Music Visualizer

[pikurasa]

I've thought long and hard about this, and I think we need a visualizer that is always displaying the current state of the code -- either as standard notation or piano roll.

Reasons for it:

• Having instant visual feedback promises to be motivating to the learner
• It would help with music literacy
• It helps conceptualize music more easily and efficiently
• It helps with debugging (both for us and for learners).
• It would probably make the programmatic things more evident.

There are some challenges in implementing this. The one big one that has been mentioned before is that programs created by users can have indeterminate outcome, which couldn't be displayed.

We could overcome these challenges in the following ways:

• Simplifying some of the indeterminate possibilities by offering fewer blocks with such features (which is already being discussed)
• Generate the output intermittently -- either at certain intervals (e.g. every few minutes, or after a block has been moved) or when the user clicks "refresh" or something like that.
• Place "wildcard" notes in places where the outcome is indeterminate, but the timing is precise.

For a learners first steps, however, there presumably wouldn't be any of the complexity outlined above, and I think a learner would benefit greatly from the visual feedback, seeing the possible outcome displayed as "pitch/sound over time" and being updated often enough to predict (and learn to better predict) the aural output.