Problem
There are many people who want to learn Piano, or are beginners. However, they can't find an easy way to start.
One of the college undergraduates, Kevin Wong, started learning Piano only a month ago. He says that he "started this late ... because [of] no access to piano, no instructor ..."
Another potential user Micah Ekchardt, who is an "advanced novice" guitar player, thinks that distinguishing the pitch is "one of the important things to learn" while learning music.
[UNDER PROGRESS]
Observations and Interviews
We interviewed much more than three people, but the three interviews that stood out the most are characterized below.
Novice Piano Player
(I'm talking about Pramod's Kevin here)
Wannabe A Cappella Singer
This interviewee was fairly familiar with music, having some experience with piano, violin, drum, and choir. When we asked him about differentiating notes, he was very excited, and said that it was super important to him, since he wanted to sing a cappella. He was primarily interested in sight reading, but had actively spent time training his ability to differentiate notes.
Most interesting to us was that he had a very specific way of training his own ability to read notes.
- play the first note
- attempt to sing the rest
- play it on a piano and compare it with what he just sang
- sing it again
- recording can help, when there isn't a teacher around
What we also found interesting is that he doesn't really believe music can be taught without human interaction. He emphasized that reinforcement from a person when you're learning is important, and it would be important to get consistent, helpful feedback from a web application. He wants something deeper than "you did this right or wrong." He is generally skeptical of machine measures of quality.
Guitar Player
This interviewee played guitar for a long while some years ago, and enjoys singing. He has some sense of relative pitch, and said he'd be very interested in practicing exclusively to get better at differentiating pitch, since he thought it was important in appreciating music. He never considered training the skill in isolation because he didn't think it was possible. He believed it was something that could only be picked up as you were playing.
He was interesting to us for two reasons.
- He played exclusively guitar. The other interviewees all talked about the piano, and when he spoke of music, he referred to strumming the guitar. This reminded us that not everyone who is learning music is familiar with the piano interface.
- He strongly believed everything should be available online, and thought it wasreally cool to consider using a web application to help with steps in the music learning process.
Other Interviewees
Other people we interviewed included someone with perfect pitch who believed the skill "couldn't be taught to an adult."
Many people expressed that differentiating notes was a specific skill out of many, and something they wanted to practice when they were actively learning to play an instrument.
User Classes
- Novice Piano Players - Piano players are the main body of our target users simply because there are a lot of them. Most of the people we interviewed had attempted to learn piano at one point or another, and noted that note differentiation was one of the skills they would like to improve at.
- Other instrument players - We discovered that some of our interviewees were novice guitar players, and we believe they're a significant part of the population as well. Their goals are similar to that of the piano player, but we must keep in mind that the interface they are familiar with is significantly different from the piano players.
It's worth noting that our user classes do not explicitly address the needs of a cappella singers, because they are more interested in learning how to produce notes that are written, and those of people with perfect pitch, who don't have such needs.
Needs & Goals
From the interviews described above, we extracted the following goals.
Train your ear
Many users have difficulty transitioning from "read and play" to "listen and play". As such, a tool which could help them train their ear in order to be able to distinguish musical notes is much desired.
Low cost music education
Many users, especially beginners, have mentioned that they have delayed learning piano due to the costs associated with buying a piano or having a tutor. As such, it would help then if we could provide music education (especially beginner level) at low cost.
Address the 'feeling lonely' problem
Learning things alone sitting in a room is boring, and much more in the case of music which is such an aesthetic and creative subject. Users have mentioned time and again how having other people around is a much better experience.
Precise pitch training (optional)
Users have also expressed interest in learning not only the art of distinguishing notes being played on an instrument, but rather also having a tool which would give them feedback on the pitch at which they themselves are singing. However, since real-time pitch analysis is an open problem with its own conference dedicated to it, we have marked this goal as optional.