I never knew much about music, and an instrument as refined as the violin felt especially far removed from my life.
But when my daughter’s elementary school formed a symphony orchestra and she switched from piano to violin, I found myself drawn into the world of the violin whether I liked it or not.
As it happened, my daughter was quite interested in the violin. Her teacher also thought she stood out among the students and took her progress very seriously. As her parent, I had no choice but to take responsibility and do my best to support her.
Yet that very sense of responsibility left me thoroughly frustrated.
After all, I did not know much about music, and I knew even less about the violin. I could read a little staff notation and had dabbled in guitar at university, when it was fashionable.
While helping her practice, I ran into three very basic problems:
Translator’s note: The source says “two” problems but lists three. The count has been corrected to match the list.
- Daily practice was quite an ordeal for a child. We had agreed on one hour of practice every day, but she would find all sorts of ways to drag it out. The time she actually spent playing might have been less than 30 minutes.
- She had one lesson with her teacher each weekend. A common pattern was that the teacher would point out three wrong notes in a piece one week, labeled A, B, and C here, including notes that should have been sharpened but were not. At the following week’s lesson, there would still be three wrong notes, labeled B, C, and D. She had practiced the mistakes until they became ingrained, making them difficult to correct.
- During that weekly weekend lesson, the teacher had to spend a substantial amount of time, sometimes even half the lesson, correcting wrong notes or poor intonation.
As a tech guy, my instinct was to solve problems when I encountered them. I could not tell by ear whether a pitch was wrong or a note was in tune. But could technology help?
If an app could understand the sound of her playing, wouldn’t that solve all my problems at once? Yes—not just intonation, but also making the practice process visible and automatically recording and assessing it.
When I searched on Google, I realized how far short my own technical knowledge fell. My searches at the time gave me the impression that computer music was a specialized and relatively small field, with few teams around the world working in it.
And that was where the next, even more exciting part of the story began.