You're A Natural

Inspiration

Music is an art form so pervasive in modern culture that it's nearly impossible to go a day without listening to some melody. Despite how common music is, few people know how to read or write music. These people are missing out on major cognitive benefits associated with learning and creating music. Research has shown that creative interaction with music improves people's neuroplasticity or there brain's ability to change and develop. The field of music therapy utilizes basic concepts of music such as rhythm and pitch to help patients with a variety of mental, emotional, and physical issues. However, the benefits of music extend to the average person as well. Creating music has been shown to increase learning, particularly communication skills.

Thus the goal of our project is to educate the average person on the basics of sheet music and enable them to creatively interact with an easy to use musical environment. With their new found skill these musicians can go on to reap the benefits associated with music therapy and create their own musical masterpieces.

What it does

Our website provides a few learning modules as an introduction to the basics of composing. Each module provides basic music theory on the corresponding topic which is followed by an interactive challenge to reinforce and test the user's learning. After a user has learned the basics they are able to independently interact with the keyboard and sheet music to create their own melodies. Users have the option to press notes on the keyboard and have sheet music automatically generated as they play or to write out the piece and then have the website play their creation back to them.

How We built it

Vue.js for the UI, Tailwind for the CSS, VexFlow for writing sheet music, Tone.js, and Three.js for the rendered piano,

Challenges We ran into

Most of our team had little to no experience with sheet music themselves! Therefore, one of the greatest challenges was quickly learning the basics of music theory in order to start hacking.

Accomplishments that We're proud of

Integrating a variety of libraries to form the lesson plans. Producing sounds in sync with the piano graphic was especially satisfying.

What We learned

Graphics rendering and (for many of us) basic music theory

What's next for You're A Natural

In the future, we hope to develop more modules containing more advanced music theory concepts enabling our users to create more complex and unique melodies.

Built With

• three.js
• tone.js