Musicparrot

What is it ?

Musicparrot was an idea pitched by Nick van der Wildt, eventually leading to a total of five individuals (including yours truly) to be excited enough to pursue this idea as a startup opportunity.

Musicparrot in a nutshell: "An online music education platform. Musicparrot provides video-based lessons to those who are willing to learn to play an instrument.".

SPOILER: Despite gaining some traction, work on Musicparrot has ceased. This page is for historical purposes.

Target audience

Musicparrot was aimed at students who are either unable to take lessons with a physical teacher or just prefer to learn on their own. The payment model of the platform would cater to both types as students would only pay when actually taking a course, instead of losing money on a mostly unused subscription.

Musicparrot also catered to teachers. Teachers would be screened (to ensure quality of both video and lesson) and could enroll in a program in which they would earn money for each lesson a student would watch. By extension, the platform would also feature direct student - teacher communication in order to provide personal feedback on a students progress.

The added benefit of providing a platform to teachers is that this allowed Musicparrot to easily branch out globally by accepting content in multiple languages. By having moderated feedback on a students progress, this also enabled gamification: students could compete with each other for their achievements in leaderboards.

Screenshot of an example guitar lesson, accompanied by animated guitar tab.

A custom music language

Different instruments use different notation methods: where pianists, woodwind and horn players would be accustomed to reading musical score as stave / staff, guitarists and drummers would prefer the format known as tab. Regardless of the notation type, traditionally learning how to read any form of music has been enough of a barrier to deter any prospective musician. Should we instead design a common tuition language that is applicable to multiple types of instruments while at the same time ensuring that slowly the learning curve can be increased to eventually present itself as a more conventional format?

For this purpose, Musicparrot came up with its own (colour coded) schemas that could be used across instruments. This to the advantage of people who are switching/learning new instruments by giving them a visual aid reminiscent of what they already know. New players could quickly adjust to the language and distinguish between notes, chords and chord flavours visually (also see screenshot of guitar lesson above).

Under the hood, the Musicparrot platform would use a single language for all music, regardless of the instrument it was intended for. While you can argue that there are a plethora of universal digital music formats (such as MIDI), for the benefit of visual representation it became apparent that more meta data is required. For this purpose, the "Musicparrot Format" (MPF) was created.

MPF could be converted from a variety of input formats (e.g. MIDI, ABC, ASCII) allowing an immediate import of projects created using standard music notation software. This to allow teachers to export their projects directly onto the Musicparrot platform and have their lesson be accompanied by visual cues automatically.

Multi platform web client

Musicparrots prototype was in an advanced stage and could cater for desktop, tablet and phone platforms with the only requirements being a web browser and a broadband internet connection. Even legacy browsers were supported by the use of Flash shims (you'd be amazed at the need for those, even in 2015!).

The aforementioned MPF format had been developed, as well as the applications to view either guitar or piano notation next to a video lesson, with the Musicparrot colour coded schema and lookahead.

Musicparrots styleguide had been translated into a reusable set of components which would ensure that the brand would be represented appropriately across a large range of devices through the platforms mini-applications.

Technologies used

Musicparrot was written using .NET, JavaScript, ActionScript 3, PHP, Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3, Cloudfront)

The benefit of starting a venture with software engineers that have been honing their craft for a while, is that you have a great head start in test coverage, build automation and continuous integration/delivery pipelines as each code change would result in an automated deployment bringing the latest developments to production.

Whether it is better to actually have a product first and worry about these peculiarities later is a different subject (!).