At Stanford’s Hackathon, Victoria Dean, Sydney Li, Kylie Jue, and I built a better way to learn the ukulele. It’s an analog to karaoke/guitar hero. You click “play” on a song, and it highlights the words at the right time, and shows you how to play the current chord. It also auto scrolls for you!

One neat innovation we had was to get the timings of the song manually. To make this easy, we built a tool that just recorded when a key was pressed. We then saved all these delays up and associated them with the lyrics. This backend to adding songs is mostly done but not yet accessible.

It certainly has some rough edges. There’s no way to choose different songs (we have 3 so far), and the UI sometimes hits a few bugs, but we are still quite proud of it.

The whole experience was massively fun. The thing I most like about our project is that I’m going to use it in the future! Now I just have to obtain a ukulele.

Update - I bought a Ukulele!