February 2022

Dear Noteful community,                                      

We’re barely into 2022, but a lot has happened at Noteful in these first few months of the year.

Back in November we got word that Noteful was a recipient of a Creative Entrepreneur Grant from the Pittsburgh Partners in the Arts.  We’ve been putting those funds to use in a couple of important ways.  ​

The first is to hire composer/sound engineer Curtis Dahl to add the audio component to our app demo (coming soon!)  Curtis is responsible for engineering, editing, and producing every recording that I’ve released during my career, so I trust him implicitly with this project, and can’t wait for you to hear what he is coming up with!  ​

The second is that we’ve contracted rock/classical/jazz musician and music educator Nico Sleator to create a podcast that will flesh out and complement the content in the Noteful app.  A little trivia for you is that Nico was my piano student for many years prior to going off and becoming a rock star.  It’s so fun to be able to incorporate his expertise into what we are building here at Noteful.  Right now the plan is to launch the podcast just prior to launching the app, so stay tuned for details!

Behind the scenes on the app construction, Jonathan Aldrich is now working full time on the project and huge new chunks of the app are shaping up every single week.  We got some important features working just this week, such as our keyboard display (thanks to Jamie Quishenberry’s work), and some critical aspects of the audio component.  Bradley and Paul are still collaborating diligently with me to simplify and speed up the content creation process.

We have some very skilled students who are working hard for Noteful right now as well.  One of my college piano students, Christian Abbott (a piano and computer science double major), has been working on helping to create content for Noteful.  We also have a very capable team from the Human Computer Interaction department at CMU who are delving into creating a student/teacher interface for the app.

By now you may have met Ed, the trusty Noteful mascot (if you haven’t, then by all means, you need to meet Ed!)  Our friend Karen Hay, who is a crochet designer/editor extraordinaire (and 
also married to our team member Bradley Schmerl) designed a real Ed, that you can actually hug and cuddle and who will listen to all your note-reading woes.  For the record, you can talk to the animated Ed, too, but the physical version of Ed just *might* be a bit more sympathetic.  My parents, who are both skilled fiber artists in their own right, have agreed to crochet up this bad boy using Karen’s pattern.  Be on the lookout for opportunities to get your very own Ed!  Just beware:  sometimes he’s hard to find, as he tends to blend into his natural habitat.  
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Be Noteful, every day!

Becky Billock 
Noteful CEO and Co-founder


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