I’m a professional pianist; so I’m not in your target audience. There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated.

Experienced players read music in a way that overcomes some of the limitations that form the assumptions that are behind these alternative notation systems. Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk. (I imagine reading code must be similar.) This is why the density of traditional notation isn’t intimidating - after a while it can be read as a whole.

Whether a system like this could be a pedagogical bridge to formal notation remains to be seen. I’ve encountered such bridging systems before. I’m an admitted skeptic because my orientation to this is that if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing. The struggle, within limits, is known to enhance learning.

I spent decades not understanding music theory and thinking of music as a sequence of notes, and I never understood why music notation and the layout of a piano were so bizarre. It just seemed like something that we were stuck with due to tradition and lack of innovation.

Ever since I started learning something about music theory (just in the past couple years... I'm far from an expert), I've realized that both sheet music and the piano layout are both very clever in unexpected ways that, as you point out, make the music notation both expressive and more compact than a straight timeline of linear note values, because they lean on the fact that sections of music tend to skip very predictable parts of the range of notes. They tend to use them in particular patterns that make it useful to reduce your focus to a subset of the available range at any given moment.

Yeah, it even goes down to the physics of harmonics.

There's this absolutely wild video by Adam nealy about how polyrhythms are actually cords. (It's very approachable if you know just a smidgeon of music theory). Highly recommend Adam's channel if you're interested in music/music theory. https://youtu.be/JiNKlhspdKg?si=J7eaB1xH4Eo27cC9

>about how polyrhythms are actually cords

Meant chords? I'm not buying it. The commonality is very stretched (notes are ratios, and chords are several ratios together). That's like saying "code is actually poetry, both are based on the arrangement of alphabet symbols groupped in small blocks". More something for a TedX talk, than something practicing composers and musicians have in mind when using either.

For starters, in chords the ratios are stacked vertically (multiple "ratio" notes played together at once), in polyrhythms horizontally. In chords it carries harmonic information, where polyrhythms can and are just as well be played with unpitched drums and percussion. And in general they serve different purposes. You can have chords playing without any polyrhythm in the rhythm side or play monophonic lines with polyrhythms.

I just watched the first half of the talk, and it's pretty interesting. I don't think Adam Neely is actually saying they're the same; he's saying it's interesting to think about their similarity. And what you actually get out of the talk is that his point is that pitch is our perception of frequency over a certain limit, and that rhythm is our perception of frequency under that limit. They're both perceptions of frequency and the ratios of those frequencies are the defining property of both chords and polyrhythms.

I haven’t seen the video (and likely will not) but there is a similar “shower thought” that vision is also energy of a given range of frequency, just like hearing.

I haven’t seen the video, but I assume what it’s getting at is that if you have like a simple 5 over 4 polyrhythm and you speed it up sufficiently you’ll start to perceive it as a major third.

I kind of also think that’s a little meaningless since while tempo for a beat and pitch for a tone are both sort of frequencies we perceive them completely differently.

Watched it. He does go into this perception difference, but he still makes a connection between the consonance of a chord due to the frequencies interacting and the consonance of a polyrhythm with the same ratios. A 3-4-5 polyrhythm is analogous to a major triad and has a pattern you can "feel" better than something dissonant.

You can also play chords polyrhythmically. Timpani is a great example.

You can, but it's optional (and orthogonal).

Yup the more I learn music the more I'm impressed by sheet notation and realise (as someone passionate about programming language theory and also linguistics) that something that can unseat sheet notation will be a huge undertaking.

Granted it does have its edge cases. IIRC it's not great at representing complex rhythm.

But what sheet notation does great man does it do well at it. Like recently have been looking at quite a few different multi voice piano pieces and the fact that using convention you can differentiate between the lower and middles voices is pretty amazing.

Eg in Clair de lune the runs that are played by both hands will share the same beam to denote it's a single voice

Strong disagree. On many instruments there is a strong memory association between the place of the note on the staff and the physical movement to play that note, Wether it be a fingering, valve combination or lip tension or whatever.

I agree. Even though some (most?) instruments have different shapes for each scale, notation should transcend implementation and aim for the most general representation. See: isomorphic instruments.

I'll concede that traditional music notation is the most efficient way of representing classical music.

With sheet music, transposing music means moving it up or down the staff, and changing the key signature to match, and adjusting any accidentals.

Music theory gives good reasons for changing keys to have a significant effect on how the song sounds. Most pianos are tuned equal temperment so you don't get that effect, but there is a good argument for other tunings that do. (You may or may not agree, but the argument is valid)

I'm not convinced, personally. Melodies that sound the same don't really sound the same (hitting different registers on the same instrument), and they aren't played the same (different fingerings), so why would they look the same in notation?

Part of me says yes and part of me says no. The thing that music notation recognizes is that which specific notes are important changes depending on which key you're in.

I'm an experienced musician and this really resonates with me. It's possible to see a scale written out in the score and know exactly what that means in terms of how it's supposed to sound, what fingering I should use, and whether there are any "aberrant" notes in there that I should watch out for. The same goes for many other common note patterns. Trying to decode something like this into something that makes sense to me musically is a huge additional burden that doesn't exist. That said, having been through the journey of being able to sight read music myself and then trying to teach it to a number of people, I agree that reading a score in real time is one of the greatest hurdles to beginner and intermediate players alike, and probably a huge impediment to many people learning to play a variety of instruments.

There is one particular instance in which getting away from traditional notation can help. I have absolute pitch, and I've played transposing (woodwind) instruments before. The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments. If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me. I don't think this is a common problem though.

I think there might be two different basic strategies that could help you out of this:

1) just work on actually transposing whatever you're reading by a fixed interval. If you get fluent in doing this, you'll get past your "page says f but it sounds d" discomfort.

2) practice reading C clefs (+ octave transposition). You play a C on a clarinet in B-flat, it sounds a B-flat. So, imagine instead of a treble clef, it were a tenor clef (but 8va higher) instead. That third-space treble-clef C is now a tenor-clef B (you have to add the accidentals).

In either case, it is probably matter of just getting used to it, and that means spending time with it, so no truly "easy" answer for you.

I'm actually quite good at transposing by any arbitrary interval (by ear), and can also play music both from sight reading and from ear. The problem is I have both an instinctive link between sounds and fingerings (or keys on a piano when I play that) and between the notes in the score and the keys they map to on the instrument. Alas I didn't encounter c clefs until rather late in my musical training (they weren't relevant for any of the instruments I played) and by that time I didn't have a compelling reason to practice reading scores. I'm adulthood I more or less only play solo piano so transposition is a moot point.

> If I could just focus on the finger positions without the distraction of the score, that would help me.

Isn't this exactly what most guitar players do? Tablature is used instead of traditional staves.

Classical and jazz guitar are written in traditional notation. Classical notation has implied positions on the fretboard - first, fifth, seventh, etc. Tablature is useful, but it is not musical notation. Its expressiveness is so limited that many tablature sites add various symbols borrowed from standard. Indeed, go on almost any guitar forum on the net and you'll find a beginner asking about some notation found on a tablature. There's a great deal more to performing on the guitar than knowing where to put the fingers of the fretting hand.

There are also special notations on tabs for hammer ons, slides, harmonics, bends, percussive rhythm guitar.

I would classify this as musical notation.

It's hard to read, but once you know it it makes sense. If someone doesn't know the genre (rock, funk, metal etc) then it makes no sense.

In traditional musical notation:

hammer-on & pull-off: slur, notation is a curved line, sometimes dashed connecting notes.

slide: notated as legato, glissando, portamento, all different, in subtle ways, to "slide"

harmonic: notated in classical guitar with a diamond-shaped head.

percussive is tambor

bend: notated using an angled line between the noteheads at the start and end.

All those tab notations are borrowed from traditional notation. And yes, there are classical guitar pieces that use all these techniques. see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbc2yDvt8RM

> The mental link between specific finger positions and specific tones / notes on the score, is one that causes me untold issues with transposing instruments.

Yes! I quit tenor and alto sax in favor of C melody. And I learned euphonium before trumpet so I just can’t see a Bb but call it C. Not at speed anyway.

> Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk.

I’m not professional, but I have been playing for awhile and can sight-read fairly easily. What you said here is 100% true, and I liken it to learning to read a language. Watch how kids learn to read, they have to look at each syllable and letter and sound out each word. Eventually, after enough practice, you don’t read individual letters, you read words. Then, you begin to observe the nuance of the grammatical structure.

I feel like reading music notation has followed a similar trend for myself. I no longer read individual notes, I see chords and progressions. Just like stories tend to follow a plot line, and you can predict how the story may end, music follows a plot line, and you can predict the movement. This is also why certain styles of music is so interesting! We expect the plot to move in a direction and then are surprised by the twist. This video by 8 bit music theory gives a good overview of how that can be done[0].

I especially love when I’m playing through a new piece and every part of the song just makes sense. Yiruma’s music in particular feels very natural for me, and it’s an absolute joy to play through the song and have it all flow together so well.

Anyways, I think a lot of people just don’t give it enough time and give up a bit too early. It’s magical when you pass that point of reading individual notes and enter into the territory of really reading pieces. I still have so far to go, but music will always be a relaxing and fulfilling hobby.

[0]: https://youtu.be/gzK1CTxxRH0?si=H3aUQo83lVl-2BQK

I took nine years of piano lessons as a child and quit because I thought learning to read music should follow the progression of learning to read words. After nine years, since I couldn't just sit down with music and play it, I thought I must be completely inept because I still "couldn't read."

It wasn't until well into adulthood that anyone told me sight reading like that (i.e., sit in front of unfamiliar music and just play it) is actually a rare and exceptional skill. Since then, I've been assuming it must not follow the "learn to read letters" path at all, but now you have me wondering if the reality is between these two ideas, and my dual misconceptions have more to do with never having actually "learned" to read in any ordinary sense.

