Sight Reading

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pablodiazpro
Posts: 3

Post by pablodiazpro »

I've been searching for a good sight reading practice software online and haven't been able to find anything decent out there. My thoughts are to use Synthesia and load a ton of short midis for practice. :) But it would be great to have a random notes generator in Synthesia which I should add it would play like a game. How difficult would it be to add something like this to the software: http://www.sheetmusictutor.com/? Or is Synthesia planning to add anything similar on the near future?
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

It sounds like you might be talking about just reading sheet music. :D

For sight reading, I'm still hoping to add the feature that Jim suggested here where the current measure is hidden a little early, forcing you to read it ahead of time.

That is a different skill set than initially learning to read the positions of notes. (The latter is required before you can start working on the former!)

Instead of revealing the next note one-by-one (which felt like it really broke up the flow of playing), would it be useful to simply have a full random song generator? Then you get to play something new each time with no prior experience with that particular piece. That exercises the same music reading skill set, but it sounds like it might be more fun.

There are a few experiments out there that have done a not-half-bad job with algorithmically generated music. This is one of my favorites because it can create things in the style of whatever you feed it. If we were to incorporate something like that, not only could Synthesia ship with a few dozen styles built-in, but we could even leave the option open to feed the algorithm yourself and create your own custom styles.
pablodiazpro
Posts: 3

Post by pablodiazpro »

Thanks for reply, Nicholas.

I read all of the resources linked on your answer. I'm very excited to see you have this on the road map. I think to cover this feature properly we need some kind of random generator and I didn't see anything about that on the linked posts. I don't even think it's necessary for the generated song to have any melodic rhythm. As you mentioned above, players just need to have a constant/indefinite supply of exercises to practice. In my opinion, that's the essence of this feature request. Also we should be able to pick the level of difficulty for the generated song, as there are different levels of ability between players.
pablodiazpro
Posts: 3

Post by pablodiazpro »

Thanks for link. I expect some form of guidance from this 'sight reading' feature, something like this: https://www.sightreadingfactory.com/ that can assist me on setting my current level and progress slowly.
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