Melody Harmonizer and Real-time Practice Monitoring for Novice Piano Learners

Abstract

Nowadays, piano-playing is a popular hobby and one can learn to play the piano by self-learning or hiring a tutor. Unfortunately, for a beginner who just learned how to read basic sheet music, it is often challenging to play a new song with both hands together. Although he may be able to play the right-hand melodies from his head, he may not know what his left hand should play to accompany the right-hand melodies.

This application allows automatic generation of the left-hand bass line harmonization, while only requiring the user to specify the chord names. The application function scope covers the entire process from piano sheet music creation to automatic harmonization generation, and supports sheet music exporting to PDF. Apart from that, a real-time piano practicing tool helps to monitor the performance of a learner’s piano practicing in real-time, if the digital piano is connected to the computer (running Google Chrome) via MIDI interface.

In essence, this project targets to help novice piano players create simple sheet music of their favourite songs, with a minimal level of knowledge in musical theory, i.e. only knowing the song melody and chord names in the song is sufficient. The application aids and simplifies the typical process that a self-learning piano player would go through when learning a new song from absolute scratch, after gaining a fundamental level of understanding on basic piano sheet music notations. Moreover, the application even helps the learner to practice playing the piano by monitoring his performance and giving feedbacks on the accuracy.