Musiclock disrupts the ways in which music theory is traditionally taught by presenting a new revolutionary way of learning scales.

Many aspiring musicians feel overwhelmed and intimidated by music theory and scales. Musiclock offers a new, revolutionary method for learning them in a simple, engaging and fun way.

The application is based on the idea by young Perttu Pölönen, who won the first price at the 2013 European Union Contest for Young Scientists and was also named the most creative Finn at the 2014 Slush startup event. Together with his brother, Pölönen started a company around his invention. The brothers joined forces with seed investor company Koppicatch, and after careful consideration, Taiste was chose to design and develop the application – the product had previously existed as a physical prototype only.

The design challenge was to turn the brilliant idea into a digital experience that would maintain the simplicity and elegance of the original concept. We did this by creating an UI that consists of not only the playable clock itself, but also features an interactive keyboard that highlights the notes that belong to the scale currently on display. The user can also transpose the backing tracks in real time to any scale she wants to practice.

The visual style of the UI was built around the idea of finding fitting colors to represent the mood of different scales: for example, selecting the Major scale turns the dominant colour to cheery yellow whereas the Blues scale is – surprise surpirse – blue.

Building the basic mechanics of the clock, keyboard and backing tracks required a deep understanding of music theory from the developer. That is part of the reason why we felt the project was such a perfect fit for us: all our team members happened to be either musicians or music enthusiasts themselves.

The app takes a notoriously complex topic – music theory – and presents it in a form that is simple, educational and approachable for musicians of all ages and skill levels.

We believe that in most cases, music theory is still being taught in ways that have made it seem needlessly scary for a great number of aspiring musicians. In the worst case scenario, music theory is the boogie man that can lead to giving up on playing an instrument.

Musiclock disrupts this state of affairs by showing that via clever teaching methods and engaging UX design, the fundamentals of music theory can and should be presented in a way that anyone can grasp. Our hope is that the world will not miss out on the next David Bowie because of the fear for music theory. Playing music should belong to everyone – Musiclock has played a small part in making that ideal closer to being a reality.