Competition is a powerful force. Do you really think those weenies who spent 10,000 hours perfecting their Guitar Hero chops would have done it if it wasn’t a game? No way.
Applying similar logic to the art of playing real music, Music Kombat, one of the music hacks demonstrated at the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Hackathon, lets two instrumentalists (or, we assume, singers) match wits by seeing who can sightread segments of a piece of popular music the best.
“Music Kombat is a music app that teaches and reinforces note recognition and sight reading,” explained the group’s spokesman, who then plucked out a few notes on a ukelele. (The group included Kenneth Ballenegger, Brandon Goldman, Joselle Ho, and Jonathan Nesvadba.) ”Musicians hone their skills by competing with other players. I’ll be competing against my friend, Ken. I’m going to be Ziggy Stardust and he’s going to be Mrs. Robinson.”
Indeed, the game includes cartoonish avatars culled from the annals of popular music, which is a nice touch. To play, each player looks at notes on an oversized musical staff on their own iPad and tries to play each one in order. The iPad 2′s microphone picks up the sound and compares it against the notes.
“Notice that as we progress, I’m actually taking away his life, like it’s a fight simulator.”
Since the angle of Rock Band 3 is that you get a real-ish guitar to learn via gaming, I remember trying it and feeling like something was missing. What I ended up thinking is that what's missing is strategic competition. The kind that Starcraft and Halo players feel when they've intelligently and genuinely outsmarted the other players. I got to wondering if that dynamic could be a part of a music learning game. The above gets close to it.
