Swara
An app that teaches the harmonium by listening to you play
Our own product: a learning app for the harmonium. Notes travel towards the keyboard, and the app listens to the real instrument through the microphone, chords and drone included.
- Sector
- Education · Music
- What we did
- Coding · Design · Strategy · App
Swara is Digital Mycelium's own product: an app that teaches the harmonium the way the best piano apps teach piano. Notes travel down a glowing highway towards the keyboard, and the app listens to the real instrument through the microphone to know what you played.
A harmonium is hard to listen to. A drone is usually held under the melody and a chord is three keys at once, so an ordinary tuner hears a blur. We built a listening engine that separates the keys, so a held drone, a melody note and a full chord are each heard for what they are. It can also learn the sound of your own instrument, key by key.
Around that sit three ways to play (the music waits for you, you keep time, or you listen first), chord lessons with finger numbers that practise every change in a song, and animated backdrops drawn in real time that respond to each note. Swara is built natively in SwiftUI and Metal. It is in development on Mac, with iPhone and iPad to follow.
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