One day when I was 3, my mom finished reading me a story, and I said it was my turn to read the next one. I read the next one, and the one after that, and the one after that. It all sort of clunked into place at once.

It also made me an unusual reader, which I also didn't know at the time. While I can read words one at a time, like when I have occasion to read aloud, by default, I read chunks of the paragraph/page at once. I don't subvocalize the words. I just know what they say. My brain apparently just handles letters and words funny.

Your comment is so helpful for me because it's helping me realize I may just need to learn to read music the way most people learn to read words, and it's not useful to think of it in terms of how I did!

As a kid, I learnt violin and trombone to a very high orchestra level standard, and could read sheet music from a very early age. I then moved on in my late twenties to guitar, bass and keyboard in a rock band, and never looked at a piece of sheet music again in my life, and would have no idea how to translate musical notation to those instruments.

I know people who cannot play a tune without sheet music. I know some of the most talented musicians on this earth who cannot read sheet music. There is no right and wrong to this. It's what works for you.

I do think some form of formal music theory training is an absolute cheat code when it comes to playing multiple instruments, or just jamming and playing by ear though

I’m similar to you, and I agree with your points completely.

I learned to play classical piano as a child and teenager and got reasonably good at it. But as my interests expanded to music that is normally not written down, I had less need to read music notation. Fifty years later, I still play the piano every day, but the only reading I do is occasionally looking at the chords and melody lines for jazz standards.

The music theory I learned when young has been very helpful over the years, and it would have been more difficult for me to absorb it then without using standard music notation. But I no longer think about music in terms of notes on a stave; I have gradually developed my own mental representation of it.

I still listen to classical music, and I do wish that I had acquired and maintained better sight-reading skills so that playing it would be a pleasure for me now rather than a chore.

Far from left field related.

  > Instead of looking at a measure as a collection of individual notes that must be perceived, interpreted and executed in sequence, they take it in as a chunk.

This is how Morse code is done. Not as individual letters, but as the sound of the stream. You don’t listen for letters per se, just rhythms of the sounds and patterns of letter combinations and words.

My former piano teacher tells me that these non-traditional systems enable people to learn specific stuff fluently and quickly but it engenders various habits that are difficult to unlearn, and limits people's development.

Personally I believe there's no substitute to doing serious amounts of repetition of stuff that you're trying to learn to get it fluent, and using your ears (and on the piano to a lesser extent eyes) to get it. Personally I'm happiest when I'm able to step away from the sheet music, but I also read to an intermediate level.

It turned out what got me much more fluent with sheet music reading was copying out some scores that were a little bit of a stretch for me, at the time, due to having multiple performances of same music at short notice.

For most music I play (I'm on sax in a couple of street bands) I much prefer to have internalised the music and be able to operate from memory based on knowing the key and some intuition of the harmonic structure. In fact if I know a tune too well the sheet music starts to throw me if I try reading and playing.

Intuition is important. The fact that I already had good intuition on the sax, but that it was a struggle on the piano is what made me stop piano lessons because getting better at piano was eating in to my getting better at the sax time too much.

> There may well be some system of notation that is superior to the standard that has developed in Western music; but nothing I’ve seen matches the expressive flexibility and compactness of the way music is now notated.

I like Ableton's Push system and associated sequencing software. I think it is superior.

Its an LED grid and matrix, but primarily within that grid it highlights all the C notes for every octave

for someone that doesn't have the discipline to already sense them, there is no need to ever gain or hone that sense anymore

its hard to describe, as the combination of hardware and software is quite comprehensive, but in comparison it really does seem like this just wasn't revisited for the last 700 years. the matrix is for playing and reading. whereas these would be separate things in analog devices and things that simulate them. hm, lines blur with the term analog. I mean in comparison to traditional physical instruments.

I love me a matrix sequencer, but they don't easily convey things like dynamics, or tempo changes, or key changes. It also requires a score for an 88 key piano be 88 rows tall. A 4 bar rest and 64 16th notes also all have the same length in the sequencer, which is some times helpful but often not helpful.

The Ableton Push sequencer is also designed with using it in a scale-only mode in mind. It gets a fair bit uglier if you enable chromatic mode.

I'm a very mediocre pianist, and my take would be that I'm not looking for a bridge because I know I'll never spend enough time to be good and I don't care about getting good, but I enjoy sitting down and playing (butchering) some pieces now and again. So if I found something simpler that helped improve my playing with minimal effort that'd be good for me even if it actively hampered any effort to get good.

I don't know whether or not this is it - judging purely from the screenshots I think it's too pared back and austere, e.g. making it harder (for me at least) to see expected duration of a note from length alone, but I love that people are trying.

I'd love suggestions if you have any! The note length is maybe not possible, just due to the fact most midi files don't encode it very well

Looking at the screenshots, I think this notation was chosen because it's easy to generate from MIDI files. MIDI files just say what note is being played, when it starts, and when it stops. Sheet music is much richer than that (as you'll note if you've ever used a tool to turn MIDI into sheet music), so anything that takes MIDI as an input is going to be terrible if it produces traditional notation as output. (I bet AI could help a lot here, though.)

Very importantly, just to append, midi start note also contains velocity, and midi also contains and control changes.

The notation looks like what a player piano would have used, so predates midi by 100 years.

I think I'm closer to the target audience as I usually learn either by "ear" or by watching someone play the song. Actually, what I prefer is looking/finding the chords first, and then I fill up the melody and everything in-between. So, an app like this is very helpful. My only feedback is I find the UI piano at the bottom of the screen hard to read without black keys

Ha when you described reading things in chunk I started wondering if you were a programmer.

I found that once I learned coding I started to internalise and conceptualise things about music I didn't before. The structure of music became so much more concrete and I also realised that not only are musical chunks (eg scale or arpeggio) an abstraction on paper but so too is the brain-muscle instruction to execute it. In some of the intermediate Beethoven and Chopin where it starts to get spicier you don't have time to think note by note...

I'm someone who's quite interested in learning to play music - took some classes in highschool (but my focus was the visual arts which is why I struggle to find time amongst my other hobbies, I'll get there)

I always wished that sheet music was rotated 90 degrees. The more I hear from musicians the more I think maybe that's not good... but there is something to be said about, "with experience you'll just get it, it become natural" especially with a system that's been around for hundreds of years...

There are some musicians out there who rotate the sheet music 90 degrees. These people exist. But I don't see a particular reason why one orientation should be much better than the other—maybe your eyes are better at following horizontally or vertically. The standard layout matches instruments like the flute, the 90 degree rotated version matches instruments like a piano.

humans spent hundreds of years figuring out what the best option would be considering this isn't something that required the technological revolution

Bullshit. The world is absolutely packed with standards that are standards because of nothing to do with being "the best". Perfect example: the imperial measurement system. Another example: logographic writing systems. Another: qwerty keyboard layout. Etc. Just because a thing is accepted today doesn't mean it's the best.

Overall a great point, but the world is not packed with the Imperial system, almost everyone uses Metric.

> if you want to learn a thing, just start learning the thing

This. After you have learned things feel free to come up with something others might want to spend their time on learning.

I agree. Many comments point out analogies to reading code, alphabets, etc. Surely, this is just how it feels to grasp any written representation of something sufficiently complicated.

I'm almost more interested in an example of gradually evolved notation being tossed completely when a simpler modern replacement actually is better. Maybe Hangul?

I want to expand on this. Not only do I agree with what you wrote, but this app is trading access to millions of available sources in a very well known writing system to one more or less unique to this app. That's a terrible investment for anyone who wants to do more than learn 1-2 favored songs.

If you need to sight read (and as rock/pop/jazz people point out, you don't have to for many genres), then you need to sight read.

There are so many other virtues to sheet music. Look at the cover image. I can see a few notes. I can see vastly more notes in sheet music. I can easily evaluate if the piece is playable, I can scan and look for broader patterns. I can see that a bass note is being held for 8 measures (and I may choose to repeat it at some point). I can look ahead quite a bit. I can understand the repeat structures - don't gasp, but you don't have to take repeats, or you can repeat more times than written, especially with 20th+ century music, where you are often expected to do things like choose your own ordering of measures or blocks of measures. There are fingerings. I can see if the composer is writing out finger pedaling explicitly (Couperin normally does, Bach normally doesn't). I can see the pedal markings, general contours of dynamics. I can see the trills, etc., which are often just suggestions rather than hard requirements. I can see the meter, meter changes, keys, key changes, accidentals. I can see a big scary chord coming up and spend a bit more time looking at it while I play a few measures behind. I can see that Bach is repeating a phrase a 5th down, or inverting it, or reversing it. I can see the difference between passages meant to be played in time, and fioritura type writing.

I haven't used these piano roll systems so there are undoubtedly some things that are nice about it for an experienced player that I don't know about, so that paragraph is one sided. But that one side is very important - I'd loathe to go without them, and can't imagine I'd ever trade them for whatever advantage the piano roll might bring. After all, a player can take a sheet of paper Chopin wrote, produce that music at a more or less performance level. So it gives you about everything you need. I could imagine a current composer might find something more expressive about the piano roll (maybe expressing note durations not evenly subdivided by 2 or 3).

I suspect there is something neurological happening that stops some people from sight reading well, just like some people struggle with text. I've read accounts of people trying for years, with seemingly good practice techniques, still struggling.

So things like this, synthasia, etc., seem to have a niche. But in general, I suggest, think about someone proposing an app that instead of displaying printed text output it sonically. Great boon for certain situations or people! Undoubtedly someone is using one to read this very post. But a terrible replacement for reading in general.

If a six year old was relying on screen readers because reading is too hard to learn, after testing for dyslexia and vision problems, you'd urge them to make the effort; the advantages of reading text vastly outweighs the 1st grade difficulties of learning to read (yes, that time span will differ by language and writing system, not the point). Literacy is empowering, and arguing that the auto mechanic down the street can't read yet makes a good living is probably not a convincing argument to not teach a child to read.

