Intergalactic Music Adventure

Thanks for your support! 

There's a significant overhaul of this project on the way. Please enjoy exploring its original demo and get ready for an especially awesome reimagining as a platformer

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The INTERGALACTIC LABORATORY OF MUSIC SCIENCE is seeking curious ADVENTURERS on board the MOTHERBOARD SOUNDSTATION  to further the study of PIANO and classical music theory. Under the watchful robotic eye of Conductor Sparkles, students will be required to fly their own spaceship through the Sound System, visiting colour-soaked planets below to FEED CHORDS TO STORM TURTLES with a mermaid in Lightning World,  FISH FOR MUSICAL NOTES WITH A FISHERMAN at a coral reef in the Piano Kingdom, MEMORISE THEORETICAL WORDS WITH GLOWING BUGS at the Word School on Marshmallow Planet, GROW A RHYTHM TREE FROM A SEMIBRIEVE SEED with Marigold on Lava Planet and MORE...

...meet wondrous planetary creatures with MUSICAL MISSIONS AND QUESTS, re-unite aliens with LOST TREASURES, and decorate your spaceship as you incidentally learn the FUNDAMENTALS OF MUSIC THEORY. 

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ABOUT THE GAME

This is a unique, lo-fi learning resource/game for classical musical theory, in particular for piano. It was designed to keep young music students engaged between weekly lessons, but is blossoming into a mysterious microcosmic reference  and learning experience for music. 

It’s also great for total newbies to music theory of any age, especially players with absolutely no access to a physical instrument of any kind. The goal is to install all of the frameworks of music theory in a visually practical way so that the player can begin to think imaginatively with them.

All learning games and quizzes  randomly pull from a huge database of music theory, making things fun for a lone adventurer, or for a classroom smart board.  Stumble upon challenges set by zany quest characters encountered on planets in Adventure Mode or quiz yourself endlessly in Scene Select mode, where every game is laid out on one page and continues infinitely in a closed circuit without connecting back to the story world, no stars granted. Perfect for group/classroom use!

Designed to work optimally on all gaming computers, with great support for teacher-guided group use on smart boards and touch-screens. Does not require a musical instrument or any MIDI equipment to use. 

The game has been drawn and programmed single-handedly by Aaron Batic, a mural artist and illustrator ‘AZZURRO’ based in South Australia with many giant painted street artworks in Adelaide, as well as in Amsterdam and London. Aaron is a classically trained pianist and private piano teacher and began to create the resource to supplement teaching in response to the impacts placed on piano lessons by the COVID crisis.

TEACHER FEATURES

The adventure includes;

• Note Name Guessing; Use a cute on-screen piano keyboard to correctly select notes being displayed randomly across treble and bass staves, with super high and low ledger-line notes included. 
• Symbol Quiz: Visit the symbol kingdom to take a quiz of 40+ musical symbols you’re bound to come across as a beginner and even some that would be new to a virtuoso 

