Yousician

Yousician is a Finnish interactive music service to learn and play a musical instrument. It currently supports guitar, piano, ukulele, bass, and voice.

Yousician
IndustryMusic education
FoundedDecember 2010 (2010-12)
FounderChris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen
Headquarters
Helsinki
,
Finland
Key people
  • Chris Thür
  • (CEO, co-founder)
  • Mikko Kaipainen
  • (COO, co-founder)
  • Anssi Klapuri
  • (CTO)
  • Seva Moshanin
  • (CMO)
ProductsYousician for Guitar, Piano, Ukulele, Bass, Voice
Yousician for Educators
GuitarTuna
Number of employees
100
Websiteofficial website

The application is available on iOS, Android, Windows and macOS platforms. Yousician analyses the users’ playing on their real musical instruments, and provides them with instant feedback and guidance. Yousician claims to be the world's largest music educator.[1]

History

Yousician Ltd. is a Helsinki based music education company founded by Chris Thür and Mikko Kaipainen in 2010 under the name Ovelin,[2] and was part of the Startup Sauna accelerator programme at Aalto University.[3] Yousician states its mission as "Making musicality as common as literacy".[1] The company develops and operates a music service called Yousician, and a tuner application called GuitarTuna. As of December 2016, Yousician claims over 8 million monthly active users worldwide across their products.[4] In 2012, the company raised $1.4m from Silicon Valley-based investor True Ventures.[5]

Yousician

The Yousician service is built on audio signal processing technology that can recognize notes and chords played by its users on their real instruments (both acoustic and electric).[6] Users are shown either a gamified, colourful version of sheet music or tablature notation for an exercise, and hear a backing track as they play along. Using the built-in microphone of the device, Yousician listens to the users play, gives feedback on accuracy and timing, and tracks users’ progress over time.[7]

Yousician is currently available for five topics: guitar, piano, bass, ukulele, and voice. For every instrument, Yousician features a syllabus developed and produced in-house by the company. Syllabi are made up of songs and exercises, tutorial videos and mini-games to learn new skills. Over all instruments, there are around 150 missions and over 25,000 exercises available. Yousician used to offer a user generated content platform where users can create their own content via an in-built editor for their own usage, or choose to share it with the community. There are some features available that do not require an instrument, e.g. ear-training or theory practice while people don't have instruments at hand. Yousician operates under a freemium model where one lesson per day is given for free, while unlimited lesson time is offered via paid subscriptions.[8]

Guitar

Yousician for Guitar was the first instrument launched on the platform when it was released in November 2014. The syllabus of guitar is divided into 3 paths: Lead, Rhythm and Knowledge. The standard visualization for guitar is a tablature view, but users can also choose to display songs as sheet music or a hybrid of the two.

Piano

Yousician for Piano was the second instrument launched on the platform in November 2015. The syllabus of piano is divided into 3 paths: Classical, Pop and Knowledge. The standard visualization for piano is a simplified version of sheet music, but users can also choose to display songs as traditional sheet music.

Ukulele

Yousician for Ukulele was the third instrument launched on the platform in December 2015. The syllabus of ukulele is divided into 3 paths: Lead, Rhythm and Knowledge. The standard visualization for ukulele is a tablature view, but users can also choose to display songs as sheet music or a hybrid of the two.

Bass

Yousician for Bass was the fourth instrument launched on the platform in April 2016. The syllabus of bass is divided into 2 paths: Playing and Knowledge. The standard visualization for bass is a tablature view, but users can also choose to display songs as sheet music or a hybrid of the two.

Voice

Yousician for Voice was the fifth instrument launched on the platform in August 2018. There's a single path in the syllabus. The visualization is a chromatic staff where notes are represented by bars, comparable to some other singing applications such as SingStar.

Yousician for Educators

Yousician for Educators is a service built on the Yousician platform for teachers using Yousician with their students, both for in-classroom and for the students to practice at home. Teachers are able to assign and monitor homework tasks and student progression from the Educator Dashboard. As of February 2017, Yousician claims the service is being used by thousands of teachers around the world. Yousician has a “Distinguished Educators” section featuring teachers that help other teachers to utilize Yousician in their classrooms. Yousician for Educators uses a freemium model for teachers and their students, although they previously had a free model for teachers.