I learned to sight read at age 4-5 with a plastic brain (I recall my mother having to teach me the letters a-g, and how to write them, for example), so I may underestimate the difficulties of learning later in life. But if you are in a situation where some kind of notation is helpful (again, not all are), learn standard notation!

edit: I thought of a counter-example. Say you play in a band. You can record your output to midi, and then share it with others. You can quantize midi and turn it into sheet music, but chances are you playing is not rhythmically exact. Sight reading that sort of thing is painful (notes carry 1/16th note into the next measure, that sort of thing), and I imagine a piano roll would often be easier.

So it's a bit like the qwerty keyboard? Sure, there are better layouts, but it's good enough, and the benefits from switching aren't worth it in exchange for universality?

After reading this thread, I'm amazed that no one has mentioned the work being done on alternative keyboards (and on alternative music notation).

The main point is that the design of the piano has held beginners back for centuries, and likewise has hindered the development of music notation.

Unfortunately the design of the piano keyboard requires that fingering change when you change key. The guitar doesn't do this, neither does the button accordion.

Whatever, a number of keyboards have been developed where the fingering does not change as you change key.

Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/

and https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/isomorphic-instru...

Particularly the https://musicnotation.org/wiki/instruments/wicki-hayden-note...

But please start searching and reading on the following topics:

Isomorphic Instruments, the Xenharmonic Keyboard, the Janko Keyboard, Linnstrument, Lumatone, Dodeka, Chromatone, Balanced keyboard.

And for just a glimpse of an alternative music presentation:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQ7LkWCzKxI

>> Start here https://www.le-nouveau-clavier.fr/english/

That is an absolutely horrible idea. It might seem intuitive at first ("Just alternate keys!") but its impracticality becomes immediately apparent and is directly acknowledged in the site you linked:

>> There’s just one drawback: the monotony of such an arrangement. How can we find our way on such a keyboard? Recently, the French musicologist Laurent Fichet remarked: “This system would certainly be much more rational than the keyboard of today, but one may wonder how players would locate the different notes with such a systematic and uniform layout.”

The French version of the article then goes on to suggest many variations of ways to avoid being lost on a keyboard without any obvious pattern (the English version only lists one, briefly). Some include coloured keys.

It is beyond obvious that the simple, intuitive solution proposed at the start produces a cavalcade of complications none of which has a simple solution.

Not to mention: despite what the linked site suggests, learning how to position your fingers on the keyboard is the least of your problems when you learn the piano, just as learning to touch-type is the least of your problems when you learn how to code.

I vote no.

> but one may wonder how players would locate the different notes with such a systematic and uniform layout.

Gitar and violin players also manage.

The symmetric keyboard is a fun concept, but its existence as niche is similar to why QWERTY is still dominant. Inertia. Most keyboards have it, and computer keyboards are much easier to change than pianos. Once you have reached a certain fluency, the jump needed from this local optimum to a new one is prohibitively high/far. For musical instruments, this would mean you would be unable to play anywhere but at home.

That's a huge drawback and it's really underappreciated by everybody advocating for the "better" concept.

Besides, there is the unrelated drawback that especially for a beginner, it's really easy to learn simple tunes with just the white keys on a piano. Throw in a black one now and then and you can get quite far and have fun as a kid. This would be much more intimidating with a symmetrical layout.

The symmetric keyboard seems “as obvious” as using tau instead of pi as a universal constant, but then again I don’t play piano

The last link is very interesting, but it doesn't look like a sheet music alternative, since it only gives you the chord progressions and not the constituent notes.

Also, good luck printing it on paper without the animations :)

I want to try to articulate an idea I see represented elsewhere without dismissing the value of what’s being offered here.

There are many comments to the effect that this is a crutch that will inhibit future learning. I agree with that assessment.

I also agree that such a tradeoff is probably fine for many people, depending on their goals.

I studied music composition in college and then worked in adult world language curriculum. Perhaps a useful analogy is the use of Romanization to teach world languages to native English speakers (romaji, pinyin, etc.)

For languages like Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.) where there is (virtually) no phonetic information in the writing system, it’s just too dang hard for a lot of people to make the leap to pronouncing characters as they are reas by natives. Pinyin or its equivalents are an “inauthentic” but valuable tool, but eventually you have to discard it to progress.

With straightforward phonetic languages like Korean, it’s actually counterproductive to try to bridge people to familiar symbols, because there’s very few resources for the learner until they start mapping sounds to Hangul.

That’d be my argument—-if you find you can’t easily make the leap to reading music and just want to get playing, sure, use this. But know that there’s a whole world of communication out there that you’ll be missing until you abandon this simplified representation and cross the full chasm.

This whole argument in favor of sheet music reminds me quite a lot of the defense of Chinese/Japanese characters. Yes, there is a long glorious tradition of using them, but assuming that they are the optimal solution and that any exploration of better methods is wrongheaded seems unsupported. Korean used to be written in Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese, Korean developed its own superior phonetic replacement for the characters (Hangul) and Vietnamese is now written in the Roman alphabet (originally for the convenience of French colonizers but independent Vietnam shows no desire to go back to characters).

I agree in the sense that in both cases the argument that holds water is less about what’s “better” and more about what’s practical. The status quo is how millions of people do it, so if you want to communicate with them you’ll probably be more successful learning their conventions vs. convincing others to use your own.

Getting philosophical, I believe there could be a more efficient/learnable notation system, but I’m bearish on one inventor or committee inventing it in a lonely tower, because of how e.g. the French and Spanish academies try so hard to prescribe clarity for their countries’ official languages and then people just go and do the organic language evolution thing to meet their local communication needs anyway.

But there are rare counterexamples like Shong Lue Yang, a spiritual leader who created an effective writing system for Hmong.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shong_Lue_Yang

I've been playing piano for a few years (no teacher, on and off) and have always been curious about the topic of sheet music. When you're first learning it's very painful. The notation isn't that bad, sharps, flats, time signatures etc - that part is ok. What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

However over time it becomes easier and easier - and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time (also accounting for the fact that there is an enormous corpus of existing sheet music).

The question regarding this app (which looks awesome) is, is this format for reading music better than sheet music at the expert level (for professional musicians). And if not, how can we get that 10x improvement to make the switch from sheet music to something better.

It is not.

I am, once again, asking people to understand that piano roll notation is no substitute for traditional notation when it comes to performance, among many other things.

It's even more frustrating on guitar where the literal same note in the same octave appears all over the fretboard. You have to figure out all the notes nearby to figure out what position you should be in. Even with years of experience I find tabs faster

The flip side of this is that chord shapes (in terms of hand shape, not intervals) are constant on the guitar (assuming no open strings). Learning piano after guitar, I was intimidated by the fact that – for example – an Am and Bm had different shapes, whereas on the guitar it's just the same shape transposed up the neck.

Anyway, I've noticed some music youtubers can read and write midi notation just as fluidly as sheet music. Which can result in some fun shenanigans[^1]

[^1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy_0mMcj0Q8

There's a lot of same shapes on the piano as well.

And the differing shapes are a bit like how A major and C major have different shapes on the guitar isn't it, for practical reasons you don't use the same shape for those two.

With the clarification that the same shape of the C major chord on the piano, when you move it up through the scale, the same shape produces all the diatonic three note chords of the scale, i.e C, Dm, Em, F, G, A, Bdim, C etc.

It might be, but it also might not. If you're just cowboy chording, sure, but if you're playing chord melody you'll find the chord you choose is highly contextual based on what you're playing and where you're going. An Am chord is a continuum of notes going up or down the neck A-C-E (G?) over and over-- wherever your hand sits, there's an Am available to you. It just might sound better (or more interesting!) or play easier to grab one set of A-C-E versus another.

I think the parent meant that those voicing are still the same when transposed all over the fretboard. E.g. the first inversion of a V7 has the same shape for all the notes horizontally. To go from A7 to B7, you just move two frets. And if you move vertically, the shape is slightly changed, but still recognizable enough.

A guitar has to be the easiest instrument for transposition (or maybe it's just the one I'm most comfortable with!).

Until you reach the B string. A shape that works on strings 4/5/6 does not work on 1/2/3. This is because G->B is 4 half steps, the rest of the strings are 5 half steps apart. So you need 2 forms for closed chords.

Then you move that note a half-step. The rest is the same. And actually, if you use drop-2 voicing, there are 3 forms because of that half-step, but still the overall shape is pretty much the same. You really need to remember one shape, and then adjust it accordingly.

There's no standard Midi "notation" that's human-readable/writeable AFAIK - even written out in, e.g. hex, I would be flabbergasted if anyone could perform from a displayed Midi file. The YT video appears to show a piano-roll type display (common for DAWs etc.), nothing to do with midi (which doesn't even have the concept of notes or note lengths at all).

Tabs are bad because they lack a sense of timing that sheet music has. I’d recommend going with a powertab or guitar pro file as that will show you the standard notation as well as the tablature. Many printed guitar sheet music books are also formatted like this. That being said knowing what sort of positon to play a note depends on what you are going for. You are right that you can play a single note all over the neck, but for a lot of those positions it will be awkward to get to the next few. Knowing your chord shapes and scales helps make this intuitive and automatic.

> and then you wonder is sheet music somehow optimal or is it 'good enough' and has withstood the test of time

I suspect traditional sheet music is like the the qwerty keyboard.

At this point it’s momentum is so large that it’s impossible to stop.

Sure, if traditional sheet music is the qwerty keyboard, then this new version is a 2x expanded keyboard, with separate keys for all the capital letters.

I think there’s no denying that the particulars of the current system of musical notation is more or less an accident of history. But it’s also a local minimum—if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes.

> if you want to improve on it, you’re probably going to have to come up with radical changes

Yeah, that’s sort of related to my point. Like, Colemak and Dvorak are theoretically (and practically, with enough practice) better than qwerty, but they don’t need to just be better, they need to be so much better that people will throw all the investment in qwerty away.

