Platform: iOS
Price: $3.99USD
Morton Subotnick’s Pitch Painter is a simple yet elegant idea. You can paint with your finger across a screen. As you draw you create lines which correspond to music notes in a scale. The rise and fall of the line you draw visually represents the sound of the instrument playing higher and lower. You can select from among 12 instruments to plays the melody you have drawn, the color of the line changes as you change the instrument. Instruments are arranged by 4 regions of the world which each house 3 instruments:
Europe and North America (Piano, Clarinet, Trumpet)
West Africa (Balafon, Mbira/Kalimba & Wooden Flute)
Middle East (Rebab, Oud & Ney)
East Asia (Erhu, Pipa & Dizi or Xiao)
The vertical axis of the app is the pitch. It is graph based so each square represents a note in the scale. As you change region you change scale. East Asia is a pentatonic scale, Europe is a diatonic scale and Africa and the Middle East are modes specific to their regions.
There are 7 ways of playing with the app:
1. Painting with your finger and enjoying the sounds you are making as you make them
2. “Replay you’re performance” which is a version of playback that replays what you drew in the order you painted it
3. “Play the canvas,” playback that plays what is painted on the canvas in order from left to right
4. “Reverse the canvas,” playback that converts what you painted into retrograde, meaning flipping it back to front.
5. “Flip the canvas,” playback that inverts what you painted, flipping it upside down.
6. Save/Load creations you have made
7. “Scrub Bar” that lets you run your finger from left to right and back, playing what has been drawn in any order.
A great music exploration game for kids
I’ve found that children really love to explore this app. They can draw in a careful way or just freely run their fingers across the screen haphazardly. This suits multiple exploration styles. It is not a game with an objective or any corrective feedback but a sound exploration sandbox. The number of instruments, regions and ways of drawing with choices of playback keep kids engaged in exploring.
Kids can sometimes get obsessive about filling up the all the space on the “canvas” with color. Luckily, there is the “replay your performance” playback option. It prevents always creating a giant block of sound if using the other playback options.
Music Lesson Ideas
There are many ways the app could be used in an educational setting. Terms such as inversion and retrograde could be introduced by having the learner select the correct playback function such as “flip the canvas” and “reverse the canvas” for example. The different scale types and instruments from regions of the world offer a lot of possibility for ear training and teaching “about” music.
The use of the grid system within this app helps build introduce the MIDI piano roll interface through a fun and interactive medium. It is also a great visual metaphor for pitch contour, the shape of a melody. Unfortunately, it is way too easy to draw two squares close together all the time unless you try to be very precise and dot paint with your finger but who knows many kids who like to be slow and careful? On the left to right axis, it’s not so much of a problem as it makes the note longer but on the vertical axis it places two notes close together which can make for some clashing sounds. It would be a definite improvement to add a “single line” feature to this app. Switching between the two modes would allow exploration of the difference between single line and harmonized melodies.
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