Translation note: This is Violy’s China-region announcement of July 6, 2021. The feature descriptions, album names, planned teacher uploads, and preliminary decision to offer free access reflect that historical announcement, rather than current Global availability or benefits. Claims about the feature’s originality and other educators’ work are presented in the original team’s voice.
This article is the birth certificate for a new species: “Synchronized Demonstration”!
Synchronized Demonstration. A demonstration with sheet music synchronized to audio and video. A real performer’s demonstration, with the sheet music and audio or video synchronized and aligned.
With Synchronized Demonstration, when you study a piece or watch a demonstration, you can use the score to jump to a precise point in the audio or video. You can specify where in the score the demonstration should begin, or locate a particular phrase or passage to watch repeatedly.
Why do we call it a new species? Because we see it as revolutionary, as an entirely new innovation: a new “species” in which the score and the demonstration are closely integrated and synchronized.
Our team spent a long time thinking about it. It deserved a distinctive name. After many discussions, we finally settled on “Synchronized Demonstration.”
In fact, the well-known violin educator Zhang Shixiang had done something similar long before this, with related video courses available for sale online.
In those courses, the teacher demonstrates a piece in the video while the corresponding score appears below it in sync.
You have probably seen plenty of videos like this on video-sharing and social platforms, with the corresponding sheet music displayed in the video.
But those demonstrations are still essentially videos. They do not let you interact with the score: the sheet music is only there to be viewed, without substantially improving the demonstration experience.
Put simply, Violy’s Synchronized Demonstration lets you interact with the score during playback to jump to a precise point in the audio or video at any time.
In other words, Synchronized Demonstration is no longer a standalone audio or video recording. It is synchronized, aligned, and combined with the score.
Synchronized Demonstration no longer depends on dragging a progress bar to find a particular note or phrase. You have surely experienced how frustrating it can be to scrub through audio or video to find a phrase. Instead, it uses the most natural way to navigate music: the score itself.
The Violy app had always offered demonstration playback, and it was interactive, too. Previously, however, those demonstrations were computer-generated, so the sound was not very realistic.
This version of the Violy app adds Synchronized Demonstration using audio and video recordings of real performers.
Many of the teachers we spoke with had already asked us for Synchronized Demonstration, hoping we could make it happen.
For teachers in music education, it is a wonderfully useful feature.
Many people in the music world had wanted to do this for a long time, but technical limitations prevented them from doing so. Even putting a score into a video, as in the examples above, takes considerable manual effort.
So why did Violy only achieve Synchronized Demonstration now?
Because there were technical hurdles.
After all, synchronizing and aligning scores with audio and video cannot rely entirely on manual work. It requires computers. After four years of building up our technical expertise, our team had finally reached the point where we could make it happen.
How could you find pieces with Synchronized Demonstration in the app?
Look in the “Online Sheet Music Library” for albums marked with the “Demonstration” label.
If an album has that label, at least one piece in it has a Synchronized Demonstration. An audio or video icon appears before each piece that has one.
The most common albums were the “String Demonstration Sheet Music Collection” and the “Piano Demonstration Sheet Music Collection.”
At the time, the selection of pieces with Synchronized Demonstration was still limited. We would keep working to expand it gradually. We would also invite renowned musicians and teachers to record more demonstrations.
Here is a preview of what we had planned:
The ability to upload Synchronized Demonstrations directly in the app would be made available to teachers first. Teachers could then record their own demonstrations for their students, making it easier for students to practice with them, passage by passage and phrase by phrase.
Have fun, everyone!
Special announcement:
Our preliminary decision was to make the new Synchronized Demonstration feature available entirely free of charge!