The Project

Data can be pretty sweet – I think its real fun to see progression and adds an aspect of gamification to otherwise mundane things. However, something to track piano playing didn’t exist – yet.

Therefore what I created is a piano keylogger, heatmap generator and session tracker. The idea is with this you can accurately see what keys you played and for how long you practiced – reducing my ability to lie about practice length (the initial purpose of this) while getting some cool graphs. I imagine the heatmaps for various composers works or genres of music could be insightful.

The Program

Heatmap Creation:

To make the piano diagram we use the PIL module and lots of polygons. To get the layering I wanted (black keys over white keys) I had to draw the black keys second. This is fine but introduced a mapping problem.

Green numbers represent the MIDI ID’s. Because I am drawing these in first I have to also fill them with the heatmap coloration first. I drew them in a simple incremental pattern (red #’s) – but now I’d need something to map the red numbers to green numbers (this problem will occur again for drawing black keys). The solution was to create mappings in a CSV file and reference the file for every key drawn in. Its obviously not optimal from a performance point of view but it is configurable and works.