Sheet music feels the same.

...and a traditional piano is like a keyboard with no markings on the keycaps.

I think back when music notation was being actively iterated on, you had to convey all the information possible, because it’s not like you could share a recording. Things like guitar tabs - which typically erase timing information - only work because who ever reading them has already heard the song and know what it’s meant to sound like

Aren't guitar tabs typically combined with abbreviated notation to show the rhythm? No lettering of notes, but just an "X" associated with half-notes, quarter notes, etc?

Sometimes. Guitar Pro had a text format that could output them - but it's not frequently used. Bar lines are encoded pretty reliably, which is at least some timing information

Not really that I’ve seen, they are basically written in plain text and you are at the mercy of the tab writer. You really got to have a recording available to go along with the tab since theres no rhythm information at all usually.

There's always been a tendency towards shorthand-- medieval manuscripts elided certain parts of the harmony/accompaniment because it's just known to be there by the musicians of the day. Same for jazz lead sheets-- they give you the melody and a general sense of the harmony, with the understanding that specific voicings and reharmonizations will be left to the discretion of the performer in the moment.

This reminds me of this excellent video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9IkpUYlOx8

Can we get this guy to play the Super Mario World ending theme with the notation from TFA?

The nyan cat improvisation is even better imo.

It's really not, not even for professionals, but anyone playing at a decent hobby level. Consider, for example, Beethoven's Sonata Pathétique (accessible to many amateurs), starting with Grave (very slowly) and changes to Allegro.

Either you start with an impossibly long bar that covers the screen, where you can't see how the phrase flows into the next notes, or you later get to a dozen identical ultra-short bars mashed on top of each other.

And that's just one problem.

> What _is_ difficult is corresponding a position on the staff to a physical note on a keyboard, especially when you have a treble clef and a base clef.

This is my biggest issue. I played piano for years and still struggle with this. (though I never excelled, and started young)

Any suggestions on a simple way to overcome this issue?

Even experienced pianists would have trouble sight reading music that uses an excess of ledger lines - i.e. we can't accurately judge what note is intended just by estimating its vertical distance from the staff. But notes on the staff (or 3 or fewer ledger lines off) are rarely an issue - it's really just familiarity (I struggle reading off unusual clefs too). Which is why I don't think any sort of piano-roll based notation system is ever going to become the norm for performers, because it essentially does require accurately judging which key to hit, when to hit it and how long to hold it for just by its spatial position on the score.

There has always been a very old method to learn music without sheet music. It is called playing by ear. It is incredible that we have a word for that. Because nobody is saying he is learning to talk by ear. Because talking and making music is an acoustic thing, and the natural thing is to use primarily your ear for that. The eye can be helpful, be it sheet music or a midi visualisation like this app. But an eye can not hear music.

There's more to music than an "acoustic thing" because of processes such as composition, arrangement, rehearsal, and so forth. Whether those things are necessary or useful depends mostly on what genre you're interested in playing.

Some genres, like rock and folk music, involve little or no written material. There are certainly players who have never read music from a sheet. I attend a week-long folk music camp every summer, and there's no sheet music. I perform jazz "standards" in small ensemble settings entirely by ear.

But I also belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, that plays from sheet music. It's really not practical to expect the players to figure out their parts by ear and perform them from memory. Requiring that would greatly reduce the scope of our repertoire, and the band's ability to attract players. Sheet music literally expands the artistic palette of the composer, to the delight of both the performers and the audience.

Sheet music allows students to study and work through a large amount of literature, quickly. My kids are both studying music in college, and the amount of material they're exposed to every week is mind blowing, in lessons, class, rehearsals, and even getting together to play for fun.

Having been a part time working musician for a few decades, I've also noticed that sheet music is a band management tool. My band would be incapable of performing if we couldn't call in one or two substitutes per performance, some of whom are sight-reading on the bandstand. Same deal for a classical orchestra. In a smaller band that I play in, the bandleader is composing most of the material, and we scribble edits and rehearsal notes in our parts as we collaborate on refining each piece.

Up through the 1960s or 70s, the instrumental parts for most popular music was recorded by professional musicians who were working from written material, even if they made sometimes dramatic changes to the songs. This was just the most efficient way to manage a studio date. The touring musicians could always learn the songs by ear later on. There are stories of bands, where the first few dates of each tour still sounded rough as the band was coming up to speed on material that had already been professionally recorded.

I do not doubt the usefulness of written music, as I do not doubt the usefulness of written speech. But you have to walk before you run. Often people play music by eye before they can really hear. Written music is a useful tool, hearing is the essence of music.

A difference may be that you start speaking around age 1/2 and then the written word follows about 5 years later. If you start learning to play the piano at age 8 and wait for 5 years to be introduced to any musical notation, then this will be very late and will have cost you 5 years of training and getting used to reading (and writing) said notation.

Indeed, and this has been an area where music education has gone back and forth. Historically, the popular Suzuki teaching method started with playing by ear (and being told where to put your fingers) exclusively. Today, "Suzuki" teachers generally add reading to the curriculum, not right away, but fairly early.

An amusing bit of reverse psychology, the kids who learn to read can begin to have more fun on their own than just playing the boring stuff from their lessons. This motivated both of my kids.

These days, the person who is utterly helpless without a sheet in front of them is a rare exception, except maybe on piano. But there are two things "wrong" with the piano: Not just the notation, but the focus on playing it as a solo instrument. In my view, in addition to reading and ear training, the other component that needs to be started as young as possible is playing with other people. The Suzuki method does emphasize this quite heavily. It's hard to do with pianos.

I fully agree. Compare to natural language: Monologues have their place, but speaking to others is essential to learn, and so is interacting musically with others.

I do also think that some education philosophies focus too much on notation, but being illiterate (as in: not being able to read musical notation) is restricting quite a lot what you can do and how you can learn.

The problem with this is remembering what you want to play, for pieces of any length and complexity. The comparison in that case is not talking, but reciting a long poem/article/novel.

I mean, I can sing or whistle any song I can think of -surely thousands of tunes- without thinking about what I need to do with my lips. That same mechanism that connected tune in head to lips and mouth can also connect tune in head to fingers on piano with enough effort.

I think, maybe to the OPs point, that would require you to either 1) remember the tune perfectly to recreate it, 2) or to have a recording that you can continually reference. #1 is still unreliable and sheet music was created when #2 was unavailable.

I'm personally envious of those who can play by ear but have found reading music to be easier to learn by comparison and more precise.

I learn by sheet music and ear. Ear is by far more precise because of the severe limitation of musical notation. As Mahler said: The essence of music is not in the notation.

I see your point and I think you’re right. Notation is more limited. To clarify, notation is more precise for me due to my limited ability to differentiate well enough by ear.

I’ve been learning piano for over a year gradually learning more and more pieces like that, and I’m starting to notice a limit to memory. The basic melody is easy to remember as you point out, but piano music often has multiple things going on at once, and it gets harder to keep track of all that in your head.

The best piano players in the world play by memory whole concerts evenings with incredible complex and hard to remember music like JS Bach. They play hundreds such of gigs a year reliable with a very big repertoire.

And of course, very often not only their own parts but to varying extents, those of their fellow musicians if they're not playing a solo composition.

Yes the eye can be useful as I said, but it is not the primarily thing to use to learn music, like a lot of people and maybe app programmers think. I think a lot of bad music comes from not using your ears to full extent.

Learning by ear can be more fun and is easier to some. It is indeed a more natural process; hear something -> replicate it. But, unless you're just playing alone or jamming with friends, not being able to read sheet music is a real hindrance when it comes to collaboration.

You'd think, but I'd suggest the bulk of collaborative music making throughout human history was done without notated music. But it's undoubtedly a massive timesaver if all the musicians going into a collaborative session know what they're supposed to play ahead of time. I certainly can't imagine it being possible to perform something like a Mahler symphony or Wagner opera without the vast majority of performers being competent readers of sheet music.

Is this something you have learnt? If so, any suggestions how to go about learning music this way?

I learned by playing along to the radio. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, and I still remember a lot of the "classic rock" repertoire for this reason. It can help to have a teacher give you a head start on easy songs before diving in head-first, and also, learning your way around your instrument independently from ear training.

You develop a reflexive connection between your ears and your hands, so the signals flow through your spinal cord and reptilian brain, while you're thinking consciously about the higher levels of musical structure and what's going on around you.

Practice. Trial & error. Playing along with the recording. I still do it regularly and it can often take a few goes to get all the chords just right, even with the relatively simple tonal/rhythmic language of most pop music.

I can play piano, trumpet, and trombone, but hardly ever do anymore. I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8.

If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does, it may confuse people who are eager to learn and get playing (without doing endless scales) and don't read sheet music.

I have no idea what tabs means in this context, though I am vaguely familiar, I think, with it as a guitar term (which you or a commenter came from).

Looking at the graphics on the site (I don't use Apple) gives me no clue how the notes for each hand are displayed "according to how they look on a keyboard."

What am I missing? Will someone who uses Apple, can't read sheet music, has never played any instrument and wants to learn how to play piano be able to figure it out within app tutorials?

Looking at the screenshots, it reminds me of Guitar Hero / ROCK Band on like ultra hard mode, maybe?

> I have been able to read sheet music since I was 8. If the whole concept of this confuses me, and it does

It’s been my experience that most people who are fond of sheet music learned it at a very young age.

Or perhaps I’m just stupid? I’ve tried several times to learn sheet music in my 20’s and it is brutally difficult. Guitar tabs? Easy. Chord charts? No problem. Sheet music? Go fuck yourself!

What is it with the musicians in the comments here having _zero_ awareness? Sheet music is probably great! Sure, fine. But to claim that OP’s idea or even YouTube tutorials are outright not a good idea is laughable and tone deaf.

Not everyone’s folks bought them a Steinway and piano lessons at age 5-13 (the age when humans can magically pick up on absurdly difficult concepts with relatively little effort).

