Alla Breve

Inspiration

I was inspired to make this project because I am studying music and cs at UMD and wanted to find a cool way to bridge these 2 fields. I like to help others, so I thought I would make an educational game that people studying music could use to study. I was also inspired somewhat by Tetris when designing the game.

What it does

It is an educational game that gives you, the player, an incomplete chord and asks you to enter the missing note. This works somewhat like Tetris, where you drag around a note similar to how you would drag a block in Tetris. When completing a chord, all 3 or 4 notes are played so you can hear the chord you just created, even if you entered a wrong note. The game gives you feedback on if you were correct or not, and tells you what you did wrong if you messed up. My goal with this is that it could be used as a study aid for any students studying music who need to review and familiarize themselves with chord structures and intervals.

How we built it

I built it in C# using the Unity Game Engine. I also used extensive recordings of individual piano notes, made available by the University of Iowa.

Challenges we ran into

I found it very difficult to bridge the gap between music and programming. I have no experience in audio processing or anything like that, so it was not easy to generate sound and music with my code. I also found it difficult to write code that would resolve a chord based on a string (ex. I pass in "E Minor" and it puts those notes on a staff and plays them back for me).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am very proud that I made an application that can generate real music and gives the user an opportunity to study a complicated topic at the same time. I'm glad I took the time to figure out how programs typically generate audio, as I learned something new I think I'll use again in the future.

What we learned

I learned how to generate sound and music from code, and the different intricacies and nuances of creating a basic music notation software.

What's next for Alla Breve

I have some bugs I need to fix in the Jazz mode (7th chords have a 4th note which makes it difficult to work cleanly with the code that expects 3). I also would like to polish up the UI a bit.