Should You Know Music Theory to Build a Mobile App for Musicians?
An interview with a Rosberry team Product Owner in charge of the Demo app project.
Over the years Rosberry has complemented its portfolio with a whole bunch of creativity boosting apps. Among them are Filmm — an easy video editing app, Template — the app to design your Instagram feed and stories, Pixel Craft — a color-by-number app, Painting Therapy — an anti-stress and relaxing painting game and SplitPic — an original collage and cloning app.
We developed our first music application around 6 years ago. That was Trackd: Social Music Platform which enables you to record songs, make joint tracks with other users and share music with the whole world. Now it’s been taken care of by the client’s product team while we received an offer from a different company to develop Demo — and we accepted it.
The idea behind the iOS-based Demo app is to be an easy-to-use mobile tool for both professional musicians and amateurs. Just imagine, you are walking down the street, and suddenly a melody starts playing in your head which you somehow need to write down so as not to forget. The melody is then followed by some bits and pieces of lyrics you should also capture somehow to later give the track another brush and make it a full-fledged song or a composition but in a more suitable environment. For those who have no musical background at all, the application offers a lot of ready-made chord progressions and helps to come up with the lyrics.
To make it a go the project required knowledgeable developers coming from a musical background. Anton, Chief Technical Officer at Rosberry, struck the perfect balance in that respect: he is an experienced iOS developer, has music education, is good at playing keyboards and making music. He previously worked with the Demo client within other projects, so a common language was already there. All these factors allowed our CTO to also take on the role of a Product Owner. This time we’ve decided to talk to him about the Demo app which has become really special to the Rosberry team.
Anton, you have been at Rosberry for over 10 years and have participated in hundreds of projects of varying complexity. What was so different about the Demo project?
The main feature of the project was that the app functionality implementation required an in-depth knowledge of music theory. Although earlier we had projects that were somehow related to music or implied sound processing, Demo brought the team to dive into the very fundamentals of music creation. The project has been one of the most hardcore ones I’ve ever been involved in.
How deep was the knowledge supposed to be to develop the application freely and confidently?
In terms of theory, the work required that we should understand the basics of musical notation, chord variations and inversions, tempo, time signature and tonality. From a more practical perspective everyone had to be familiar with the MIDI and various audio formats, MIDI playback synchronisation with the recorded audio and live recording.
How did you get the team together if you say the project required special knowledge of music theory?
Well, I can’t say the knowledge of music theory and the basics of mixing were the main criteria for building the team, but, of course, we kept that in mind. In one way or another four of us: myself, a QA-engineer, a backend developer and a UI/UX designer had the knowledge. I was also helping the team to gain insight into working with MIDI and audio data. But it was a little more difficult for our main iOS developer, so the team gave him a crash course covering all essentials he might need throughout the project.
For example?
We did our best to fill in the gaps both in his knowledge of the simplest concepts like octaves, tonalities and types of chords, and of slightly more advanced ones: the Nashville number system, transposition, etc.
And could developers without special knowledge develop the Demo app?
In the context of the Infinite Monkey Theorem, they could — sooner or later. However, it would be a real challenge. In this case, the client would be spinning out the pleasure describing the app logic, its functionality and features — painfully, in the smallest details, over and over again, and the team would be doing a lot of things through trial and error.
Anyway, assuming that no one on the team didn’t have similar experience, the best first step would be getting familiar with music theory.
What are you really proud of in this project in terms of technical implementation?
The most significant achievement has been how we’ve managed to organise the work with “styles” and rhythms in the app.
“Style” — like hip-hop or rock?
Almost. A “style” in Demo is the set of chords characteristic of a musical style. The user can choose one of the preset “styles” in the app or create their own. For example, the following chords build a set for the Pop-1 style: Am, F, Em, G.
But chords alone are not enough, you still need to understand how they should be played. Here the rhythm comes to the rescue. The rhythm describes in what order, with what velocity and duration the notes in these chords are played, how the pauses are placed and how the percussion part should be played. The app has the rhythms tailored to a particular musical style, and there are more universal ones.
Of course, I can’t disclose all the details, but it was a non-trivial task that required attention both technical- and product-wise.
Tell us a little about testing as it was different from testing on other projects, right?
As is the case with any multimedia application, the main challenge of the Demo project was testing of the generated content. Here we are talking about a sequence of chords composed by the user, audio recording and, ultimately, a resulting song. That also required the knowledge of musical theory, because otherwise it would have been impossible to check the correctness of the inversion and transposition of chords or switching between time signatures. Fortunately, we had a QA engineer on the team who took on that difficult job.
It must have been wildly interesting to test the application?
Well, in fact, the process was not much different from testing of any other application, except that our QA engineer had to ‘shut himself away’ from time to time to record audio. The major tricks were attention to detail and musical experience, which made it possible to quickly notice if something was going wrong: be it a desynchronisation of audio tracks or some incorrect change of tonality, or anything else.
Did the QA engineer use any musical instruments while recording audio?
He didn’t need any, since Demo is the very instrument. But he was recording vocals — singing heart out, actually!
It would probably be not right to say that Demo has no peer competitors, so how does it attract users?
I would say that the main selling point of Demo is focusing on specific flow of work and balance between the needs of amateurs and more experienced users. The application is not pretending to become a complete replacement for a digital audio workstation, but it’s zeroing in on being a kind of all-in-one notebook to capture musical ideas.
Did you look around to borrow the best practices from your competitors to use them in your product?
We didn’t much, to be honest. But, of course, we took into account some general aspects of working with audio and MIDI, which are typical for almost all such applications and digital workstations. The basic user flow, in turn, is quite unique, so we would have not been able to have some sneaky peek to work it through similarly, at all desire.
How is the project doing these days? What plans do you have in stock to enhance the app?
I can hardly expand on that, since it is proprietary information. But we’ve definitely ramped up our skills in creating apps for musicians and are ready to take up the next big idea.
Many successful apps developed by Rosberry are about people’s real interests and hobbies, as in addition to being designers, developers and testers, we are also enthusiastic musicians, photographers, athletes, travellers, DJs and even beekeepers. We know what we want from such applications as users, not as professionals only. So, at the interface of hard skills and inspiration, we keep on creating high-quality lifestyle apps like Demo.
