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Show HN: Dodeka Music – piano keyboard and easy-to-read sheet music in one app
- sova 9y agoLooks really great. Keep up the good work. I'm looking forward to all the new musical instruments that can come out thanks to the iOS audio engine :)
- j_rcht 9y agoThanks sova for the kind words! Much appreciated!:)
- hashkb 9y agoThese guitar hero style alternative notations are a major problem IMO. It's extra problematic to advertise it as "learn music" when really it's giving you a crutch to avoid learning music.
- cranjice 9y agoYeah, sorry, I took one look at this keyboard layout and thought to myself "ok this is a toy" I'd love to see an application that could capture audio from an instrument and act as a real-time theory aid/teacher. For example: * the note you are playing is this * the notes you've just played in sequence belong to these scales. here are possibilities for next notes * try these chords * the chord you've just played is comprised of these notes * the next chord in the scale could be this * popular songs with these chords or in this scale are
- ThomPete 9y agoYou need context for that. Clearly something like this isn't for getting your head around avantgarde music. I say the more tools the better. People will outgrow their instrument fairly quickly if it's too limiting and then just move on to something new.
- markvdb 9y agoSupposedly something like chordify does this relatively well...
- sclangdon 9y agoI think you're confusing the act of making music with musical notation. This app is clearly trying to teach you how to play music, not how to read notation. I don't see the problem in an alternative notation if it's easier to read (I don't know if it is, I've never used the app).
- analog31 9y agoDisclosure: I'm a performing musician. I'm fluent at "sight reading," which means that I can perform music directly from a written sheet. I use this skill regularly on stage. Since I play jazz, the notations that I read include standard "dots," chord symbols, and mixtures thereof. But... learning to read music is an effectively insurmountable obstacle for many people who might otherwise enjoy playing music in a limited capacity, or in musical styles that don't make much use of reading. For this reason, I appreciate development of alternative notations. There is already an extensive literature of written music for guitar and electric bass, that uses "tabulature," a notation based on numerically identifying finger positions on the instrument. Percussion notation is a kind of tabulature. The problem with alternative notation is that standard notation represents a symbiosis between composers and performers. Composers know that if they use a particular notation system, then there will be plenty of people who are capable of reading it. Performers know that if they learn standard notation, then they can tap into extensive literature and performing opportunities. Nothing like that exists for any alternative notation. Even with guitar tabulature, very few composers know how to write it unless they're guitarists, and nobody can "sight read" it, so it's use is limited to learning material that will be performed from memory. Granted, I've just made a lot of generalizations, but they hold pretty well, most of the time.
- armagon 9y agoAs someone trying to learn to read sheet music as an adult, it is clear to me that the system is in dire need of a refactor. I'm always excited to see alternative notations, but you are right about the problem where there is a vast amount written using the notation we have right now. I look forward to the day when I can don a pair of high-tech glasses, look at something written in standard musical notation, and have it "transnotated" on the fly to something easier to read!
- ThomPete 9y agoIsn't music first and foremost about rhythm, melodies, harmonies? How is this not giving them som basic introduction?
- treehau5 9y agoThose are the parts that roll up into this thing we call "music" but that is not what music is nor what it is about. Your air conditioner, for example, has a rhythm and a pitch to it's sound, but no one would ever call it music. Your cooking timer, another example. Jonathan Peters defines music as "the universal language of emotions communicated through intelligently ordered sounds consisting of rhythm and pitch" so to answer what music is about: It's about conveying emotion.
- brooklyn_ashey 9y agoWait,what? So who is Jonathan Peters (a dj, re-mixer, and producer) to tell us what music is? Excuse me, but I happen to think my air conditioner is making a kind of music. The dude works with Mac Quale (American Horror Story) , and Quale seems to think sounds and textures are music. Also- can we please move beyond this "universal language" thing? What is universal about sounds and contexts? For example, the 12 tone scale is western, while other cultures enjoy microtones but these sounds sound "out of tune" to the average westerner. Steve Reich thought the utterances of a victimof race riots was music as evidenced by his piece "Come Out". John Cage showed that chance ambient sound is music with the famous 4'33"... and well, there are hundres ofexamples. Why can't we reach for a more culturally and intellectually and conceptually expansive defenition of an artform here on Hacker News? What "emotion" was John Cage going for in his prepared piano pieces? What about Richard Serra, the sculptor? I read stuff like this time and again by truly intellectual people on HN and I am always surprised at how behind the developments in artistic thinking are here.And really, it is 2017-- how can anyone think "music" is a universal language. As a composer myself, this defenition of music shoves me into a time machine and thrusts me back to old Vienna where I'm having tea with Brahms and Clara Schuman! Please! I need my modern brain, modern concept of the history of music and art, and my ability to redefine the parameters of my artform! How would you like program in COBOL all day for the rest of your life, denying the existence of modern coding languages? By the way, do yourself a favor and listen to "come out"---- drop in at some middle or later point innthat composition or even anywhere in Reich's "clapping Music" and tell me what emotion one is meant to feel... get back to us on that please.
