Pete's Piano - Software Development

What is it?
A software package I am currently designing and implementing. You see a page of piano sheet-music on the screen, and when you click a button, the PC plays it though the speakers. Sounding just like a real piano. You can then fiddle with the sheet music on the screen, changing the notes, the timing etc. and of course you can hear your changes as you go.

The aim is to allow people to play around with composing and editing piano music using the traditional, accepted and powerful idiom of sheet music, without the massive and oneruous burden of learning the motor skills and fleetness of brain and finger to play a real instrument.

How far has it got?
The stage it's got to is that it has an underlying mathematical / software model of the piece - that knows what notes should be played at what time, for how long, and how loud. There's a software component that tries to work out how this might be expressed in sheet music notation and shows it on the screen. And there's a software component that can take the mathematical model and use it to drive a sound synthesisor to make the 'right noises'.

The current work is to combine the graphics display of the sheet music with the sound generation so you can see on the sheet music some kind of animated display of where you are up to in the playback.

Why am I doing it?
Mainly because the process of doing it is fun and satisfying. But also partly because I find when I read about music theory from books etc. I am completely blocked from assimilating this knowledge in any productive way by not being able to play an instrument. I have tried, but realistically when I look around at people who have some talent for playing instruments - the effort and dedication that even they have to put in to get anywhere is just mad. And not for me.