A long time ago in a galaxy far far away . . .No wait . . . that's a different story.OK, several years ago I went back to school to finish a college degree in computer science (even though I've already been working in the industry for years. Oh well.) For the final project we needed to design and build a product and present it to a faculty advisory panel. So I needed a project idea. On a simultainious timeline I started playing an instrument called The Chapman Stick. about 8 or 10 years ago. I had already been playing music all my life (and guitar for over 20 years). But something about The Stick really grabbed my attention. So I decided to merge these two interest by writing a piece of software for The Stick. So we got a project team together and wrote a paper describing the project we were proposing. The faculty accepted it and we started designing and coding. As happens with most college projects we had one member of the team (me) who did most of the work and wrote nearly all the code. Another member of the team wrote most of the documentation and the last two members were merely taking up space. After 3 months of work we had "Tapper". Tapper was a program that allowed the user to select a tuning of The Stick (although the prototype only allowed the 10 string standard tuning). The user could then select a chord or scale in any key. Tapper would show fingering diagrams for that chord or scale. But more importanly, tapper could play that chord or scale via MIDI so the user could actually hear how that fingering would sound. Tapper also had a non-functional GUI (Graphical User Interface) for an ear training section. The ear training dialog box would allow the user to select a chord or scale and a key, Tapper would then pick a random group of notes from that chord or scale and play them. The user would have to try to play the same phrase on his instrument. After a pre-selected time delay (2 to 10 seconds) tapper would show the musical notation and the position on the fingerboard for the random phrase that it had played. Finally, Tapper had a "Flash Card" section. In this dialog box Tapper would show a note on a musical staff. The user would have to play that note. After a time delay Tapper would show the fingering position of that note. This kind of "Flash Card" system would teach a player to read music quite quickly. After school ended I set Tapper aside for over a year. I wanted to eventually build it into the fully featured program that I had envisioned but life just became too busy. Also, I no longer wanted to program it in C++ for MS Windows using the MFC libraries for the gui. I've been programming exclusivly in Java for the past 3 years and I wanted to make Tapper a cross platform Java program. So here we are several years later. I'm opening up the Tapper code and the Tapper vision to the world. I know that many Stick players are software engineers and many computer programmers are also musicians. I'd like to take that combination of talents and use them to build the program that I dreamed about so many years ago. I hope you can be part of that dream. If you're a programmer, photographer, artist, author or just somebody who'd like help out then take a look at the task list and then e-mail me to let me know how you'd like to help out. I'll get in touch with you and we'll get you set up and ready to go. |