MusicShape

Play a note. Watch it appear. MusicShape draws your playing as a single line crossing a grid of semitones, and that one line carries three things at once. Where it sits is the pitch, and it takes on colour as it drifts — warm when you are running sharp, cool when you are falling flat — so the direction of an error reads before you have finished the note. How it waves is your vibrato. How thick it is is how loud you are playing. So a phrase becomes a shape you can read at a glance: the scoop up into a note, the one that sags halfway through, the crescendo that never quite arrived, whether your vibrato is as even as it feels. It is the difference between a tuner telling you that was flat, and seeing exactly where, and by how much. JUST PLAY. IT REMEMBERS. Open it, play, put it down. Each sitting is kept on its own: what you worked on and how long you actually played, as opposed to how long the case was open. Type a note mid-practice — still flat on the top A — and find it again in March. WATCH THE MONTHS ADD UP A calendar of everything you have played. Which notes you miss and which way you miss them. What time of day you really practise, as opposed to when you meant to. And any piece you have named becomes a place of its own: how its intonation has moved across the stretch you are looking at, which of its notes still need the work, and every practice note you wrote while you were in it. KEEP MOTIVATED. SHARE YOUR PROGRESS. A month of practice adds up to something worth showing, and watching it add up is a good part of what gets you back to the case tomorrow: the days, the hours you actually played, and how much of it landed in tune, in an image you can post anywhere. It is the screen you are already looking at — a month, one session or one piece — with a switch for each section it shows, and you see the whole image before anything moves. It is made on the device, nothing is uploaded, and nothing in the app ever asks you to share. FOR ANYONE WHO CHOOSES THE PITCH Twenty-one instruments across strings, brass, woodwinds and voice — violin to double bass, trumpet to tuba, piccolo to bassoon, soprano to bass. Each brings its own range and its own default tolerance, and transposing instruments are named by their key, so a B-flat clarinet is listed as one. TUNED THE WAY MUSIC IS ACTUALLY PLAYED Set your key, your temperament and your reference A. Play a Bach sarabande in Pythagorean tuning and the leading note is nowhere near where an equal-tempered needle sits waiting for it; take an ensemble down to A=415 and nothing about it is out of tune. Just intonation is there too, and the whole grid moves with whichever one you pick. YOU DECIDE WHAT COUNTS AS IN TUNE Nobody agrees on the number, so it is yours to set. Choose your tolerance — the app suggests one for your instrument — and the colours, the counts and the progress all follow it. RECORD WHEN IT MATTERS Most of the time you only want to see the line. When a run-through is worth keeping, hold the Listen button and record it — the shape, the notes, and the sound if you want it. Old recordings can be thinned out later without losing what you wrote about them. YOUR PRACTICE HISTORY IS SAFE Months of playing add up to something you would not want to lose. Your log is included in your iPhone's backup, so a new phone restores every session, every note you wrote and every piece you tracked — with no account to create and nothing to remember to export. MADE TO LAST A FULL SESSION An intonation app you have to keep plugged in is one you stop opening. This one is built for a real practice session, and it stops listening by itself when you put the instrument down. NO ADS, NO ACCOUNT, NO SUBSCRIPTION Buy it once and every future update is included — and there is a great deal more on the way, because this is an app still being actively built. Nothing is collected, there is nothing to sign up for, and your playing never leaves your phone.