A Sharp

Inspiration

It is very difficult to understand the music theory behind scales and chords on a guitar due to its shape. We were inspired to utilize data visualization in order generate visual practice routines to help guitar players conceptualize scales and chords.

What it does

A Sharp takes in a list of chords, scales, and a file path to generate a practice routine visualized on the fret board of a guitar.

How I built it

This was built with the python standard GUI library tkinter to read in all the values from the user. The GUI is then piped to a python script which formats and manipulates the data so that it can be readable for our back end system. The back end system is written in C++ and takes in formatted data to generate .png images that represent chords and scales.

Challenges I ran into

Originally we wanted to make an interactive web app that does similar things, but around 6:00 AM we ran into a lot of different problems with the UI and web design so we went with more sleek approach which catered to our strengths, Creating charts to showcase chords and scales.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

We are really proud of the fact that we met all of our requirements and accomplished what we set out to do. While time constraints did lead to a less than ideal UI/UX, we still made an app that can be utilized by musicians to practice music theory.

What I learned

Learning the mathematics behind music theory and guitars is the core of this application. There was a ton of research put into figuring out how to procedural calculate the fret configurations and notes within a scale. Additionally, even though we failed in making a web app, we still learned a ton about the web development.