Possible improvements?

[Forlane]

Dear developer,

Thank you for your contribution to the selection of the most ingenious and useful software: NoteCard seems to be the best sight-reading drill tool available. I am also familiar with Jalmus, which has a less efficient method of letting the notes run across the screen, instead of appearing one by one as in Notecard.

However, the program has one big advantage - a possibility to use a MIDI keyboard to press the piano keys in the program. I am wondering why this is not an option in NoteCard, with all the logical background behing its concept, laid out eloquently on the website. Wouldn't the option to use an actual keyboard help to attain the goal of efficient sight-reading drill even better? Or perhaps it is too difficult from the point of developing? Is the option envisaged for the next upgrade?

Another intuitive option that should help the begginer is the possibility to import .mid files with actual music and allow NoteCard to "approve" the notes as the keys are pressed one after another by the user. The same three questions would apply.

Thank you for your feedback in advance.

[Forlane]

Some more suggestions:

1. There should be a toggle-on option to enable pause to be used during a quiz. It is very frustrating to have someone or something disrupt you after the first note and distort the final result.

2. Note by note results should distinguish between flats and sharps. Would be useful to pin point a particular problem with flats or sharps.

3. There should be an option to cancel a quiz in progress. Exiting a program instead of waiting for 10 notes to appear before one can proceed to another menu while testing is uncomfortable.

4. There could be an option to increase speed with which the notes appear for more advanced users. This, coupled with the possibility to use MIDI keyboard (even if no .mid import is available), would allow something even closer to the real sight-reading.

5. There could be an option for sharps and flats to appear beside the clefs.

6. The natural sign appearing here and there would add complexity and emulate real scores better.

[ahasoft]

Thanks very much for taking the time to chip in with these suggestions. The major one of allowing MIDI keyboard input was actually planned for the first release — was even mostly written — but in the end had to wait for an update, which has just now taken place. I agree that it is an important feature, even though relatively few users have the needed hardware.

The idea of creating quizzes automatically by stepping through a MIDI file is interesting, but I have a couple of reservations about it. For one thing, NoteCard does not deal with rhythm, but learning to reproduce the notes of a melody without regard to rhythm (or expression) may actually be counterproductive in terms of developing musicianship; for another, because the notes of real melodies are to some degree ordered — that is, notes already played establish a context for predicting notes that follow — this kind of quiz would actually be less challenging, and probably less beneficial in terms of time invested, than one in which the notes are selected randomly.

1. There should be a toggle-on option to enable pause to be used during a quiz. It is very frustrating to have someone or something disrupt you after the first note and distort the final result.
3. There should be an option to cancel a quiz in progress. Exiting a program instead of waiting for 10 notes to appear before one can proceed to another menu while testing is uncomfortable.

I agree that NoteCard needs a way of handling the problems you describe, but I think both would be handled by the addition of a Halt (i.e. Cancel) command that terminates the current quiz without registering the currently-offered note. Your progress rating and records (in the Paid Version of NoteCard) are based on your history of responses to each note, not on quiz scores as such, so you wouldn’t really lose anything by ending a quiz prematurely. One problem with Pause is that it is hard to allow suspending the current question without giving you extra time to respond.

2. Note by note results should distinguish between flats and sharps. Would be useful to pin point a particular problem with flats or sharps.

Although there is intuitive appeal in having separate records for say, Db, D and D#, rather than grouping all responses under D as happens now, it would require further complexity in the progress review interface, which has to be weighed against the modest gain in detail. This feature might surface as an option in a future version, though.

4. There could be an option to increase speed with which the notes appear for more advanced users. This, coupled with the possibility to use MIDI keyboard (even if no .mid import is available), would allow something even closer to the real sight-reading.

The idea of varying the quiz clock speed has been raised before, though usually with a view to slowing it down rather speeding it up. The speed can actually be changed even in NoteCard 3.0 by editing a value in the settings file as described in the online help. A related parameter is the amount of ‘free time’ allowed for responding to quiz questions, which varies with the chosen input instrument. A fast response time is expected for users of the MIDI input instrument, as you propose.

Whether to allow clock speed changes from within NoteCard, and what the user interface would be like, are questions that are under consideration for future versions. One complication is that either your progress rating would change every time you selected a new speed, or separate records would have to be kept for each speed used. If the latter approach were taken, it would make sense to restrict the available speeds to a small number of discrete values (e.g. slow, medium and fast).

5. There could be an option for sharps and flats to appear beside the clefs.
6. The natural sign appearing here and there would add complexity and emulate real scores better.

Support for a key signature is a possible extended feature for a future version (and would require the natural sign). As a matter of principle, I’m not convinced that complexity and better emulation of real scores should be goal in themselves for NoteCard. To my mind the best drill comes from the deepest implementation of the narrowest learning task. Still, I agree that users might benefit from a ‘second course’ of NoteCard quizzes in which each set of notes is presented with a different key signature.

Thanks again for the detailed feedback and suggestions.

Nick

[ooconnor]

Hi Nick,

We used to use NoteCard 2 which was very good, version 3 is a big improvement - well done. However, I must agree with Forlane on the following:

Some more suggestions:

1. There should be a toggle-on option to enable pause to be used during a quiz. It is very frustrating to have someone or something disrupt you after the first note and distort the final result.

3. There should be an option to cancel a quiz in progress. Exiting a program instead of waiting for 10 notes to appear before one can proceed to another menu while testing is uncomfortable.

5. There could be an option for sharps and flats to appear beside the clefs.

6. The natural sign appearing here and there would add complexity and emulate real scores better.

1 & 3 - definitely, there needs to be a option to cancel
5 & 6 - key signatures (with the option for 'accidentals' - naturals/flats/sharps) would be very useful