Pianojacq, an easy way to learn to play the piano
It&#x27;s funny, I&#x27;ve had almost the same experience: decided to start playing again during Covid, and wanted to use the midi port to gamify things a bit. I&#x27;ve been using Synthesia[1] on an iPad, which also lets you take an arbitrary MIDI file and practice it.<p>On the off-chance that this will inspire the article&#x27;s author for their development, or simply for the curious, this has been my experience with it:<p>The primary mode of display is &quot;Guitar Hero&quot; style (it&#x27;s hard to describe just look at this video to get an idea[2]) but it&#x27;s possible to display the sheet music. It lets you practice and grades you depending on how close you&#x27;re sticking to the score. It&#x27;s very nice to be able to practice one hand separately while having the app play the other hand. I do fairly well reading sheet music but the first time deciphering it can be a bit tedious, using the app speeds this up considerably for me.<p>Synthesia is <i>almost</i> great but it has a lot of small shortcomings which add up to a bad user experience, for example:<p>- The conversion from MIDI to a readable score is very poor compared to, say, Musescore. The sharps and flats are generally off (e.g. randomly a double flat D will appear instead of a C, even though the score has a C, Musescore interprets the midi as a C, etc).<p>- Not enough wiggle room when playing, e.g. if a chord is not arpeggiated in the midi file, you won&#x27;t be able to move forward by arpeggiating.<p>- The app really depends on you following the score exactly and linearly. It should also let the score follow you. For example, if you&#x27;re playing at a given pace, miss, stop and repeat a bar, the app should detect that automatically instead of just carrying on expecting you to keep playing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;synthesiagame.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;synthesiagame.com&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sleZ-hzrtRY" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=sleZ-hzrtRY</a>