How I trained sheet reading using the Web MIDI API | Hacker News Reader

How I trained sheet reading using the Web MIDI API

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59 pointsphilippotto14 comments

This is great! I'm learning to read sheet music and play the piano at the same time and have found the same problem: I'm just memorising the music, not _reading_it.

Just this weekend I tried jalmus, but couldn't get it running and ended up trying to write something kinda similar to this:

https://mobile.twitter.com/philip_roberts/status/61775984704... Mine just does one note at a time though and I didn't know about webmidi, so was using node with electron shell for midi access, definitely gonna switch it over to webmidi now though, thanks!

Stay tuned for awesomeness like this in my interactive sheet-music site Soundslice (https://www.soundslice.com). :-)

This, plus the ability to load in whatever piece of music you want to learn, plus the ability to listen to real audio recordings (as opposed to synthetic/MIDI), all available from the web, equals a lovely future for musicians.

From a musician's point of view this sounds like a dangerous idea. Training your hands on random sequences of notes which do not make sense musically and relying on visual feedback feels like it will do nothing to build the skill which you actually need which is the ability to associate hand movements to musical patterns.

But then it is probably just what you need if you want to play crazy atonal music. What do i know?

Yes, it sounds a bit like learning to read 'letters' instead of 'words'... You will read letters quite fast but what about the meaning? Playing the piano is not touch-typing, as far as I know.

Atonal (actually, I'd argue microtonal) music is totally where it's at though...

good luck with microtonal on a midi keyboard, though..

Every midi workstation I've used for a while lets you make +/- cent adjustments.

Then there's the tonal plexus and similar.

There are many things you need in music though. Not just the ability to associate hand movement to musical patterns.

Well, I'm on the fence... I'm not a great reader on the piano (I'm terrible) but I can read well enough to play gigs on the upright bass.

On on hand, my reaction was the same... I am usually trying to decide what chord I'm supposed to be playing at a given moment and to decipher what the bass and melody are doing... so this is more like a typing exercise where you do random typing.

On the other hand, I don't read much for the piano and all I can play are those patterns... I have 10 or so bass patterns and know how to come up with inversions of all the chords without thinking, so it is easy to play some elton john tune but very difficult to read beginner bach. Being forced to play a combination of notes that aren't already in my musical vocabulary sounds like a good way to learn to read.

Maybe there is a common ground where, like typing tutorial software the trainer generates somewhat normal musical patterns in a random fashion.

Sight-reading is an important skill, even essential for many studio and session musicians.

I found this a while back and have been really enjoying it. http://www.synthesiagame.com

With a laptop that folds flat, you can prop it on the music stand of your piano. Would be best with a touch screen, I think.

No need for a laptop if you have an iPad. Synthesia has an app. My iPad sits on my music stand connects to my digital piano via USB-MIDI.

This is a first step toward writing your own ear training software, like EarMaster Pro. It has chord training, interval training, etc. This is probably closest to melodic sight-"singing" (you can use a midi instrument too) which is randomly generated melodic sequences, although it's aimed at singers so no chords.

There's also sightreadingfactory which generates random music to play as well. This one allows you to pick an instrument, level, time signature, and key. But it isn't interactive. It'd be great if they added web midi.

"All numbers aside, I’m also feeling a vast improvement while playing piano. Instead of reading each note separately, I’m seeing patterns (within each chord) and distances which really astonished me. Of course, there is still room for improvement and I’m looking forward to the challenge."

Thats what we do when we learn to read anything. You don't read the individual characters but rather the entire words or even parts of sentences.

But he is right that it's cool.

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