About Octotune
Octotune is a piano app that runs in the web browser and teaches people to read sheet music at the piano, from a first sound at age 2½ to sight-reading. It is made by the Octotune team and is built on landmark reading, sound before sign, and short sittings that end on music.
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 is made by the Octotune team.
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 outwards 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 centre, 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 110 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 licence. We are grateful to them.
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 a plain, friendly octopus on a blue tile, lifting a single note.
Octotune is not affiliated with Nintendo or with the Splatoon 2 soundtrack album Octotune (2018).
Octotune is not affiliated with Nintendo or with the Splatoon 2 soundtrack album "Octotune" (2018).