• Note Fishing: Fish for crotchets, dotted minims, semibrieves, quavers and semiquavers in a coral reef with the fisherman’s worm, dodging tropical fish, pink jellies and the wrong note types
• Rhythm Restaurant: Serve dinner to an infinite queue of starving aliens who can only order their food by speaking in rhythmic notation. Match the sound of their orders to the name of foods and drinks on offer
• Trumpet Anatomy: Learn the parts of a trumpet. Looking at other instruments can help build an understanding of our own instrument and its place in the music world
• Mermaid Chords: Help a mermaid feed triad chords to her hungry storm turtles, by selecting the notes needed to make up each chord she calls out using an on-screen piano keyboard. Loops randomly and infinitely through all of the white note chords (Level 2 chords coming soon)
• Vinyl Turntable: Listen to some of the well known piano classics from long-gone staple composers like Fur Elise, Greensleeves, Alouette, Canon in D  played simply on piano
• Music Motherboard: Join a fleet of robotic musical scientists on board a music laboratory space station, and help them by testing fantastical new gadgets in music experiments. Bounce sounds around the room as liquid drops that mix into each other, and draw using musical notation all in the name of science
• 20 Minute Lesson: Take a self-paced piano refresher lesson with the head robot of the Music Motherboard, the sassy Conductor Sparkles. Designed to teach all of the basics of piano that you would get in a first lesson, and to be effective even assuming a student has absolutely no prior knowledge of music or piano at all. Learn about fingering, intervals, chords, scales, songs, pitch and pressure prompted by a Conductor Sparkles’ fun voiceover and her fleet of musical androids 
• Rhythm Tree: Help Marigold grow a rhythm tree from a semibrieve seed, to its many tiny semiquaver leaves, by dragging and dropping notes to the correct branches. (Level 2, 'Triplet Tree' coming soon)
• Word school: Quiz yourself on 130+ new and old musical terms in Italian and English, endlessly and randomly as you hear each one pronounced. It’s every reasonably useful word from the music lexicon, with some classic extra Italiano flair
• Guitar Anatomy: Learn the parts of an acoustic guitar on board a Guitar Ship
• Notes of the Fretboard: Learn how the frets are arranged and where each note is on a guitar fretboard, at a glance
• Imaginator Synth- Students with absolutely no piano access can play a simple, straightforward virtual piano with two octaves and instruments that will be added as unlockables over time (currently Piano, Trumpet and Synthetic Voice are available with more on the way)
• Chord Book: All white note major and minor triad chords presented in a cute, clean interface in the Chord Book on board the spaceship 
• Scales Book: All white note major and minor scales for reference presented in the same cute, clean interface in the Scales Book
  Level 2 scales and chords coming soon

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PURE IMAGINATION

Other fun features include:

• Outer Space: Fly through space, controlling your spaceship with your mouse (or your whole arm on a giant smart board) performing tricky manoeuvres to suck up trails of stars, visiting planets and discovering spaceships and characters out in the starry deep
• Asteroid Blast: Shoot your way through asteroid belts as you dramatically enter the atmosphere of each undiscovered planet for the first time that day
• Artificial Intelligence- Students can hear stories, mini-lessons, tips and jokes in conversations with robot, humanoid and other characters found on board starships, and hanging out down below on planets. Re-unite characters with their lost items and hear them muse about piano or give insights about classical theory. AI makes its own choices in how it puts together conversation, so you can keep chatting to hear something different. 

• SongSuggestorBot - hidden on one of the planets is an advanced experiment, a cheeky robot that will string together and suggest wondrous themes for the next song you should write
• Gift Shop- Spend ‘stars’ earned in learning games on cute embellishments for your cursor and character as well as decorations, paint jobs and even upgrades for your Spaceship with new mini-games hiding within (like Outer Space mode). All the best ones are expensive, and do not carry over from sitting to sitting, which means the student has to really put in daily effort to accrue the stars needed to become a purple yeti zooming through deep space shooting sprinkles at asteroids, or splash rainbow gumballs all over the screen out of a cursor that’s a slice of watermelon 

• AchievementBot- A robot keeps track of everything you’ve done for today. Then tomorrow, you get to do it all again! Earn cute badges  as you progress through a huge line of missions. 

• AstroGarden-  Collect plant samples from every planet and in outer space to fill a tiny, oxygen-producing plant garden on board your spaceship 

• Space Buddies- slowly gather a little family of space critters on your spaceship to watch over your interplanetary adventure

• Treasure Chests: Discover treasure chests full of stars and rewards, with some needing to be unlocked by special keys you’ll only find hidden deeply within other learning games 

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ON THE WAY

• More piano lessons, including song teaching. 
• The Voice Ship featuring a vocal primer lesson.
• Level 2 'Black note' chords and scales, and in the Mermaid Chords activity. 

This is a project in development. Your feedback and support is greatly greatly appreciated in the artist's effort to promote more engaging music learning and preserve  classical music theory in a contemporary context. 

! ! The artist is including a demo version .apk file for use on Android devices to encourage better usage  and  more feedback. Please note that this has not been extensively tested on Android, given it is not the platform the game is being developed for.