- meggar 9y agoWhich audio framework did you choose for this?
- j_rcht 9y agoAV foundation
- philbarr 9y agoWhilst I'm all for innovation, the "Dodeka Keyboard" is not going to help you learn piano. It's going to help you to learn to play a Dodeka Keyboard.
- ThomPete 9y agoIs that their claim though? Isn't the claim you will learn to play music and isn't that the most important regardless of which instrument you learn?
- philbarr 9y agoI was going off the phrase, "Always wanted to play piano? Now is your time." from [0]. [0] http://www.dodeka.info/Play/ http://www.dodeka.info/Play/
- ThomPete 9y agoPlay piano, not learn to play piano. Semantics but I think it's important the title of the Show HN taken into consideration.
- fiatjaf 9y agoAnything that gives you music sense is going to help you learn piano.
- ThomPete 9y agoHi j_rcht congrats on the launch. As a long time musician myself I am always intersted in learning about new instruments. The video you post in the bottom is it purely to increase the span of how many octaves you fingers can span or what's the purpose?
- j_rcht 9y agoHi ThomPete - thanks! The videos at the bottom only present the app functionalities - nothing more really. But about the span, we use the same dimensions as conventional piano, meaning that octaves size aren't wider.
- ThomPete 9y agoI'm confused now :) The video that shows the real life piano where all the keys are the same size?
- brooklyn_ashey 9y agoNice idea! Could be a great intro for new learners or even those who just want to get at making sound with a lower bar to entry- which is fantastic. I'd love to try it with a student. Have you?
- whiddershins 9y agoCongrats on your launch. I love innovation and experimentation in this space. I am confused about why you feel it is easier to read the "sheet music" in your app than traditional notation. I feel the tight spacing of the note indicators does overtly show rhythmic values, but at the expense of easy readability. They are also misleading unless they show how varied an actual note duration can be. Do you show staccato notes as short? How short? These are determinations left to the player. The lack of stems makes the use of the term "sheet music" rather misleading/confusing, in my opinion. Having a chromatic keyboard that gives equal space to all twelve tones is a cool idea, but as someone who plays such keyboards primarily, as well as "normal" piano, I can assure you it is not necessarily easier to learn or to play traditional music, including modern pop music, on such a keyboard. I am genuinely curious whether you have tested any of the assumptions behind your reworking of these conventions, many of which probably exist for reasons that go beyond just inertia. I feel like I keep seeing products that try to do away with what's "hard" about reading sheet music, but that is solving one of the smallest hurdles confronting people trying to learn music. Sure, it looks like hieroglyphs to the uninitiated, but once you learn the basics it's actually pretty easy to work with. Do you have a plan in place for gradually introducing the learner to stems and rests and other sheet music notation, or ... how does the learner move on from this? Regardless, would love to hear about how things go and how people respond to your ideas.
- j_rcht 9y agoHi whiddershins, Thanks for your comment, To answer your questions about additional notation marks, please feel free to check our documentation here http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Presentation/ http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Presentation/ and http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Resources/ http://www.dodeka.info/Learn/Resources/. These will show you how we notate rests, staccato, and other notational marks. As for the advantage dodeka brings, it's really about the synergy there is between the keyboard and the sheets. There's only one way to write one piece, which means that players can easily learn how to play a song in every tone. Our tests showed that people usually take between 1 to 3 minutes to read and play an easy piece in all different tones. This is fast right? :) For rhythms - we believe it's easier for one's mind to see the value rather that to compute it. Also, we are not targeting musicians, but rather beginners and people who'd like to learn/play music in an easy way. Finally, I'm not sure that I understood what you meant with the stems and sheet music.
- desireco42 9y agoIpad only. I do happen to have one but...
- mmcconnell1618 9y agoSuggestion: I don't know if it's just Safari on the Mac or not but I didn't get any sound from the three videos on the page. It was strange for a music app to not have sound in the videos. Maybe a technical glitch on my machine?
- blauditore 9y agoSame here on FF & Ubuntu, pretty sure the videos are silent (even though they contain an audio track).
- j_rcht 9y agoit's a bug - will change that asap.
- j_rcht 9y agoit's a bug - will change that asap.