Children have to put in the hours, maybe the same or slightly less than an adult does, to learn to read music. A 9 year old will need to practice reading and playing daily for at least 3 years before they can kinda sorta (sight-)read through beginner material with some facility. Most (middle-class with supportive parents) children who are learning to play an instrument benefit from having the time, space, and energy to do this as a part of their ordinary schooling routine. This is of course in contrast to many adults who have to attend to work, family, and other life things.

I started learning to play music as an adult with zero training as a child, and in my observation, adults (such as myself) don't actually have a problem learning sheet music, so long as they're comfortable practicing reading for several years daily, just like a child would. I'm several years in with daily practice, and I can work my way through sight-reading early-intermediate classical repertoire, albeit slowly.

Adults, at least those with the privilege of learning music, are usually already quite literate and perhaps even quite formally educated. Moreover, said adults also have a strong conception of music—their ears are good and attuned to their preferred styles of music. To many such adults then, it feels agonizing to start learning to read, and dedicate oneself to the pursuit at a child-level for many years. No doubt plasticity is a factor, but I genuinely think it's grossly overstated.

> I’ve tried several times to learn sheet music in my 20’s and it is brutally difficult.

What do you mean by "learn it"? Just being able to decode what notes are supposed to be played and how long they should last from sheet music, given no time limit? Or doing it in near real-time?

Is there any point to learning to do it not in real time?

Well, of course. I can only do it pretty slowly, and I can still learn songs, intros, licks etc. by finding sheet music online and spending time with it. Isn't that pretty obvious?

Isn’t that essentially the same as memorizing the notes for the whole song?

I dunno, I guess it’s useful, but if I were trying to learn to read sheet music it would be so that I could pick up and play.

I'm pretty fluent in reading sheet music. Still, for most songs the process is figuring out what notes to play in sub realtime, then slowly speeding up where both reading and fingering are limiting my speed. Then, as I "know" the whole song, looking at the sheet music helps my fingers remember which notes come next—together with muscle memory. And here sheet music notation shows its strength. At this point I don't see individual notes, but groups of notes, both in time and in harmony, and because I see them as groups at once, my sight reading can keep up with the song. But that takes practice for each song.

The latter, obviously.

Pianists call real-time reading "sight-reading", and it's not what pianists usually focus on. Even the most skilled pianist is probably not going to sight-read a Bach fugue (or be satisfied with the result).

The more common way to read music (at least in terms of the large and marvelous classical piano literature), is as part of a careful process of studying. You read to learn and understand the music, but the reading doesn't need to be real-time (it normally isn't, when learning a piece).

Real-time sight-reading is its own special skill, which you can practice for its own sake. But it's nowhere near as important as the non-real-time learning process mentioned above. I got pretty good at sight-reading when I worked as an accompanist, but I still hate it: It's not how I like to learn a piece. (And the music I find most interesting [like Bach!] can't even really be learned that way).

It feels like most of that frustration is (or should be) directed at other commentors. I tried to frame my questions in a way that someone who does not read sheet music and is also unfamiliar with tabs might frame them. I saw the developer had been replying to comments or I wouldn't have bothered. I was hoping he might elaborate for potential users of his app. I certainly didn't claim it wasn't a good idea, merely that my frame-of-reference gave me no indication of how it worked for piano.

My parents never bought us a piano. My grandmother passed her decidely-not-Steinway down to us, and also paid for lessons with a school music teacher. I joined the band in 5th grade and played a school-issue trumpet until my parents could afford a used one. After my 10th grade the band teacher lost almost all his trombone players to graduation, so he taught me over the summer before I started my junior year and gave me an old trombone with lots of dings, which I used through my freshman year in college, after which I dropped band because it was a 1 hr credit and took about 25–30 hours a week (practice with band, practice on own, perform at games), and I wasn't a music major.

The layout is a rotated & mirrored version of that commonly used on DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) so it certainly makes sense to professionals.

It's just a vertical piano roll (in fact that's the typical orientation of physical piano rolls - DAWs typically rotate them 90 deg as we're accustomed to the concept of time being the horizontal axis).

See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2YF34XlfzU

If someone described to you how to play d above middle c on a trumpet by saying “1 & 3” that would be pretty close to guitar tablature. Instead of reading a score, they show you what frets to hit.

And thats it though. No information on things like how you should hit the notes or for how long.

Depends. You could be looking at the worst tab on earth, which is just lines representing strings and numbers representing frets, which pretty much require that you be listening to the song and reading the tab for it to make any sense.or you could be looking at tablature alongside sheet music, which is much more enlightening.

Some folks even have MIDI enabled tablature with sheet music, which is awesome [0], but is not merely tab.

[0]: https://www.songsterr.com/a/wsa/metallica-one-tab-s444

Yeah power tabs and guitar pro often have this coupled. I’d guess though most people viewing tabs are looking at the plain texts on ultimate guitar though. It doesn’t help that for a lot of music there is no official tab, only what the community has been able to make for the good of the community. Sometimes also those ‘official’ tab books are not correct to the recording.

One problem I see with your design is that there's no way to deal with rubato, and presumably you can't alter the tempo on the fly as you're playing.

The problem that sheet music solves is providing a static notation that can be read non-linearly for a dynamic piece of art that must be played linearly.

There's also no way to represent dynamics, as far as I can tell? The MIDI file won't give you that information.

Similarly unless you support MIDI 2 clip files (to my knowledge, no one does yet) you're also missing the key signature information, which is kind of important (otherwise the notes have no meaning - you need to infer their function from context, which is ambiguous)

Midi actually supports a lot of this. You can change the tempo on the fly, and each note has a velocity that's effectively your dynamic

Yes - there's no key signatures. It's something I may add in the future

Don't forget - most people who use this app don't learn a lot of this stuff. They just want to play

MIDI supports neither. It supports an encoded tempo change, there is no way for you to read a MIDI file back at the pace a player wishes to play using just the MIDI file. Velocity is not the same thing as dynamics, it represents the particular force applied to a key at a moment in time but cannot represent change in dynamics over time (or even leave room for interpretation).

The thing is that if you want to play you need to learn some fundamentals first. A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.

> A keyboard isn't a just slab of buttons to push at particular times.

Have you ever played any beginner songs? That’s literally what they are.

Most good classical music teachers will instill, as early as possible, that piano isn't just hitting buttons at particular times. Even music like Three Blind Mice or Mary Had A Little Lamb will be augmented with some instruction on how to play it musically, such as balance of the hands and some phrasing. Of course, at this level, one wouldn't expect mastery of these ideas, but one would certainly be exposed to them.

on the one hand, yay. Tabs have made learning guitar stuff incredibly accessible, and dealing with the separate hands of the piano and separate clefs is a PITA. On the other hand... ugh. We've successfully churned out generations of musically illiterate musicians. We've also made it really hard to find the sheet music for a piece instead of the tabs, and the tabs are lacking in SO MUCH information.

I think the real problem is that people are going for free tabs, and the free tabs online are just kinda awful. They don't just miss information, but they also contain outright errors.

If you’re serious about learning a piece, so you can perform it, you’ll want to transcribe it yourself, buy some better tabs, or buy sheet music. Or do some combination of those things. It’s not a problems with tabs themselves, but the general low quality tabs you see in ASCII art from random websites.

(For what it’s worth, I think it’s really easy to find sheet music for popular music. Sometimes too easy… I search for some pop song and get a couple dozen different arrangements for different instruments at different levels. The catch is that you have to pay a couple bucks.)

You know, tabs weren't always awful [1]. Before and during Web 2.0, back when the web was rife with JS-free, non-commercial labors of love, educated fans and scholars of music created phenomenal sheets and tabs, full transcriptions of their favored artists, scores, and bands.

Then came adtech, and when those goons rolled in, they just couldn't believe the opportunity that these idiots were wasting by doing all this work for free and just giving it awa... er- STEALING SALES from LEGITIMATE ARTISTS.

It usually started with campaigns of rude emails that threatened and insulted the site owner. "How could you do something as horrible as stealing the food out of the mouths of the artists you claim to love by competing with their official sheet music? You're lucky I found you first you first since you're such a small-fry, because if they knew what you were up to, they'd be disgusted by you, and their lawyers would sue you so hard, your grandkids would still be in litigation. Oh and by the way, your tabs are shit, your site is shit, and you're a shit person, so why don't you do everyone a favor and shut down?"

Then, once the site owner had a very predictable panic attack and crisis of faith, typically chronicled publicly on their home page, they'd be made an offer of a few hundred dollars. "Look, the only way out of this is to sell. We're connected, partnered with artists. Unlike you, you lowlife, you thief, we make money so we can PAY the artists. It's the only way to do this fairly. If you really think about it, you'll understand and do the Right Thing."

Then, if the site owner sold, the site would be stripped, frozen, and crammed with ads until it was a desiccated husk of itself, or else forwarded to its new home. Either way, there would be no more new tabs, no photos from tours, event updates, band recommendations, or community interaction, all waning value siphoned into some traffic-whoring cramscammer's [2] pocket.

And if they didn't sell, either the interaction left enough of a negative impression they they lost their passion, or they were legally harassed until they shut down, but only after they were scraped and hoovered up into trashy meta-sites like ultimate-guitar.

This is the slum web we live in today, but with more aggressive authoritarian identity management.

[1] For reference: https://www.classtab.org/tabbing.htm#history

[2] I wonder if anyone can name the top two private forums for this prior 2005? Bonus points if you can name a person we all know today who was part of them!

Notation is always lossy. And for what its worth, for the entirety of human civilization music has been an aural tradition passed down from teacher to student, and primarily learned by ear. The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.

> The notation is just whatever is most convenient to people for taking notes at the time.

That 'at the time' now seems to have extended to around 400 years (in Western classical tradition for instance, from pre-baroque). The evolution of another type of keyboard demonstrates that convenience is not necessarily the watchword.

https://www.thoughtco.com/history-of-the-computer-keyboard-1...

