Show HN: OnKey – I'm a bad singer, so I built an app to show where I'm off-key

I have thoughts about this pedagologically. I think these kinds of tools can be helpful, but the number of rhythm students I have seen who need to break out of the dependence on a visual metronome is rough.

Part of the struggle is really listening to yourself, and learning how to pick up on your own mistakes.

I hope the tool is helpful, and I hope I don't sound too curmudgeonly when I say don't let the time making and maintaining tools for practice detract from the most important thing, the ur-tool of all learning: more practice.

(Ask me how I know! A common trap for programmers!)

What a fun idea! I love that the song doesn't have to be programmed in by the developer. Will give it a try.

Have you played the Rock Band and similar "rhythm games" that were all the rage in the Wii era? I don't know that it helped my singing per se but gave some incentive to practice.

In case anyone is interested, you can test your relative pitch perception (as opposed to producing the pitch) in this excellent Yale site: https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td I got 15th [sic] percentile!

You built the scoring feature of karaoke that I failed to build a few years ago, this is awesome!

If you haven't done any karaoke using DAM/JoySound, etc they have a scoring mode that sits at the top that does two things: one, help you sing on key because we all suck, and two, score then rank you against other singers (anonymously.)

I couldn't tell from the demo, but do you get access to the audio ahead of time? My karaoke project stopped in its tracks because I couldn't afford to secure rights to music and there didn't seem to be a great legal solution to get audio.

> These requests do go out:

> Shazam (Apple): a short signature of the music app's sound, not the audio and never your mic, to name a song OnKey hasn't learned when the music app doesn't say what's playing.

> LRCLIB: the song's artist, title, album and length, to fetch lyrics.

> iTunes Search and Lookup (Apple): an artist and title, or the ID Shazam returned, for covers and the song's length. The cover images come from Spotify's, Apple's or YouTube's image hosts.

> GitHub: a check for a new version a minute after launch and once a day, and its download.

I really appreciate this level of transparency. Wish it was the standard.

I am sure this app will be very useful for my wife and daughter, who spent the whole day singing at the top of their lungs. It will also be a benefit for me, as I’ll get to hear more accurate notes.

Singing is about so much more than just hitting the right notes. Breath management is one of the most important skills you can develop to improve your singing. Proper vocal technique helps you avoid injuring your voice when tackling difficult songs. Learning to recognize and use techniques like belting, twang, head voice, chest voice, vocal fry, etc., can really bring your singing to life. Prosody and rhythm training help you develop good timing (one of the most important aspects of music), and there's so much more to it.

This kind of app is great for getting started and getting a taste of what singing involves, but it would be awesome to cover these other aspects as well, or at least mention their existence for aspiring singers.

i love the feature where you can select a song to compare to.

My little sister asked me to turn music into notation. I built https://om-intelligence.ch/projects/vocal-notation/vocal-not...

feel free to integrate that into your app, the architecture might be a way around mac only..

It might be able to turn any song into singable notation then.

Good show!

Here's a stress test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMzIk2pUuNU