Thumbs down from a lifelong DDRer and casual pianist.
Though idank's comment is nice to see!
As far as I can tell, you're wrong. You're supposed to tap at the same rhythm as the distance between the notes conveys.
Mozart's Piano Sonata No. 16 - Allegro makes it very obvious. Satie's Gymnopédie No. 1 makes it obvious too since you have to hold the key.
Does anyone else experience an optical illusion where it appears their screen is moving when they finish a song/leave the page?
Drive-by suggestions -- 1. make the background image fixed so only the notes are moving, 2. make the notes circles smaller, and the notes bursting animation a bit slower, might help reduce the dizziness.
EDIT - oh, it's got ads in it. Removed. Sorry, if you ship your software stuffed with some 3rd party crap that most certainly nobody wants and then offer to disable that part for money, then it's an instant No. Please make a proper paid version with none of this nonsense and I will gladly pay for it.
I believe Cut The Rope pre-dated the push for keeping apps singular with IAP to unlock additional content.
However, you are refusing to pay the developer $0.99 (correction: $0.70 to the developer) for the exact same product which you said would "easily" pay $2 for.
If you are genuinely so against this business model, why do you own an iOS device? It's Apple pushing this, not the lone developer you've arbitrarily decided to punish.
I have created an app to learn the music staff notation. Web version: http://www.adhyet.com/flamingnotes
Some suggestions:
- the ads on iPad are really obtrusive. Please remove them. I'd gladly pay for the app or the individual packages. ( I deleted the app within 5 minutes)
- a "buy everything" option would be nice
- I think a two handed mode would be really great: perhaps you could consider generating two timelines with separate even handlers so that you can play multiple rhythms at the same time. Would be a nice "advanced mode".
- eventually , an option to include scoring would be nice. You could compare the actual rhythm offset with the"ideal" rhythm to train user rhythm. The current "sandbox" mode really should stay, though, since I really enjoyed watching my kid playing with it :-)
Other than that, great work!