Math and music researchers, Dr. Garbers and Dr. Noll, today announce the release of MIDI SolFa Mode-Go-Round 2.0 for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Started in 2010 as an awarded interactive music-theoretical exhibit in Math-Advanture-Land Dresden, Germany, the MIDI SolFa Mode-Go-Round app aims to be both an entertaining musical instrument, a medium to illustrate music theoretical topics and a tool for practicing musicians.
Customer review: “This on the one hand is a very simple app, but on the other it is complex. It is clever and unique.”
The app has a spiral keyboard with 7 keys per octave. Its design and its transformations are based on recent mathematical music theory insights into diatonic scales. The keyboard relates scale degrees, note names, step patterns and solmization and is useful for teaching and exploring music theory. Users can play diatonic melodies and must explicitly change tonic and mode. Thereby, they get a feeling for the seven modes and learn modulation. On touching the keys, the instrument plays instrument sounds or “sings” solmization syllables according to movable or fixed Doh tradition.
The new version offers a more precisely articulated solmization voice, support for arbitrary instrument sounds and many useful tools for practicing musicians. The app shows MIDI notes on the keyboard and offers simple multitrack MIDI recording and playback. Users can play back a MIDI file and highlight parts to understand and practice a voice in a polyphonic piece: For each MIDI channel, they can change the instrument sound, mix it freely with the solmization sound and toggle note display. There is a growing number of online-tutorials containing musical excerpts as downloadable MIDI-files, that allow to study modulations, voice leading patterns and other music theoretical topics.
An entertaining new feature is the canon generator: Users can interactively learn to improvise canon-melodies – a traditional element in Renaissance musicianship. The user specifies temporal and diatonic offsets of the imitating voices and plays the lead melody. The app plays the imitations note-by-note and shows implied notes and admissible continuations of the lead melody. Beginners and advanced users have plenty of options to practice imitation and counterpoint.
MIDI SolFa Mode-Go-Round 2.0 is $4.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide exclusively through the App Store in the Music category. There are also Lite and Free versions. Promo codes are available by request. Please visit MIDI SolFa Mode-Go-Round online for more information, including videos, user guides and tutorials.
