About Rina Piano

Rina Piano exists because a child sat down at a piano with a book of sheet music and could not begin.

Not because the music was too hard. Because reading it — working out which dot on which line means which key — takes months before the first real tune arrives. Most children stop before they get there.

What it does

Photograph a page from any book. The app reads it: pitches, rhythm, both hands. What comes out is not a picture of the page but actual notes, which means the app knows what should sound and when.

Then the keyboard lights up the next key and waits. No timer, no score, no losing. The child presses it, and the piece moves on.

That is the whole idea: the reading is handled, so the playing can start on day one. Reading comes later, the way it does for a child who learns to speak before learning to write.

What it is not

Not a game. There is nothing to win and no streak to break. Minutes at the keyboard fill in a calendar, and that is all the scoring there is.

Not a teacher. It will not correct your posture or your fingering. It shows which key comes next and listens for it. A teacher does the rest, and a teacher is worth having.

Not a library. The catalog holds works in the public domain — free to play because their copyright has expired. Anything else you bring yourself, from your own books.

Who makes it

Pangorina, a small company. Rina, the pangolin at the piano, is our mascot — a scaled anteater who turned out to be surprisingly good at Bach.

The app is free. There is no advertising in it and no plan to put any there.

How the recognition works

Printed music goes through an optical reader that has been taught to see staves, noteheads and stems. Where a measure comes out doubtful — the durations do not add up to what the time signature demands — a language model is asked to read that measure again, and only that measure.

Accuracy is about 85% on a clean printed PDF and about 60% on a photograph taken by hand. The app marks the measures it is unsure about rather than pretending they are right. Catalog pieces are exact, because nothing in them was recognised.

Getting in touch

Write to support@rinapiano.com. A person reads it.