Reception

Yousician was released on November 2014, to mostly positive reviews. Guitar World called it "modern technology's gift to music education" and in March 2015 it was featured as 'Editor's Choice' in the Apple iOS App Store.[9] Critical voices usually do not question the product itself, but contrast it to the option of learning to play an instrument in private lessons. Voicesinc.org for example stated that “If you’re happy to learn from a digital screen, then it’s great, but if you want a lot more human interaction and demonstration, there may be some better options.” As of October 2018, the Yousician app had 227,660 ratings on Google Play with an average 4.5 of the 5-star rating and on the iOS App Store 10,076 ratings with an average of 4.3 of the 5-stars.

Yousician was featured two times as 'Editor's Choice' in the iOS App Store and won a "Best of 2016 Apps" award from Google Play. Yousician was one of Wired's top 100 European startups in 2012,[10] and were also featured in The Sunday Times "World's Best Apps List 2012". Yousician and its apps have won several technology and start-up competitions, including SXSW Accelerator 2012 (Music)[11] and Midemlab 2012.

In June 2018 Yousician began what the company has called a "sunset of the song upload feature" which was completed with the October 2018 update 2.58 that removed all user generated content from the app.[12] The removal of user generated content sparked opposition among some vocal users online. Coincidence with introduction of what Yousician calls popular songs, licensed songs by well-known bands and artists, that was announced with the update 2.55 on 23rd of August 2018[13] led to speculation about the motives of the decision, however Yousician as a company has not elaborated on the reasons of their business move.

The creators of Yousician had been sued by Ubisoft over claimed patent infringement on their patent U.S. Patent 9,839,852, for an "Interactive guitar game", which Ubisoft had used in their game Rocksmith.[14] In August 2019, a federal district court ruled that the patent claims of Ubisoft were too broad and not defined in enough specificity, nullifying the patent and dismissing Ubisoft's suit.[15]

gollark: And yet it correlates well with... I think lifetime earnings and stuff?
gollark: It can be quantified, just not *amazingly* well.
gollark: You can apparently, in IVF, select embryos with or without [GENETIC THING(S) OF CHOICE], and genetic modification may soon allow directly writing out unwanted bits.
gollark: ···
gollark: There are perfectly good technological solutions to that.

References
  1. "Landing page". Official website. Yousician. Retrieved 29 January 2019.
  2. Lappalainen, Elina. "Tamperelaiselle Ovelinille miljoonasijoitus Piilaaksosta". Talouselämä. Retrieved 19 July 2013.
  3. Armstrong, Stephen. "Europe's hottest startups 2015: Helsinki". Wired.co.uk. Retrieved 30 July 2015.
  4. Slush Conference. "5 years after winning Slush100". YouTube. Slush - official channel. Retrieved 23 February 2017.
  5. Empson, Rip. "Ovelin Grabs €1.1 Million From True Ventures". TechCrunch.com. Retrieved 8 February 2012.
  6. "Anssi Klapuri - From Time-Frequency to Time-Pitch Domain: Psychoacoustic vs. Data-Driven Approach". Retrieved 19 July 2013.
  7. Apple Appstore, iTunes. "App description". Apple Appstore. Apple. Retrieved 23 February 2017.
  8. Grannell, Craig. "Review: Yousician Guitar Gamifies Learning Chords and Riffs". tapsmart.com. Retrieved 23 March 2015.
  9. Priario, Guitar World. "Yousician Is a Fast, Fun Way to Learn to Play Guitar". Guitar World. Retrieved 23 February 2017.
  10. Cheshire, Tom. "Europe's 100 hottest startups 2012: Helsinki". Wired.co.uk. Retrieved 19 July 2013.
  11. "SXSW Music Accelerator 2012 Recap". Retrieved 19 July 2013.
  12. alexch2441. "Why is music uploading function disappeared?". Yousician.com. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  13. "Yousician update - version 2.55". Yousician.com. Retrieved 2020-06-15.
  14. US patent 9,839,852
  15. Sinclair, Brendan (August 13, 2019). "Ubisoft loses Rocksmith patent suit". GamesIndustry.biz. Retrieved August 13, 2019.
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