Thom Yorke, among probably other great musicians, couldn’t read sheet music.

But Jonny Greenwood can.

I completely agree with your point though, sheet music is an element from Western "Music Theory", and has nothing to do with being able to make music. It definitely does help if you want to have musicians trained in that Western cultural practice to play your music, but not everyone cares about that.

Edit: my point about Mr Greenwood is that he is a huge part of the sound of Radiohead, as well as the other members.

Maybe not, but he has an amazing ear and a vaste knowledge of music theory.

It's great to have tools that make easier to learn how to play music, which btw, I feel music should have evolved naturally itself towards something with better high level abstraction (kinda like programming languages). However, my fear with this kind of approaches in music is that you might end up being a simple "typewriter". I mean, you play by pure mechanical memory instead of due to develop a logical understanding of what you are doing. This was the main reason I ditched yousician for guitar. I saw myself just doing a more complex "guitar hero" kind of thing and I don't want that, I want music theory and understanding instead of moving blindly my hands following coloured dots on the screen.

Congrats on the release, looks great!

Reminds me of Synthesia[1], with a better UX but less features!

How do you handle the displaying all notes on a portrait phone per your homepage screenshot? Especially on songs with a large gap between both hands, seems like it would be pretty cramped so a tablet might be the better option.

[1] https://www.synthesiagame.com/

Yes - it is heavily based on Synthesia. It has a few different priorities - it won't play weird formats like MusicXML, but it has stuff like looping, a speed trainer (looping with an automatic tempo increment), transposition etc.

Portrait on your phone is about the worse way to use the app, but it does technically work. You'll have to scroll side to side to see all the notes. Landscape is better - you fit all the notes in - and if you tap the screen once, it'll hide the header for a bit of extra space. But yes, an iPad or Mac is by far the best experience

Thanks for your response!

I was confused on the portrait as the phone is shown as-is on the homepage, I would advice making it landscape instead as it seems to be a more usable format

Yes - that would make a lot of sense! I copied the layout from the TechniCalc page, and never gave it a second thought

This is really cool! Guitar was my first instrument, then I went on to learn bass, drums, and a bunch of others, but I never bothered to learn how to read music - or, really, sight read. The few songs I know on piano, I learned from an electronic piano that had a display with an image of the keyboard and the keys would change color to tell you which one to play. When I play Maple Leaf Rag for other musicians they're often surprised to find out I can't read music.

So I can definitely see a market for this and will probably try learning another song on piano with it. That said, I do wish I had just learned to read music up front, as I learned my first instrument. I think it would have opened up doors for me, particularly for playing with other musicians (like an orchestra or a jazz band). But who knows how much longer that will be the case - tomorrow's great musicians may learn on an app like this!

I learned a soprano instrument and was able to sight read the treble clef since forever. But try as I could I never could teach myself to be fluent with the bass clef. It just messes with my brain somehow.

Oh, awesome! I'm working on something similar, to put out as a PWA. Seems I had similar aspirations/complaints that you did, but also didn't have an apple device (that I wanted to use for the app).

Yours is a very nice presentation! I like the annotations feature, and the comprehensiveness of the features, even for the stated goal of such simple functionality. A lot of people might leave out percussion loops, or be a bit more stingy with the free tracks.

This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask anyway: does it recognize Midi controller input? In my practice, I've found value in having the notes I play represented digitally, so that I can keep my eyes on the screen (and, let's face it, Rock Band/Guitar Hero is fun). But I didn't see that specifically advertised anywhere, so I was curious!

Funny - this actually started as a web app! https://github.com/jacobp100/piano

It does not recognize midi input at the moment

This is kind of a tangent, but I’ve played instruments all my life and I never really understood how to use sheet music beyond the initial learning of a piece. I always see musicians actively referencing it while playing, but I’ve never been able to read it nearly quickly enough to do so. That also holds for guitar tabs, which I can read more quickly than sheet music (for guitar or piano). For anything remotely complicated, I need to memorize the piece so I can focus on what I need to do with my hands. A chord sheet I can follow while improvising even if I haven’t seen the progression before, but my playing definitely isn’t as good because the mental load of reading, listening, and playing is too much. It’s like having one too many processes open on your computer and the OS / CPU can’t quite keep up

The ability to read unfamiliar music while playing is called sight reading, and generally speaking it's more of an exercise than a capability relevant to actual performance.

During performance, sheet music is like a cheat sheet during exam, a reminder of something you already know. Most of the music is in your head and hand. The sheet music is just there to prevent a memory slip. Some orchestral music can be awfully repetitive, and having the page there helps you keep track of where you are. You are not supposed to devote lots of attention to the page itself, (unless you didn't practice before the performance and decides to sightread on stage, which, you know, happens).

I play a lot of piano and harpsichord at a very advanced level, and almost always use the sheet music. For me, it's a memory aid and a sort of "map" to the piece. You can also write stuff on your score to have reminders. This takes cognitive load off when you are performing. The goal of music is to play the music, so why waste brain capacity on getting to perfect memory of a piece when you can instead spend that on making the piece more expressive?

I will also say that learning to play without looking at your hands is a great skill to have, and also takes off some of the cognitive load.

Having good memory is important. It seems to me you have a really good muscle memory and that has helped you play without looking at the score.

I've played the piano since a very young age and the thing is, learning to play without looking at the keys (eg whilst reading) is actually a good skill to have. The argument goes that this way you can look at one hand without worrying about missing with the other while in a concert. I tend to agree.

Also I scribble a lot in my sheet music because part of studying a piece is discovering things written in it (everything has a purpose, every staccato, forte, piano, etc.)

I’m basically the opposite — really struggle to memorize music, and will almost always read while playing.

Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?

The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!

Looks cool design-wise, but who is this for?

Although the upfront cost of learning sheet music is a few weeks of study, it quickly becomes worth it due to gains in speed of learning and sightreading skills.

Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly, but it'll ultimately stunt their development.

For people saying “but there are amazing musicians who don’t read music,” yes, of course there are. Literacy isn’t required for poets, either. There are rich oral traditions that weren’t written down for hundreds or thousands of years. But you cannot convince me that reading and writing are unimportant for poets and audiobook readers. You can do both jobs without reading or writing, but they’re a heck of a lot easier if you do.

I think it also depends what instrument you play. It’s understandable that there are guitarists in this thread saying “eh, pianists don’t need sheet music, I do fine without it” but they are missing the fact that sheet music is way more useful for piano than it is for guitar. If someone truly does not want to learn to read music, they might consider taking up an instrument like guitar where you can get along without it.

If you already know and like sheet music, I don’t think this app will be for you

I know at least one other person who didn’t bother learning sheet music. Maybe it’s because I came from guitar, where tabs aren’t particularly sight readable, so I just learn and remember the entire piece

Yes, this app could serve as an introduction to piano, but ultimately relying on it will be detrimental to long-term growth.

I think the app would b more useful if it helped teach sheet music (which can be frustrating for beginners) through this friendly UI.

I learned piano when I was young, but I never practiced and basically repeated the same lesson over and over. We started taking our 5 year old for piano lessons and I was inspired and wanted to start practicing as well, but I found I couldn't read any sheet music.

I found a course on Udemy: Read Music FAST and Read Music FAST! Part 2. I highly recommend those. It basically took a week or two to get through them and I was able to jump into the author's free Intermediate lesson.

In the jazz world it is fairly common for pianists to be unable to read music. For example, Colin Vallon, one of the most successful jazz pianists of the new millennium, has admitted in a number of interviews that he never learned.

I wouldn't call it "fairly common."

There are certainly outliers who play by ear or rely on improvisation, but musicians in all genres rely on sheet music to develop their craft.

Many, many "outliers".

Yeah that's true but I know for a fact that many of my friends would like to simply learn a few simple songs without really getting into the details of learning music! So this might be helpful for all those people like them!

This is wrong. Played piano all my life, and never learned to read sheet music fast enough for it to be any use. This has not stunted my development. I play by ear and chords.

I play by ear and chords too, but being able to jot something down, or read something someone else has written down, is as useful to me in music as it is in English. Literacy is just plain practical.

Practical and useful, yes! Stunting development is something different. I do know how to read sheet music, but I’ve never practiced it to be fast enough to sight read. I’ve never felt that this has stunted my development - if it had, I probably would have picked up speed naturally.

Sightreading is difficult enough that most pianists aren’t any good at it. Those who are get props and envy from other musicians.

I'm sure you can play piano, but I'm also willing to bet it has put a ceiling on the types of pieces you can learn.

Have you tried learning a Chopin Ballade or Bach WTC fugue without sheet music?

GP might not want to play that kind of music. You can easily get away with no reading ability if you play in bands, pop groups, etc. (not that it's not useful to read)

It's objectively a ceiling if you can't work towards playing the most technically challenging music.

It doesn't have to be Bach. You will struggle to learn ANY advanced piano without sheet music.

Sure it's for "beginners," but I'm saying it will inherently stunt their growth compared to putting in the work to learn sheet music.

That's not remotely true. if your objective is to play keys in a rock band, you really mostly just need chords and a little fill here and there.

I completely agree with your fundamental point, but it's a mistake to say someone needs to be able to be technically excellent in order not to feel like they've hit a ceiling in what they can do.

It’s not an objective ceiling when we disagree on which way is up! You have a super-weird and specific idea of what it means to play piano. I really can’t think of a less inspiring goal than playing “advanced” or “technically challenging” music. If you like to do that, go nuts, but don’t assume that anything else is meaningless.

How is that "super-weird" or "specific"? If anything, your idea of advanced pieces not being "up" is obscure.

> I really can’t think of a less inspiring goal than playing “advanced” or “technically challenging” music

Really? You can't understand how aiming to conquer a highly technical and musical piece is inspiring? It's the same as tackling any other difficult goal.

Music at a less technical level isn't meaningless, but it's an inherent limitation on your musicality if your repertoire is limited by technique.

