my roommate got a digital piano! it was the cheapest one she could find that still had 88 keys, and was weighted. it was under $200. it arrived a few days ago. she was recommended this app by her coworkers, who’ve raved about it: https://yousician.com/
i saw her using it on an ipad. it uses the tablet’s microphone to listen to what you’re playing, and if you’re playing the correct pitch, it lights up the bar or note on the staff. it is a little bit like guitar hero.
i am having Feelings about this app because in 2012, i led a group that won a BeMyApp hackthon with our iOS app called PlayPitch, that showed notes on a musical staff and listened to you play any instrument with the device’s microphone. if you played the correct note, the note would light up and progress to the next note. the judges awarded us first place and this was supposed to come with a VC investment. i immediately hated the VC who was supposed to give us $35,000, and he immediately hated me. (a friend who was present in the audience at the pitches told me she was standing next to him, and when the judges announced the winner, he said aloud to himself, “oh god, not her.” lol.) i ignored the emails where he tried to give me money. he saw me one week later at a different, completely unrelated hackathon, (this time we made something with firebase, and i became firebase developer # 22) and he asked me why i wasn’t returning his emails. i had to get my white male friend to come with me to tell him no because i was afraid of telling him we didn’t want his money. lol. so we never worked on the app again after that one weekend. but it actually did work. two of my friends implemented fast fourier transforms in matlab and then exported their work into iOS somehow, and that’s how the pitch-matching worked. i don’t even remember what code i worked on, cuz i didn’t know matlab, i still don’t really know what an FFT is or how it turns a microphone input signal into numbers that can signify what pitch a noise is at, and i didn’t know iOS. maybe i like made a website for it? but i definitely gave the pitch. i’m fucking amazing at pitching. and i loved the attention. i loved it so much. i think we brought in like five random instruments including my recorder from 1988 and a melodica and my acoustic guitar from 2000 and probably my erhu. lol.
it’s easy to say “that could have been us,” but it couldn’t have been. i didn’t want to be a tech ceo then, although i felt too guilty to actually voice that. i guess that’s what i’m voicing it now.
oh my god this is the pitch LOL YouTube
i can’t even finish watching myself talk. oh god this is painful. i actually suck at pitching? this is terrible lol. oh look we used fritz’s PAN FLUTE IN THE DEMO HAHAHAHAHA