Musicianship-Building Practice Companion

February 12, 2024

A dynamic illustration showing musicians surrounded by a swirl of musical instruments, animated sheet music, and a digital audio interface, symbolizing the blend of traditional music with modern technology.

Goals

As I wrote about last week, I’m building an app to help musicians improve their skills. I don’t have a name for it yet, but I do have a pretty good idea of what I hope to accomplish.

Build

A musicianship-building practice companion that allows users to improve their sight reading, ear training, and overall musicianship. The aim is to make it useful for musicians of all skill levels while being simple and intuitive to use.

Achieve

I want musicians to have a fun and accessible way to improve their skills using a “cross-training” approach.

Users can log in and warm up with infinitely generated sight reading exercises. Or they can work on their ear training and choose from various types of intervallic tone recognition or rhythmic dictation exercises.

Users can rack up points while improving overall musicianship. Keeping their scores balanced ensures they know they are hitting all their bases with their practice session and not just focusing on one area.

Selfish Pursuits

There is a lot of cool web tech that I want to try out.

I won’t get too into the weeds here but I thought I should at least mention a couple of the tools I plan to use:

  1. VexFlow - An open-source JavaScript library that lets us render music notation and guitar tablature interactively on web pages.
  2. Web Audio API - Gives us a ton of flexibility and control to generate and manipulate audio in all sorts of ways. Stoked to learn more about this.
  3. OpenAI API - I’m going start by using OpenAI’s text generation models to generate music examples. Over time, we can fine-tune our model to suit various use cases. I may also want to check out some more music-specific AI models such as Magenta or AIVA.

Features

Keep in mind, that everything is “nice to have” at the moment, but here is what I would like to see happen as we build out this app:

  1. User login
  2. Change instrument and update music examples accordingly
  3. Personalized practice dashboard
  4. Scoreboard (personal + global)
  5. AI-generated sight reading examples, trained by real music scores
  6. AI-generated rhythmic and tonal ear training examples, trained by real audio files

Communities

Building this allows me to build a bridge between my music mind, and my technical mind. Coincidentally, music and tech are two communities that will get the most out of following along.

Musicians

I’m thinking of this app as a musician companion, so of course, music folks of all shapes and sizes will find themselves to be right at home here.

I may also need to recruit some of you for beta testing once we build out more features. Thank you to the people who have reached out so far!

Tech

Since this is a technical blog, there will be all sorts of interesting tidbits for the nerds.

More specifically, web dev enthusiasts should find the Web Audio API stuff pretty interesting. I’m bummed I haven’t dug into this sooner.

Education

The education community has always been near and dear to my heart. I spent many years teaching music, working with individual students, and in the classroom.

This will hopefully be a tool that teachers can recommend to their students as a way to “level up” - just the basics to start but building in complexity over time.

We’ll see!

Gratitude

Thanks so much for letting me indulge publicly in a fun little side project.

Do you have a fun little side project of your own that you could use some help with? Wave Land is here to assist with all of your web needs. Click here to get started.

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