Technique facilitates greater musicality. Sheet music facilitates greater technique.

Regardless, do as you please, but it's like saying, "I'll never learn code, because I can build no-code products!"

> You can't understand how aiming to conquer a highly technical and musical piece is inspiring?

You are putting words in my mouth - I am saying it’s not inspiring to me. I can understand that someone else might find it inspiring, sure! Like speedrunning a video game, some might find it an enjoyable challenge - but I think they can see that there are other reasons to play games. They wouldn’t say “who’s it for?” about a strategy guide because it’s not about speed.

For what it’s worth, I disagree with almost all of your descriptions of what musicality consists of. It’s not about repertoire or technique. If you see what types of music most people enjoy listening to and playing, you can see that you have a niche point of view. Technically challenging music is not more enjoyable to play or hear. Sheet music is irrelevant to most types of music, both historically and today - music is fundamentally heard and felt, not written and read, nor conquered.

I’ll leave this conversation now as it doesn’t appear to go anywhere meaningful.

Yes, and, it's a niche view even if you restrict things to America/western music. From a global perspective it's even more niche, limiting, and boxed in.

You’re probably not very good at playing the piano. I’m not sure what you mean by far enough, but not being able to sight read a piece is not the same as being unable to read sheet music at all.

I've noticed that across my many hobbies, there are always people who insist that THEIR way of learning how to do a thing is the ONLY way to learn how to do a thing. This seems more prevalent in the music world, though. Especially if they had strict teacher.

Wes Montgomery couldn't read music, but he was a pretty good guitarist [1]

[1] This is an understatement, by the way.

> You’re probably not very good at playing the piano.

This is rude. What the heck do you base this on?

Yeah it's a moronic comment. I'm not even going to bother to compile a list of musicians that smoke everyone else without reading sheet music, but you can't throw a rock without hitting one.

In the professional music scene, you can go for an entire career without running into one. It is a relatively small set of outliers, and even then, there is a narrow set of genres (most of them Western and modern) where a professional player can get away with not reading or writing music.

Even in the poster child of learning by ear, Jazz, something like 99% of session and pro players learn to read music.

> Maybe this can introduce people to piano and get them playing quickly

That’s good enough for the people that would otherwise never play at all.

Learning piano without reading scores (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin...) is like learning C without bitwise operators and pointers...

Two fatal issues I discovered: - the apple store was so biased, even when I typed in "piano tabs", it couldn't find your app in the top 10 results. I had to type in the name of the entire app: "Piano Tabs: Learn & Practice"

Then I attempted to install it and got this: - "This application requires iOS 15.0 or later". This is a deal breaker on so many apps. I don't trust apple enough to change my iOS version. Note: this happened on a pretty recent iphone 7+

You don't trust what?

I'm struggling to imagine why anyone would trust e.g. iOS 10 more then iOS 15.

(And if it's about not trusting new updates, iOS 15 has been out for 2 years now.)

If you don’t trust Apple to maintain your phone why even bother buying a phone from them in the first place?

i didn't buy it. I got it as a hand me down.

I'm not sure what OS you're on, but iOS 13 was about the buggiest OS they ever released. If you're on that, I'd highly recommend upgrading. iOS 14 was pretty solid - but I'd still recommend upgrading

iPhone 7 was released 7 years ago. It's definitely not recent, and I wouldn't expect any app developer to support such an old device.

Ironically, OP can still upgrade their iPhone 7 to iOS 15. Apple claims that 94% of iPhones are on iOS 15 or later.

[1] https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/

Yes - it's so difficult to get up the pecking order in the App Store

Unfortunately I won't be able to support older versions - iOS 15 already causes a lot of problems. That said, all devices that ran iOS 13 also run iOS 15

> It changed about a month ago from an up front price to in app purchases and/or a subscription - which has absolutely tanked revenue so far - but maybe it will pick up

This doesn’t surprise me. I abhor all subscriptions. I’ll pay for things once, upfront, but I’d rather do without than have continuous payments.

These days I avoid upfront payments unless you come out ahead within a year. I don't want to buy something that takes 5 years to be cheaper than the yearly payments. I have no idea if I'm going to want this thing for x years, most of the time I don't end up getting good value from upfront payments. With subscriptions I can just cancel and move to the best option at the time.

The old offering is still available as an in app purchase (it only unlocks importing, but doesn't expire) - but I think the conversion rates for IAPs are far, far lower

I agree that sheet music could be improved. The worst part to me is simply that notes are identical symbols just shifted up or down ever so slightly. But based on the screenshots your app does the same thing, just side to side. I think it would be more helpful if each note had a color to it.

Yes - that is a problem with the format. There's a few visual cues I add for this, like the black notes extending all the way up into the score, markers on every octave. You can also scroll the score like a normal scrollview, and it'll highlight on the visual keyboard what's currently played, and also play the notes if you scroll slow enough

Synthesia has done this exact solution for well over a decade now. But there’s also the option to read generated sheet music and adjust the playback and gradung in many ways.

https://synthesiagame.com/

Yes - the core app is similar. Synthesia for sure has better import support and connects to physical keyboards. This app focuses a lot more on UI/UX, and still has some unique playback features, like setting up a loop that starts slow and speeds up after each iteration

Maybe it's just me, and I'm not particularly good at reading sheet music but -- for piano -- I find all the alternative even worse.

At least this sort of display eliminates the "akshually C𝄫 and A♯ are different"-type cranks.

I applaud tools like this, which give alternative options for people to access the music world. Traditional sheet music is a very competent tool, but it's also a very specific form of translation (of sound, to print). Certainly not the only one, and not even necessarily the best possible one.

I am getting a little off-track here, and I'm probably doing my suggestion few favours by burying it here where few will ever see it, but on a similar track, I envisage music tuition being a huge potential application for augmented reality. The possibilities there are mindblowing.

I recently started looking into cheap electric keyboards that I could use to teach myself piano, and this looks so awesome for learning. I would pay for this app, but unfortunately I don't have any Apple devices.

I just did the same. I wanted to get something cheap-ish, but still feeling like a piano. Roland seems to the default choice, maybe with Yamaha being a close second.

I wound up buying a Roland FP-30X, but I think the FP-10 feels basically the same. When we visit friends who went for cheaper options, their keyboards feel like toys.

I just did the same, and I think those Rolands are basically the cheapest options that will actually serve you well over the medium to long term.

Sorry - yes it is Apple only. Their OSes have a tonne of audio stuff out the box which can be pricey to license from other places

Understood and makes sense - best of luck with this, it really looks fantastic.

Thank you!

Hah that's good to know, the comparison to learning to drive makes a lot of sense. Thanks for the tip

Does it support midi-in? I've got a small midi keyboard, being able to hook that up to this would be ideal.

And if that's in there, what about a mode - like typing instructors - where the page only advances if you hit the right keys? I think that would be an ideal way to learn the notes, followed by a mode like Guitar Hero where you have to hit the right notes at the right time.

Finally, given that the app is aimed at teaching, I'd add a progression path, have the user start with simple music and gradually progress. Finding rights-free midi files and assessing difficulty might be difficult though.

Synthesia works with midi(via USB) - at least the PC and Android versions do.

I use Synthesia on the iPad and it works great.

No MIDI in for the moment. It’d be nice to have, for sure!

For learning - I agree - I wanted to have some kind of ‘difficulty’ heuristic for pieces, and recommend easy ones. I just haven’t been able to come up with anything yet.

You can look up the royal grading the UK uses for classical pieces and use that.

A single difficulty score is a bit difficult (hah) as a piece will have many technical dimensions to it, and ideally you're comfortable with most of it but a few dimensions push you out of your comfort zone.

I think these standard grade scores attempt to give some kind of loose ordering to when you might want to tackle the piece.

I'm actually from the UK. Is this the grade system people normally refer to - like they say they're grade 8?

I meant more an algorithm to determine the difficulty. Things like tempo and how much your fingers would need to move. But equally, I could probably just cherry pick some easier pieces far quicker

I've been playing the piano for 55+ years, and still practice daily.

What makes piano difficult isn't reading music notation. You can learn to read music notation in a week. What makes it difficult is the physical challanges.

Skipping music notation may save you a few weeks at the very beginning, but you'll quickly hit a wall and need to learn the physical skills. And if you can't read music, you won't be able to make music with other people.

This is a very, very bad idea.

People have different goals and ideas of how they want to play. I don't think that's something that should be gatekept.

I’m trying to help this guy not hit a wall after six months.

Having been trained to read sheet music, I definitely wouldn't be your customer. The notation system is so smart, the closer you look at it, that I cannot imagine that it can be replaced with something just as good, especially for the more complex scores.

Definitely some alternative solutions may be good for beginners, but I wonder how they would perform with the Kreisleriana.

Was interested in the concept because weirdly i'm an ok average+ piano player but just suck at sheet reading. Just downloaded it on my M2 mac. It doesn't work? Clicking on a track just show a picture of the track. Clicking on a composer just show a picture of the composer. Clicking on View All just show a page with View All written in the middle.

I've figured out what causes it - the navigation system on older versions of iOS and macOS was broken. I'm releasing an update to fix it now and it will be with you as soon as Apple has reviewed it

That does not sound right. Don't suppose you could record a video, then tap the 'help' button and email me it?

What's the pricing model here? the AppStore lists a yearly subscription as $10, but then an additional IAP to import songs of $5? It's confusing, and I never install apps when the pricing is unclear. Also, any plans for lifetime, as a lot of people simply don't want yet another subscription.

The subscription unlocks everything while it’s active

The ‘lifetime’ option is $5 but only unlocks importing your own files (not the 800 pieces in the catalog)

Its a good point - I should clarify this pricing

I think it has potential! However to me the piano is too small and hard to see.

Check the Flowkey app for reference, their piano representation is more sophisticated, but note that it takes half the screen (landscape mode) and there is no wasted space on the ending left and write.

