Singing Stairs

Singing Stairs is a building at night, cut from paper. Every lit window is a music game, and the residents are the notes: eight letters, from C up to high C, who stand on the fire escape and sing their own pitch. The higher the landing, the higher the note, so the building teaches the one idea every musician starts with. Fifteen games: PLAY: The playground, where the slide, the swing, the ladder and five more pieces of equipment each carry one musical idea. Paint the sky, where a finger drawing across the night is sung back, higher on the screen for higher notes. Song time, where she plays real songs by tapping the letter that glows, the words lit syllable by syllable. Make a tune, where she writes her own song on a grid and hears it forwards or backwards. SING: Sing together, where her voice moves a star up and down the fire escape as she sings. Sing it back, where she hears a note and sings it. LISTEN: The mystery singer, Higher or lower, Up or down, Happy or sad, How many singers, Echo clouds, The band and Drum talk: pitch, the shape of a tune, major and minor, harmony, memory, the sound of four instruments, and rhythm. AT BEDTIME: Goodnight, stairs. A lullaby, and the letters fall asleep one landing at a time. There is no score, no timer and no wrong answer. A miss plays what she tapped next to the right note, which is the comparison that trains an ear. Every note is a real recording: the Salamander Grand Piano, and violin, flute and harp from the VSCO-2 orchestra. Everything works offline. No accounts, no advertising, no purchases, no links out of the app, and no data collected. The two singing games listen while they are open and work out the pitch on the phone; nothing is recorded or sent anywhere. Settings sit behind a grown-ups gate.