Piano Playground

Music is a language that is only learned by playing. This app does exactly that. Available only on the App Store. Touch a key. Hear it ring. See it appear on the staff. Touch two keys. The app tells you the interval between them — a major third, a minor sixth, a tritone. If you've never heard those terms before, now you know what they sound like. Touch three keys. Now you've got a chord. The app figures out what kind and tells you. C Major. D Minor. G Dominant Seventh. Whatever combination you play, it identifies the chord quality and root. Keep adding notes. Four, five, six, seven. Once you get past three, the app starts thinking in scales. "That's A Dorian." "That's B Lydian." "That's the whole-tone scale." It watches what you play and names it in real time, so you can hear the difference between modes instead of just reading about them. The piano. The app is over 1.3 GB. Almost all of that is piano samples. Most music apps use tiny compressed sounds — a few megabytes, maybe. This app ships with recordings of a real concert grand piano, captured at 48 kHz / 24-bit resolution. That's the same quality you'd find in a professional recording studio. There are 480 individual samples — every minor third across the keyboard, recorded at 16 different volume levels. The result sounds like a piano because it is one, just recorded very carefully. Notation. Some people learned C-D-E-F-G-A-B. Some learned Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Si. In Germany and Nordics they use H instead of B. Six different note-naming conventions are built in. "Major" and "minor" is one way to describe chords. "Dur" and "moll" is German. "Maggiore" and "minore" is Italian. Nine terminology systems, covering how musicians actually talk in different parts of the world. Switch whenever you want. The music stays the same — only the words change. iPad and iPhone. On iPad you have room to spread out — two or three octaves visible at once, plenty of space for the staff and chord names. On iPhone it all still works, just more compact. Play. Hear. Learn. ------ Einnig á íslensku – Also available in Icelandic ----- Tónlist er túngumál sem einungis skilst með því að leika. Snertu einn takka. Þú heyrir hann og sérð nótuna á nótnastrikinu. Snertu tvo takka. Appið segir þér bilið þar á milli: þríund, lítil sextund, þrítónn, o.s.frv. Snertu þrjá takka og þú ert með hljóm: C-dúr. D-moll. G-sjöundi. Bættu við fleiri og appið byrjar að sýna þér tónstiga: A-dórískt, H-lýdískt, heiltónastiginn. Flygilinn sem þú heyrir er raunverulegur: 480 hljóðupptökur, 48 kHz/24 bita. Sex nótnanafnakerfi eru tiltæk í appinu, þar á meðal íslenska/þýska H-kerfið en einnig do re mi. Níu nafnakerfi fyrir hljóma. Skiptu um kerfi þegar þér hentar: tónlistin breytist ekki, aðeins orðin. Virkar án nettengingar.