Magical Music

Magical Music is a fun app for learning how to play your favorite songs on the piano or keyboard. The concept is similar to Guitar Hero, with notes falling from the top as the song progresses, giving you an overall grade on how well you hit the right notes.

The player picks the song to learn at the landing page

The difference is that you learn the actual notes of the song, and can choose to play either on the virtual keyboard or with an accompanying real keyboard or piano.

As the notes fall, the player hits the corresponding key

The app was built to showcase the ease at which developers could build beautiful, yet powerful Windows 8 applications quickly and easily by combining native C++ with Windows 8 XAML. It was released as a sample at the //build 2011 conference.

I designed and implemented the overall app experience in collaboration with other developers. It was a short project but a great learning experience overall because it was my first design project for Microsoft, my first time shipping and I got to learn a little bit of C++ (we used it to process the incoming sound from the real keyboard!).