How we made the Wolfie piano app | App story
We at music tech company Tonara are a relatively small setup – 15 people to be precise. But together we have more than 250 years of music playing, composing and teaching between us. We’re all equally passionate about both music and innovation, and we have a chief music officer instead of a chief marketing officer. So it should come as no surprise that every product we’ve developed uses the massive potential of technology to connect more people to the wonder and beauty of classical music, and the value of music education.
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Our music education app, Wolfie – (nick)named after prolific composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – grew out of an understanding that the process of studying music could be lonely and unappealing for today’s generation of children.
Classical music education might be alive and well in China, but in the US and to a lesser extent Europe, the field of study is declining. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. For a generation of children who are tablet native, the idea of sitting down with an analogue object can seem boring when compared to an hour on a device that gives you access to worlds of information and entertainment.
Instead of fighting the rising dominance of apps and tablets, our response was to use precisely those tools to bring kids back to music study. We believe that studying to play an instrument is a valuable, enjoyable and rewarding experience, so we wanted to create a technological bridge to help a younger generation access that. Wolfie was designed as a music education tool that would speak the language of today’s generation of children: technology.
Our first step in doing this was to find a way to help younger students focus and concentrate – a tall order when, according to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.
A screenshot from the app.
After an hour’s lesson with a teacher, finding the self-motivation to practise alone can be hard. That’s why our first and most important feature of Wolfie was the patented Magic Cursor, which follows music being played by students in real-time on the score itself. This helps students focus their attention on the music, learn notes more effectively and improve their rhythm.
It works for any instrumentation, any style and any level of complexity, demonstrating a level of technological innovation that was previously unheard of. With the Magic Cursor we’ve created a digital technology that is able to really “hear” music.
Once we had built the first version of the app, we needed to test it in the real world. We initially trialled Wolfie at the Special Music School (SMS) in New York. As part of the pilot, we worked closely with teachers and students to make changes to the platform based on their feedback.
This process was instrumental in helping us refine our offering and the SMS has continued to use the app even after the pilot programme ended. This told us we were on the right track with giving teachers and students what they need to teach and learn more effectively.
One of our biggest ongoing challenges is ensuring Wolfie has an extensive catalogue of scores to keep up with the needs of any music teacher or student. Our mandate is to make it as easy as possible for young people to get excited about learning to play music, so we can’t afford not to have a score that a student might want to learn to play. In order to do that we had to partner with different music publishers to build a score catalogue for music students at every level. We’ve been lucky so far in partnering with major music publishers like Schott, but this is an ongoing process and we’re constantly adding new scores.
So far we’ve managed to make the process of studying music approximate other digital experiences young students today are having. Wolfie is getting kids to sit at the piano with the same technology that was pulling them away from it. Our next steps will be to continue improving the product – we’ve got a major update coming soon – and increasing our exposure with music teachers, who are the gatekeepers to the music teaching experience.
App facts
Length of the project: 12 months from start to finish
Companies involved: Tonara
Size of the team: one algorithm developer, three software developers, three musicians and one designer/product manager
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Guy Bauman is CEO of Tonara
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