2026-06-07

Last modified: 2026-03-07 15:38:23

Child piano music

We have this piano:

It comes with "sheet music" for some nursery rhymes, like this:

But I want a larger repertoire - so the plan is to come up with some text-file format that lets me specify music & associated lyrics, and a script that will turn it into a PDF or SVG or even HTML page that I can then print out, with the notes labelled according to the numbers/colours of the piano.

And then I will get an LLM to convert some popular songs into the format, and print them out and stuff them inside the book.

So a couple of things:

• the notes all have a number and colour - if the colour is black it is one of the black keys, otherwise it is a white key
• I need to be able to specify the order of the notes, and what words are associated with each note, if any
• also need to be able to specify gaps of silence, but not very precisely
• chords are not possible on this piano, it only plays one note at a time

So maybe we just provide a line of text per line of music. Numbers in the text become notes. A number followed by a * is a black note. A 0 can be a gap note if you need one. And the other characters up to the next number are the text associated with that note.

So the first line of Incy Wincy Spider would be roughly:

7In-7cy 7win-8cy 9spi-9der 7climbed 8up 7the 8wa-9ter 7spout.

The gaps will not be exactly right but close enough I feel.

https://github.com/jes/toy-piano-music