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Comment by Meleagris | Hacker News Reader

Holy smokes!!! It has just occurred to me that anyone who can type on a keyboard knows how to play an instrument. Your keyboard is the instrument.

With solo mode, I asked ChatGPT to translate the songs to keyboard notes, and I was just typing the notes as if I was doing a typing test, and I was playing songs. lol the easiest "sight-reading" I've ever done.

Is this the every persons instrument?

Here is Happy Birthday in solo mode:

E E T E I U E E T E P I E E B X I U T C C X I P I

Crazy unlock!

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A small toy xylophone with each note painted a different colour works by the same principle of abstracting melody into a simple system whose mechanics are already mastered. That kind of device has given children a way to learn Happy Birthday (by simply going Red Red Blue Red Yellow Green.....) for many generations now.

The full challenge however is that "knowing how to play an instrument" in the musical context is a deeeeep, deep well, and that any musician is only as informed as their experience. Hitting-notes-in-order means you've just walked into the atrium of a potentially lifelong learning experience, no matter what the instrument.

Musical typing is super fun and is built in to some free audio tools like garage band, but it’s kind of a thing where you’d have to already know about it in order to find it in the first place.

I love the idea of treating it like a typing test, maybe it is the new guitar hero.

There's plenty virtual instrument that use keyboard as input, you can even modified as simple or complex. I don't remember the name but there's desktop Piano app and browser based virtual Drum.

Am I going crazy? How is this the first time people have encountered a musical keyboard?

It looks more like 'Old Macdonald had a farm'

Welcome to QWERTY-MIDI, around since the advent of DAWs basically.

https://beijaflor.io/qwertymidi/

You should try strudel.cc

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