Agreed - I've had this argument with people who've implemented virtual scroll on technical tools and now users can't Ctrl-F around, or get a real sense of where they are in the data. Want to count a particular string? Or eyeball as you scroll to get a feel for the shape of it?
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
This is cool, though the notes in your example look pretty random? Are they actually randomly or is it just too modern for me to hear it without playing it?
I'm a fairly average pianist, but sight reading is a (relative) strength. Being able to play random notes is definitely part of it, but I think for me sight-reading is more about getting a sense of the gist of the music (a lot of pattern matching of common phrases, cadences, hand positions etc) - this is kind of subconcious, then my focus is on keeping my internal version aligned with what's on the page (spotting where the written music is doing something different or interesting and making sure you hit those notes). The latter part would definitley improve by practicing random notes, but the first bit is more akin to improvisation - you've got some lossy, distilled version of the music in your head (from memory or from your first mental parse of the full manuscript) and you're trying to recreate it (or expound on it).
I think what really helped my reading was having lots of cheap/free sheet music on hand and just trying to play it (simplifying massively if needed, but trying to get the sense of it, even if only playing 20% of the notes)
Yes, that's the problem with this approach. You don't learn random notes, you learn note patterns.
It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and learning to read words. Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, typically arranged in some kind of harmonic context so you can make reasonable guesses about what's coming next.
This matters because finger positions have to be optimised for the smoothest and fastest motion. Piano sheet music usually includes this information, but random note sequences won't.
All of it contributes to look-ahead, where you're reading a bar or two ahead of the music to give your brain time to assemble the finger movements it's going to need.
I was going to make the same comment as the PP, but I disagree with your point about "note patterns". When you're sight reading real music (melodies, harmonies and chords), that's when you start grokking note patterns and can reach real mastery. Sufficiently good sight readers often don't even need to read every individual note to anticipate what will "happen next" because in many cases chord progressions, rhythms and harmonies are fairly predictable (especially, especially in pop/rock music, religious music and a lot of early classical.
I think the OP would have benefitted more from programming an interface to project Hanon's exercises[1] to practice than randomized notes.
[1] https://www.hanon-online.com/ <-- perhaps the most popular fingering practice for pianists. It's boring and tedious, but it 100% works!
They are not anticipating the next phrase from memory. Music has a structure that often repeats or relates to earlier patterns. Like reading, you look forward and recognise the patterns in the score and their relative position. While I am partially agreeing with you, I disagree about 'reading' individual notes. You see every note, you just don't need to convert them to a letter or key, because your hand is playing the whole phrase by interpreting the structure.
> good sight readers often don't even need to read
That would suggest they aren't good at reading, but good at playing. If you are practicing reading, then not reading and making stuff up is against what you are trying to do.
> Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands...
This made me think of typing tutor programs that just prompt for random letters. I type like shit on those-- slow and inaccurate.
On the other hand, I'm quick and reasonably accurate when typing English words and frequently-used command lines.
The analogy would surely hold true with musical instruments. Even with my limited experience playing musical instruments I can't imagine trying to practice random notes and rhythms. On the face of it I would think it would have little to no value. (Effectively practicing to play unlistenable music...)
I remember typing tutors that started with the home row and slowly expanded. There aren’t a lot of words that use the home row exclusively, so you end up with nonsense.
(You said “typing tutors programs” but my memory is of actual tutors, as in, people.)
You may not like practicing random notes but maybe you want to play Schönberg or Bartók?
As a counterpoint, Bartok’s Mikrokosmos [1] was the “textbook” for a piano sight reading class at my community college. He does have a lot of accessible, even pedagogical, pieces.
I mean, Bartók is really not that random: polytonality, pentatonic and octatonic stuff, whole-tone scales etc. are all things you can practice and put into work in his music. (You can argue that Schönberg is even less random, cause serialism, but that probably doesn't help too much when playing the piano).
As a wildly amateur and unschooled musician Bartók simply looks wildly intimidating. Listen to him (again, as a wildly amateur and unschooled musician) doesn't make him make much more sense.
I wish I'd taken music more seriously when I was a kid (and had better neuroplasticity). I know I could still make decent progress with it, even at nearly 50, but I missed my opportunity to really cozy up to it deeply. (Instead I've got 6502 and 16-bit x86 assembler... Arguably not an even trade.)
...on a lovely, bangy, ink-scented IBM Selectric in typing class. Which at the time felt like a meaningless exercise, but absolutely strengthened the ability of my fingers to find the right keys in a hurry without looking at the keyboard.
> typing tutor programs that just prompt for random letters
I learnt touch typing on a physical mechanical typewriter. The syllabus that I followed did seem random but as I kept at it I could see there was a method to the madness.
I checked out a few software tutorials and they seemed OK. Maybe there are some not good ones.
Music is made of words - scale-specific gestures, of which there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, typically arranged in some kind of harmonic context so you can make reasonable guesses about what's coming next
Some genres of music are that way. Other genres have different conventions, ethics, and aesthetics. Even within harmonically oriented Euro-traditions, great weight is given to a musician’s ability to play what does not easily “fall under the fingers.”
There’s nothing wrong with Smoke on the Water but it is totally played.
> It's the difference between learning to recognise letters and learning to read words
Bebop is the best example of this for me in music. When I first started listening to Charlie Parker as a teenager, I heard only a series of notes. But it sounded great so I kept listening (a lot!) and then I heard phrases, sentences, an actual language.
