Week 952

Matt Kirkland

It's Week 952!

Highlight of the week was launching the new version of Neumz, the 'Gregorian Chant Karaoke' app. It got a major upgrade now in v4, with MOVING notes, so you can follow along syllable-by-syllable. This was a big technical feat that involved some serious machine learning and research partners. I've mentioned this a few times in these weeknotes, but I love this app and I really love this feature.

Having note-by-note highlighting was part of the vision for Neumz from the beginning, but the tooling around the esoteric square note music notation just wasn't available. And that esoteric notation is really weird! This new notation solves a bunch of problems (better and sharper rendering, more variability in screen sizes, etc), but being able to highlight note-by-note is the big win.

I love this app. It's SO niche and specific (but also, you know, a billion catholics out there!). But mostly I love that we get to tackle unique problems where there's just not an off-the-shelf solution.

We're thankful as always to the Neumz team and Odradek Records!