Music in the Mind

Our passion project is called Piano Ninja. It’s a piano memory game using PureData featuring seven belt levels, with black belt being the highest. Once a level begins, notes will appear and the keyboard will light up certain keys to the tune and speed of a song chosen by us. The songs will get more difficult as levels progress and the goal is to get a certain percentage of notes correct to advance to the next “belt”. If too low a percentage is achieved, the student is demoted to a lower belt. This game can be played through a computer keyboard or tablet by hitting each note to play it, which bridges an accessibility gap in learning and practicing the piano for students without piano access. Our solution will also aim to engage students in learning the piano by gamifying the process and fostering a fun, interactive learning environment. We plan to create a front end that displays a piano along with the color corresponding to the current level by using the midi function along with chunks of our current patches to help implement our project. We aim to create an interactive element by sending messages to the chat when a player earns or loses a belt. Students can play against each other by seeing who gets to the highest level first. This game is unique because no one has gamified learning piano using notes. For example, Guitar Hero helps you “learn” to play the guitar, but doesn’t show any notes to correlate with playing. Through using an actual keyboard image and displaying notes, students can learn the piano accurately through a fun interactive way. This game is also unique because it’s ninja themed and you move through levels to learn.