Then I bought Giant Steps and again heard only a scramble of notes. It was a new language, which took some time to learn. But now listening to Coltrane and listening to someone talk, feels exactly the same.
Yes the notes are in a random sequence. The "chords" appear to be chosen as major or minor triads, with random inversions or random "common intervals" like octaves, fifths and fourths, I don't think I've ever come across a tritone or "wierd" intervals.
I have gone through various phases in how it feels to play these random notes. Right at the beginning there is obviously the mechanical skill of just being able to put your fingers in the right place. This is less pronounced on piano than guitar, since single notes on the piano are obviously pretty easy for anyone. But when I switched to chords, I definitely felt the feeling I remember from learning the guitar, where the campfire chord shapes seemed to be just impossible to achieve with my fingers.
Keep in mind that this is not the only thing I'm doing to learn - I am also learning pieces, playing arpeggios and scales and studying music theory. Lately I've been gaining speed on the random notes by identifying runs and reading ahead a bit like you're describing.
I am quite proficient at guitar, played in a band and did a lot of pop music playing where you're handed a lyric sheet with chords and you have to just play. I can do that pretty much without prep. I can also "sight read" tablature for reasonably simple finger picking for novel songs quite a bit faster than I am able to do it on piano at the moment. I could never quite get there for traditional notation although I tried. I struggled to improve because once I knew the piece, I could play it without reading the music. So I would laboriously figure out the fingerings, then just play the piece from memory once I had done that. This was all happening in the early 1990s so I also didn't have the glut of music we would have now. Tablature was much more available for the pieces I wante to learn than traditional notation. I guess there is a mode where you force yourself to only learn new pieces all the time, but I found that pretty frustrating coming from zero.
I'm finding with piano, now that I have the notes in my fingers, that first step is much less frustrating and I can focus on building the mechanical dexterity to execute the phrases and remember the music.
To my enormous relief, the Samsung stove that came with our house gets this right - even covered in water the controls still work. I was previously dead-against induction just because I couldn't find a good quality stove-top with physical buttons, to the point where I'd already budgeted replacing it with gas when we bought the house. I don't know how they've done it, but it's the only one I've ever used that manages. (For comparison, the high-end Miele and cheap-and-cheerful non-branded ones I've used in various rental houses over the last 20 years have all had exactly the problem you describe above).
A few of the new home models (in Europe at least) come with physical knobs.
My two gripes about induction are the touch controls they typically ship with and the inability to roast peppers over an open flame. But the incredible temperature response makes up for both IMO.
When I'm making a throwaway interface like this, I write the GET handler to return a super-minimal page with an unstyled form having method=POST and the couple of inputs required. The POST handler actions the request and redirects to itself to GET the form again - browsers are so forgiving of incomplete/incorrect markup and the base browser style-sheet screams "this is a prototype, don't judge it!" to anybody you show it to.
To be clear I'm just talking about the web interface, not implying the whole project is throwaway - on the contrary it looks like a lot of work (and a lot of fun :) ) kudos!
The author was a labmate, and the person who introduced me to python. Taking over one of his codebases was rather a formative part of my career. (That particular code was considerably more normal than the one linked above).
Also for me, both on Firefox and Edge - I'm wondering if it's to do with being behind a corporate proxy that MITMs everything and might be buffering rather than passing through partial respones, or has a much higher threshold before streaming?
If that is the reason, it'll provide an (even more than usually) poor experience for those behind such a proxy
I was quite annoyed when I dropped my 13yo one and broke the handle. Then I discovered they sell replacement handles! 5 minutes with a hammer and punch later and it should be good for another 13 years (or till I next drop it)
This is often said, but I don't think it should paint too rosy a picture, it's still a massively debilitating disease. My father (diagnosed just after 50) lived nearly 30 years with it (died 78 - I guess that's normal life expectancy, but the last decade of his life he had a pretty bad quality of life). He is unusual in that his death cert just says Parkinson's Disease as cause of death, and I wondered at the time whether the consultant was making a point that PD can be the thing that kills you after all. He really didn't have much else wrong with him except that, once the drugs stopped working he couldn't swallow, talk or walk - he lost a ton of weight and the dementia side of it (which is far less discussed) meant any kind of communication was basically impossible. Not sure what my point is - but "you don't die of it" is a bit of an oversimplification.
That is incredible. To live 27-28 years after diagnosis is a modern medical miracle. That said, I am highly sympathetic to the points that you made. Essentially, he became a vegetable: <<any kind of communication was basically impossible>>
Did you ever discuss end-of-life options with him before the disease progressed so far? I have a close relative with PD. I am terrified of the last years, but no idea how to raise the issue of end-of-life options. My family's culture is pretty much "try to live forever" instead of "try to live well". Are there any Swiss/Belgians/Dutchies here with experience on planned end-of-life options? Those three countries are exceptionally liberal on that matter.
More generally, it's one of the interesting things working in a non-big-tech company with non-public-facing software. So much of the received wisdom and culture in our field comes from places with incredible engineering talent but working at totally different scales with different constraints and requirements. Some of time the practices, tools, approaches advocated by big tech apply generally, and sometimes they do things a particular way because it's the least bad option given their constraints (which are not the same as our constraints).
There are good reasons why Amazon doesn't return a 10,000 row table when you search for a mobile phone case, but for [data ]scientists|analysts etc many of those reasons no longer apply, and the best UX might just be the massive table/grid of data.
Not sure what the answer is, other than keep talking to your users and watching them using your tools :)
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