Zeroseven

Brendan Hogan, founder of Australia's largest and most successful in-school keyboard music program which teaches thousands of children across Australia to play the keyboard, approached Zeroseven to help turn his piano teaching methodology into an interactive application.

Brendan has literally written the text book which, perfected over many years, contained the syllabus for the lessons and together with his in-house team created the characters, story line and animations to bring it to life.

Zeroseven took Brendan's visionary invention, Musiah® - the world's first Artificially Intelligent Virtual Piano Teacher, and custom built an application to house it.

The creation of the interactive Musiah® project consisted of developing several distinct parts, including:

• The Desktop Application: The core Musiah application is built using Microsoft.Net and Flash and runs on the user's desktop 
• This communicates with the secure Web Services 
• Public Website (build - not design)
• Customer account management
• Web based account management administration
• Several custom desktop applications using Adobe AIR, Flash and Microsoft.Net for the creation and management of application content

Features of the final desktop product include:

• Fantastic audio quality with the integration of software synthesizers responding to student MIDI input and final answer files
• Custom Flash flow handling, controlling the flow of the visual display, audio, character animation, tasks and feedback
• MusicXML Renderer that produces a dynamic music manuscript from an XML file. This allows for students to interact with the items displayed (notes, rests, clefs, key signatures and so on) while learning about them and for Musiah to be able to give illustrated feedback.
• MIDI integration for scoring and 'correct' answer playbacks
• Unique scoring algorithms and feedback mechanism, that marks the student on their note accuracy, timing, duration and provides feedback depending on the students learning requirements and history, including note by note or grouped feedback, step-by-step instruction, video feedback
• Unique Flash animation control and audio synchronising using an XML
• Secure web service integration with online customer progress tracking

Content helper applications:

• Animation Creator - An Adobe AIR application allowing content editors to create sequences of animations using the five main characters synchronised to audio clips
• The MIDI Mapper - This tool takes a MIDI file and the MusicXML file and automates the process of mapping the visible note with the heard note, creating custom MIDI answer files that have a human feel to them
• Desktop application administration that turns thousands of audio clips, images, animations, Music XML files, midi files and other assets into the lesson content for the application.

As of 22 May 2012, the Musiah application is in BETA and used by over a 1,000 end users. The application has received rave reviews and is suitable for users of all ages from children to adults. Musiah® has revolutionized piano teaching and Zeroseven is thrilled to be a part of it.

Microsoft.NET // SQL Server // HTML // JavaScript // Flash // Adobe AIR // Web Services // CSS // AJAX