Imagine that you’re a musician — cellist, pianist, lead guitar in a rock band, Gospel singer, sax player in a jazz ensemble — and you’re practicing some new piece, or even an old one you never quite mastered. Imagine further that you’re stuck somewhere in the sheet music, that you’re playing adagio when you should be at allegro. Imagine being able to instantly find someone somewhere — anywhere in the world — who’s practicing the same piece at the same time you are.
And that person might have the same problem, or not.
Either way, you’re suddenly not alone in the struggle with musical notes.
What I’ve just described is essentially the promise of a new app, developed for classical musicians by a Peabody Institute professor and his cello student. It launches via the Apple App Store on Sept. 1.
It’s called iMeetStand and here’s why: The professor, renown cellist Amit Peled, noticed over the last several years that the eyes and attention of his students regularly moved from the music on the tablets on the stands before them to their phones. If they’re going to continue that habit, Peled thought, then maybe the phone should offer something relevant and useful.
So he pulled aside Josh Jang, a senior who has been studying both cello with Peled at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and mathematics at JHU.
How about an app to help students practice?
What if a cello student could locate another cellist, somewhere in cyberspace, also practicing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major? Both might be struggling with the same passage or preparing for the same audition or concert. With the app, they can message each other, even share a short video.
Jang developed the codes necessary to make the instant connections.
Users of the app, free at launch, can enter their profile and the specific compositions they are practicing. If, say, a horn player in Baltimore is looking to confer with another horn player about Strauss’s Nocturno, iMeetStand will make an instant link while practice on both ends is in progress.
“After teaching for so many years, I realized there was little point in complaining that young musicians are constantly reaching for their phones, even during practice,” Peled says. “Why not use that natural desire to connect and turn it into something positive? The philosophy behind [the app] became very simple: You may be physically alone in a practice room, but you don’t have to feel that you are practicing alone.”
Jang had AI help to develop the app, but what strikes me about iMeetStand is that it resists AI: Its goal is to connect humans engaged in the same discipline; it does not use artificial intelligence to teach but rather allows musicians to teach and motivate each other.
“We hope we can build a worldwide community of musicians,” says Peled, a longtime professor at Peabody, founder of the Mount Vernon Virtuosi chamber orchestra and now a partner with Jang in a Baltimore-based tech company.
For starters, iMeetStand focuses on classical music. Users draw compositions from the IMSLP — the International Music Score Library Project, the huge digital repository of public-domain scores and sheet music.
For musicians engaged in other genres — jazz, rock, pop, reggae, whatever — the app allows a user to upload PDFs of music they’ve been working on and eventually make connections for practice and consultations.
“What excites me most is knowing that somewhere in the world there may be another musician practicing exactly what I’m practicing and striving toward the same goal,” says Jang, 21, who came to Hopkins from upstate New York. “We want to make it possible for us to find each other. Practicing will always require individual work — but it doesn’t have to feel lonely.”
Right.
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
Practice.
But you don’t have to practice alone.
Note: Amit Peled conducts the Mount Vernon Virtuosi with the choir of Emmanuel Episcopal Church in Mozart’s Requiem in two Baltimore concerts Sept. 25-27. Full information.
