koljapluemer / cut-up-and-practice

A python app to practice music — "cut" sheet music into pieces and get better with chunking and deliberate practice.

Cut Up and Practice

These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms.

— The Talent Code

This project allows you to practice music by "cutting up" a piece of music into snippets and practicing them, one after the other. It follows the principles of Deliberate Practice, Chunking, and Spaced Repetition.

Cut Up and Practice is in an early stage of development. You can run it and use it to practice almost any instrument, but expect rough edges and missing features.

How It Works

1. Find a piece of music that you want to practice (e.g. sheet music)
2. "Cut it" into small pieces using a screenshot tool of your choice
3. Put all screenshots into a folder
4. Start Cut Up and Practice, load up the folder and auto-generate "snippets"
5. Practice!

Also see demo video below:

demo_video.mp4

Contributing & Running Locally

Release files that allow you to run this app with one click are WIP. For now, it has to be installed manually.

1. clone this repository to your local machine
2. make sure Python is installed
3. create and activate a virtualenv
4. get dependencies, e.g. with pip install -r requirements.txt
5. run python src/app.py

I am happy about any contribution, issue of feedback :)

Building

1. Run pyinstaller src/app.py --hidden-import=PIL._tkinter_finder --hidden-import=pony.orm.dbproviders --hidden-import=pony.orm.dbproviders.sqlite

Credit

• executable app made with pyinstaller
• using ebisu for exercise selection
• other stack:
  • tkk
  • Pony ORM