Potential future support for creating lessons?

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Electrode
Posts: 195

Post by Electrode »

I'm imagining Synthesia one day being able to create lessons. These could have functionality similar to Melody Mode (or the ability to switch, on-the-fly, between Melody and Rhythm mode - so that students could first learn notes and then play whole sections at reduced speeds).

I'm imagining features like being able to pause melody mode to highlight certain keys, or annotate the keyboard with arrows (or light up certain keys in their respective hand colours), and display information using text boxes in the middle of the screen, or automatically running "Watch & Listen" demos of a section before showing instructions and then allowing a student to play the section themselves. Essentially, I think it's like creating scripted cutscenes or animated presentations with full control over seeking through the song, playing different things, showing and hiding key/note labels and restarting sections (to give students practice on difficult bits, etc.)...

I realise this is an idea for way, way into the future, and it would be a metric ton of work, but still... I do think it is possible, one day. And I would buy Synthesia all over again if we were eventually able to have this. I'd be able to send my students homework in Synthesia files and it would be like I'm able to guide them myself during the week as they practice!
Nicholas
Posts: 13132

Post by Nicholas »

Electrode wrote: 11-26-22 6:29 amI realise this is an idea for way, way into the future...
So, scrolling down to line 2154(!) of my task list, I have a simple "Lesson support with content creation tools" bullet point, but you nailed down exactly what I had intended when I added that.

I do believe this is one of those things where you could get a pretty big chunk of the overall value of the feature by only implementing a small fraction of it. A good first step might just be a kind of "annotation" feature, where you could attach something like a text box to some time point in the song that would either scroll down with the notes or simply appear/disappear at the appointed time (holding steady, so it's easier to read).

Just having that loses most of the nuance you just described, but it would already be a fairly powerful tool for educators. Being able to temporarily listen to a passage (which I've been calling "play a screenful of notes" or "audition from here"--on task list line 990 :lol: ) has been requested as a completely separate feature many times and it would pair nicely with the kinds of things you described, even if it wasn't scripted.

That said, yes, the holy grail is a kind of interactive lesson designer, like you described. How cool would that be?
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