Well, that's complicated. You're talking about music theory. It's a fascinating topic, and not taught enough, or early enough, in conservatories (at least in my limited experience in France).

But, it's a different topic. Learning (western) music theory involves scales first and foremost. There are hundreds of scales; even if we limit ourselves to 1 major and 3 minor scales (a big limitation), that still leaves us with 12 x 4 = 48 scales. Then you have chord progressions, cadences, types of resolutions, time divisions... rhythm... everything else...

And none of that deals specifically with sight reading. In principle, you could learn music theory without ever knowing how to read music. IIRC, Paul McCartney, arguably one of the best song writers of all time, can't read music fluently (if at all).

I think it takes a very long time (a lifetime?) to actually learn music theory. But it can take from a few months to a couple of years of dedicated practice to learn to read music well. That's what I'm trying to do with this app.

Now, recognizing patterns, chords, chords in arpeggios, chord progressions would be a natural evolution, yes. For now, I don't know how to deal with any of that (esp. from a UI standpoint) but it's something that's on the radar, for sure.

What I meant was that sight reading has very little do do with knowing which note a note is. This is more about learning the basics of reading.

I practice 1-2 hours of scales and chords, tonguing and control every day. Being able to generate weird melodies to challenge all the combinations you have stored in your brain would be amgreat future development. The melodies don't even need to make sense.

One of my favourite etudes are the Deux etudes atonale by Boutry, and some of them are pretty much dice rolls on paper.

> Being able to generate weird melodies to challenge all the combinations you have stored in your brain (...) pretty much dice rolls on paper

Thanks for the follow-up! In your parent comment you were talking about scales and the fact that one is able to guess the next note if they know the scale.

Now random "dice roll" music may be a little easier to produce, and maybe not very far from what we have already.

Can you elaborate on what you would need, specifically? Chromatic random music (using all 12 notes, including accidentals), in the range of the bassoon?

And what do you mean by "play along"? Would you simply need the app to make some sound, or would you expect it to detect and analyze what the player does? (This would require MIDI, and in my experience, the few MIDI wind instruments that exist are unpopular with instrumentalists, to say the least.)

Or -- what about generating random sheet music (PDFs) on demand? That would be a great project, I would love to work on that.