mightyMIDI

Inspiration

We decided to take on Native Instruments’ challenge of making the joy of creating music accessible to people with physical or mental disabilities. One of the team members, Aafia, has been an avid student of piano for almost 11 years, and she recognizes that it’s not easy to learn how to read sheet music. This hinders people with learning disabilities, and perhaps those learning later in life, from being able to play proficiently. We do this by using muscle memory to our advantage.

What it does

The user can download any MIDI file, and our program will send that file to the keyboard (we used the Komplete Kontrol model provided to us by Native Instruments). The keyboard then plays back the song and lights up the keys to be pressed at the appropriate time, providing a useful and clear visualization that enables people to learn pieces without ever having to look at the sheet music. They can also slow down the tempo as needed.

How I built it

Java has a package for working with MIDI files and sending/receiving information.

Challenges I ran into

First hack that required interfacing with hardware.

What's next for mightyMIDI

We would like information to the computer back from the keyboard. Our vision is to have the program pause until it obtains confirmation from the keyboard that the user has pressed all of the keys that need to be played at that moment in the song.

Built With

• java
• midi.js