←All ideas

Piano Practice as Flashcards

Seed
First sketched: January 30, 2026

Imagine Anki, or Duolingo, but with your sheet music that tracks your progress. You don't need to spend time planning your session, just show up and launch the app - it knows what you should practice to get better.

The itch

  • Developing a consistent practicing schedule is always challenging, but it's more challenging to come up with a plan (and sticking with it) that help you to make progress
  • Too much cognitive load for deciding daily practice schedule - what to review and what to practice
  • Practicing pieces is not like memorising words, same bar will be repeated at different tempo, and each time is a new session (not simply a review)
  • Slow progress, not very rewarding. Many streaks tend to break due to lack of positive feedback loop

What if…

  • Divide-and-conquer: break pieces down to bars (or phrases) and treat each of them as a "card". When certain familiarity is reached, we "merge" the cards, like in merge sort algorithm lol
  • Recording your practice session (WITH PERMISSION OF COURSE) in the background, the recording will be attributed to the "cards", so you can hear the progress you've made
  • Structured mode (with warm up, scales and stuff) vs. Casual mode (just play the piece).
  • Intelligent practice session construction: give an estimate of time (or free play mode), the app will put the "cards" together with correct repetition to dynamically generate a session that can be completed within the indicated time.

How I'd build it

  • Sheet music OCR & Bar recognition?
  • Practice session construction algorithm (the fun bit): deterministic? AI driven?
  • User experience: simplistic interface, no unnecessary decisions to be made, no cognitive load. The interface fails if the user has to spend > 30 seconds in getting to their customised and personalised practice session
  • Nice to haves: Accurate PDF -> MusicXML translation (tried some open-source ones, failed for the sheet I have)

Log

Initial scoping + React based mock up. Does not look good : (

iPad prototyping, first working version. But the user experience is still not ideal, and still too many cognitive load for user to launch a session.