About Octotune
Octotune is a piano app that runs in your web browser. It teaches you to read sheet music at the piano: grown-ups on a 12-unit path from middle C to sight-reading, and children from 2½ in a Kids mode that needs no reading at all. It was founded by Scott Everitt and Ingrid Everitt.
Octotune is also available as a free download for iPhone and iPad. Get the app and see device requirements, or keep playing in your browser.
Founders
Octotune was founded by Scott Everitt and Ingrid Everitt, who both grew up playing piano. Inspired by their experience as parents, they set out to create an approachable way for young children to engage with music. That vision developed into a piano and music-reading application for children and adults.
Scott Everitt
Co-founder
Scott leads software development at Octotune.
Ingrid Everitt
Co-founder
Ingrid holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA).
Why we made it
Plenty of apps teach you to press the keys that light up. Fewer teach you to read the page, so that you can sit down at any piano with any music. Octotune is reading-first. The lit keys and finger hints are there to help, and they fade as you learn.
We also wanted three things we couldn't find together:
- Real reading, with a real keyboard. A MIDI keyboard plugs straight into the browser. The app hears each note and waits for it, so the page is never a race.
- A way in for the very young. Many piano courses begin at four to six. Octotune Kids begins at 2½, with things a small child can really do: a steady beat, high and low, loud and soft, the black keys in twos and threes.
- Nothing in the way. No ads, no analytics, no voice, and no sign-in for children.
The method
The adult path uses landmark reading, as in the Faber and Alfred method books. You learn three notes on sight (middle C, treble G and bass F) and read every other note as a step or a skip from one of them. Then the reading spreads outward to ledger lines, keys, chords and sight-reading.
For children, the order follows what the established early-childhood methods share: sound before sign (Kodály), the body before the page (Dalcroze), and a steady beat, high and low, loud and soft and the black-key groups before finger numbers, letters and the staff. Methods written for three- to six-year-olds, such as WunderKeys, Music for Little Mozarts and Faber's My First Piano Adventure, all begin away from the staff in much this way.
The research review behind the children's curriculum is Miendlarzewska and Trost (2014), How musical training affects cognitive development: rhythm, reward and other modulating variables. Three ideas from it shaped the app:
- Rhythm comes first. Keeping time with a beat is the skill the review puts at the center, so a steady beat is taught early, not saved for later.
- Reward, not pressure. Children learn best when they want to. So there are no lives, no timers and no failure states for a child, and stars can be earned but never lost.
- Play, don't just listen. Every activity has the child making sound within seconds.
Every sitting is short, three to six minutes for an adult and about two for a child, and ends on music. How the adult path works and the Kids path describe each unit.
The songs
The 15 children's songs are public-domain tunes in our own arrangements, fingered for small hands. The 109 classical pieces come from the Mutopia Project, whose volunteers typeset public-domain music and share it freely. Every piece shows its composer, its typesetter and its license. We are grateful to them.
Credits
Writing about Octotune? The press kit has product facts, logo files and contact details.
The grand piano is a Steinway sampled by Akai, who released the recordings into the public domain. We use the Splendid Grand Piano edition from SFZ Instruments, mapped by kinwie, in the web copies smpldsnds made of it. Octotune serves the files from its own site.
The other instruments (music box, marimba, bells, kalimba, harp, steel drum and xylophone) are from the Fluid (R3) General MIDI soundfont by Frank Wen, as rendered for the web by Benjamin Gleitzman in midi-js-soundfonts. That rendering is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and the soundfont itself under the MIT license. We use the recordings unchanged, and Octotune serves them from its own site.
The instruments are played by smplr, by danigb.
The name, and the octopus
An octopus has eight arms. An octave has eight notes. And Octotune has eight instruments to play: piano, music box, marimba, bells, kalimba, harp, steel drum and xylophone. The mark is Octo peeking over three piano keys, parchment on a navy tile.
Octotune is not affiliated with Nintendo or with the Splatoon 2 soundtrack album Octotune (2018).