April 2022

Noteful Newsletter

It’s been a whirlwind at Noteful since our last newsletter in February.  If you’re new to the Noteful community, welcome!  We remain excited about our mission of bringing fun and accessible music education directly to your smartphone or tablet.  We can't wait for you to have the chance to improve your ear, and learn to recognize notes on the staff with more ease.​

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We're incorporated!

First in the news is that we are now officially incorporated as Noteful LLC!   This means we are legit, and can do fancy stuff like pay taxes and whatnot.

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Noteful app progress

We’ve made significant progress towards the beta version of the Noteful app.  Just this past week we had a very exciting moment when our team members were able to get a working version of Noteful on our phones in order to begin internal testing prior to the beta round.  ​

Speaking of beta testing, we will be organizing our beta round over the next month.  Each tester will receive a link to complete a basic registration form, answering a few questions that will allow us to better process the feedback that we receive during the testing.  I’ll take this opportunity to give a huge shout out to all of you on our mailing list who signed up as testers.  You are our heroes!   And if you didn’t sign up as a tester but you want to…. you still can do so until the remaining spots are filled! 

Become a beta tester

If the word “test” brings back bad memories of high school math class, don’t be alarmed.  Being a beta tester mostly means that you get access to play with the app before anyone else.  We will need testers who are complete music novices as well as others who are professional musicians, plus everything in between.  So don’t let your experience–or lack thereof–deter you from signing up!  We will also have some fun perks and incentives for this special group of people.  

After the beta round we are planning a gradual onboarding of users at launch time in order to ensure a quality experience.  Those of you on our mailing list will get first dibs on the waiting list and then we will add people incrementally as we are able. 

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App demo

In other news, we will be officially releasing our app demo to you soon!  We’re waiting to post and promote it publicly until we are closer to the public launch, but we plan to share it with our Noteful community–in other words, with you!–prior to that time.  Here’s a sneak preview of a few scenes from the demo.  ​

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Team Triumphs

Founders

• Jonathan has gotten nearly all the templates functioning that are slated to ship with the first version of the app.  He has deployed the app to both Android and iOS.​
• Jamie has implemented a gorgeous keyboard (much prettier than the one pictured in the app demo!)
•  Paul  transitioned our database to a dedicated Noteful development server, and has updated many features to our interfaces that help our processes to run more efficiently.  
• Bradley has created a code pipeline that we will be using to generate much of the app’s content, based on carefully created lesson structures.
• Becky has been creating the lesson structures for Bradley’s code pipeline, as well as preparing for the beta round and launch.​

Other team members

• Shalini, Kelly, Ahana, and Neely (our HCI team at Carnegie Mellon University) have nearly completed a hi-fi prototype of a student/teacher interface for the Noteful app.
• Christian has been engraving musical examples for the app, and will be joining us as a full-time intern this summer.
• Nico has been creating podcast episodes as companion material to the content in the early levels of the app.
• Lyn has been crocheting versions of our mascot, Ed.  
• Hudson will be joining the team in a few weeks as a full-time intern over the summer to contribute to the software development.​

Learn more about each of our team members on our Noteful Facebook page

Be Noteful.  Every day.
​
Becky Billock
CEO & Co-founder
Noteful LLC