Either way, cool project!

If you're on an iPhone, landscape is definitely the better way to use it. I should advertise that more. Looking up flowkey, they have a video in landscape, and their screenshots are in portrait - I might look at doing something like that

This is really awesome, congrats on shipping. If you don't mind me asking, what do sales look like on average for an app like this? I'm hoping to someday make a "music education app", but I'm skeptical if people would pay for it. Thank you!

I don’t mind being candid about sales - I always found it really interesting reading about others

So for 2022, this app was a $5 up front price, and made $200. I have a similar one for MP3 playback - also $5 up front - that made $900. Then you used to be able to buy both together for $8, which made $130

A month ago I moved to in app purchases and subscriptions - and since then I’ve only managed to get one subscription and zero IAPs. The downloads have also been terrible - with about 5 a day

The level of marketing before has been having a good store listing, and some effort into keywords, but no active marketing (self promotion or ads etc.)

Focus now is on marketing. The nice thing about it being free to download is it’s easier to get interest from posts like these. That was much harder to do before

Thanks for sharing! One thing I've thought about for marketing an app like this was to just sit down and do a Twitch stream or something and screen-share while using the app. I feel like if it looks cool enough you'll get a few folks that want to check it out.. and hopefully it snowballs. You could record it and slice up clips for YouTube with the good parts..

Good luck with marketing!

And another note.. Free-to-play apps with IAP could benefit from learning about how it works in the gaming industry. I highly recommend the Gamecraft podcast from the incredible VC Mitch Lasky

https://www.gamecraftpod.com/

Thanks! I'll give that a listen. I think I have a lot of learning to do here

That honestly looks amazing. Do you plan to release on Android by any chance?

Unfortunately not! This is a SwiftUI app using a lot of Apple audio libraries - so it would be a complete rewrite to get it running on Android

The pricing model is confusing at first and not very clear until you start trying to use the app (tried the macOS version for now). The App Store description does not mention the subscription and what features it unlocks, and in the app it doesn't trigger until you try to play a song. If you dismiss the window, you actually have to go back to playing a song (and wait) to see it again as there isn't a settings pane or other trigger just to see the subscription page. A few suggestions on that front:

  - Put the pricing either on a splash window after opening for the first time OR in a message tile on the library screen
  - Include certain (full) songs in the free version and give them a badge of some sort ("free", "included", etc.)
  - Put a badge in the toolbar indicating whether you are in a free or paid mode
  - Make it clear if a subscription is valid for iOS *and* macOS or if they are separate (2x the cost) (edit: downloaded on iOS and it's not limiting anything so it must be a universal subscription. Put that early in the description for sure.)

I put a piano in my apartment in 2020, the year the app appears to have been first released. Several people in my household were looking for something exactly like this to practice and never came across it, though we did get suckered into a few $10/month or $75/year subscriptions for other things that ended up barely getting used. If the pricing stays the same but is much clearer to people I believe you could get decent conversion from a little bit of targeted advertising.

Besides that, the import dialog could be less spartan. It is not indicated in the app itself that it takes MIDI files only. Normal users may not know what a MIDI file is at first but you might be surprised at how many would learn and go seek those if given a tiny bit of guidance. Tons of non-technical people have learned to get their hands on playable guitar tabs the same way.

As for the playing interface, I like it quite a bit. Plenty of people will comment about how anything getting in the way of becoming an expert in sight reading is somehow evil (hyperbole) but this is silly. I could easily recommend this app to friends who played Guitar Hero as kids and now want to play along to stuff on the piano or keyboard– hey, we all got older and maybe acquired more "mature" instruments with black and white keys. I used to read standard sheet music for chamber/orchestra but it's been years and frankly it's the least important skill for the type of music that I play. However I do have a piano and once in a while want to play something without getting into a lesson on sheet music especially since what I used to read had far less range than a piano.

App Store note: searching for "piano tabs" the app doesn't show up even after a lot of scrolling. "piano tabs learning & practice" finds it as the top result. I am a fan of the plain name; it's short and self-explanatory to the point that I imagine people do randomly search those terms without knowing about your app. That should be a good thing but in practice it seems the discoverability isn't there which is worth looking into.

Some suggestions and features based on personal preference, so I'm putting in a separate comment.

  - Put an "Import MIDI file" button in the Imported Files section
  - Star or bookmark icon, pick one for favorites. Currently one is used on the library screen and a different one in the song view.
  - Sidebar for the different sections with hide/show toggle, for example I don't like to scroll through stacked Sections and don't really care to see Recents at all
  - Options for thumbnail, tab display could be one but some variations would be interesting:
    - Color based on tempo
    - Dot-based graphic (primarily aesthetic, but recognizable at a glance)
    - Size S/M/L option which assigns per section
  - Tags for tracks, ideally color-codable. Maybe I want to tag something "mastered", or "difficult", "somber", etc.
    - After entering the search box, escape key or outside click should dismiss and return to the home layout. Currently the sections get reorganized, Favorites and Recents disappear and Pieces shows up at the bottom, but I can't get back without closing the app.
  - "Choose Random" button to open a piece
  - Composer interface, create new pieces from scratch or modify from the library using something similar to the playing interface
    (n.b. a decent interface for this if no keyboard/midi-in would be present a 1+-octave keyboard with some modifiers, so multiple key taps can create individual notes, optional rest interval, or extend a continuous note. Row-level actions so you can duplicate creating repeats, shift up/down, etc. Slight differences between macOS/iOS.)
  - Allow user editable text, emoji, or color highlight in the play scroll. Noting a section of the piece is one obvious use but it could be handy for several uses.
  - (semi serious) watch integration to vibrate on tempo.
  - Music box mode, notes only play as you scroll (I see you did this actually. My daughter is gonna love this...)

Thanks again for the suggestions!

What OS were you using where you couldn't get out of the search page? On the main page, the layout is altered so there's no duplication on results - but if you exit the search interface, it'll go back

Also note you can press the chevron to the left of a section to collapse it, and it'll remember that setting

On macOS 13.5, entering the search shows no obvious way to end/return. However I just pressed Enter and that took me back, which was unexpected. So it works, just oddly mapped I think. On iOS the search+cancel is just fine.

For the sections, I noticed that but still find it odd that the home library view doesn't actually show me... the full library. You have to discover pieces by composer which I missed at first. BTW, there is a typo on both mac/iOS versions where the header is missing an r in "Lib[*r]ary".

Ah yes - mac is particularly difficult to get that interaction right

Thanks for pointing out the typo. I'm really bad for those!

Thanks for the suggestions! A few people are saying they were confused, so I'll put some more effort around that wording

The import dialog is unfortunately just the system dialog - I have some other apps using it and it's frequently something people are confused about. There's no real way around it though.

I'm still experimenting with the catalog. The app used to have a lot of links to places to get MIDI files from, but I just don't think it's something most people wanted to bother with. But that remains to be seen!

On iOS, I don't think the term MIDI is mentioned anywhere in app. Unless you recalled it from the app store description then the Import button seems quite mysterious; average users might mistake it for something to interpret and extract notes from MP3s or whatever.

I have this site bookmarked for fun: https://bitmidi.com/ If I showed this app to some friends, the first thing they'd go looking for would be some video game music which is a whole different set than classical. Considering that, it would be nice to have separate libraries or playlists for genre organization. Offer some pre-populated as IAP, e.g. Classical is default but you can get popular songs, SNES tracks, etc. for $1-2 per collection if doable with individual licenses.

It’s advertised in the screenshots - but I’ll double check the description

I’d love to expand the catalog. Classical was easy because they’re all dead and everything is in the public domain. Anything current I’d have to license and I don’t have the foggiest how I’d even do that

I've been taking piano lessons for several months now and I'm still struggling with sheet music notes. I may give this a try! It reminds me of playing guitar hero back in the day :)

Yeah I was in the same boat. I came from guitar, so had some level of dexterity. I couldn't use beginner tutorials that show you what note to play, because they were far too basic. But then with sheet music, I'd spend 90% of the time counting EGBDF - and getting it wrong a lot of the time too!

How do you only have one review?

This looks super cool and would make me basically immediately able to roughly play quite a few pieces. Need to setup my keyboard and try it out.

Short answer, I’m terrible at marketing, and I’ve had bad luck with users

I had to reset the rating a few months back because people would give me a 1 star review when a song didn’t open. I always try to be as helpful as possible here - when a song doesn’t open, it has a link to email me, and I’ve always fixed these issues. But those 1 star reviews never got updated. Hopefully now that’s a thing of the past, because it’s tested on all 800 pieces from the catalog, which all have to parse successfully to generate the previews

If you’d like to add to the reviews, it would be really helpful!

Tried to teach my girlfriend to play the piano for a while now. But reading notes was too difficult for her. I can see this be really helpful for newbies!

What we actually need is a program that effectively teaches sight reading sheet music well. That would be the music school winner.

Hmm. Looks like the classic piano roll notation.

Does Casio Chordana play do something similar?

Looks like it! I'm definitely not the first to do this

this is beautiful. id love a color changing ability. i use synthesia and you should take notes from that app. Id use your app if you could also show sheet music and let me have greater granularity on how I practice, eg. left and right hand, practicing the notes and then the timing

Does anyone have recommendations for a learn-to-play-on-it keyboard? Not too expensive, but not a toy?

Roland FP-10 is en entry level "not a toy" keyboard.

Is this just musical notation or do you hook up a MIDI device so it can point out mistakes?

For now, it’s just MIDI files rather than MIDI devices

Hey this is really cool! Thanks for sharing it!

Thank you!

This doesn't teach you how to play piano, this teaches you how to read vertically scrolling notes. It doesn't actually teach you where the notes are on the piano, when key changes are made, or when to play a note strong or soft.

This is gamifying an actual skill without teaching the actual skill. Good for a few parlor tricks but actually learning piano, requires, well, actually learning how to read the sheet music.