'Everyone should code a little:' Meet the Student Building a Practice App
Irene Giovannetti's app lets students choose a virtual concert hall to rehearse in and set up a map of venues around the world they hope to perform at one day.
Irene Giovannetti and her practice app.
Everyone knows how to get to Carnegie Hall, but Irene Giovannetti is offering some help with that.
PracticePro
The trumpet player (who studies with David Burkhart and Adam Luftman) spent part of her break between semesters working on an app called PracticePro with AV and Music Technology System Administrator Lance Jabr as her advisor.
Giovannetti had finished her undergraduate degree in Italy and was exploring her career options when she first got into coding, she says. While she stayed with music, she always kept coding as an interest, and like a lot of people, started working on PracticePro because she couldn't find an app that did what she was looking for.
"I thought that was crazy," she says. "But then with all these new tools and everything, I said, 'Let's see what that would look like.' The beginning was way easier than I expected, so I just kept doing it. I had a tiny bit of knowledge here and there that helped me through, but it was all fun."
The app is aimed at musicians who want to stay focused on their practice time, work towards a dedicated job, and put together a "dream map" of spaces across the world where they've played—or, perhaps more crucially, hope to one day play. It also offers a variety of virtual settings to focus on while you track your practice time, like a concert hall or practice room. (For SFCM musicians, there's a space that mimics performing in the Barbro Osher Recital Hall in SFCM's Bowes Center at night.)
"This is a sort of 'gamification' of the practice," Giovannetti says. "But recently I was preparing for my recital and something very silly that I found useful was to put as a background of my phone, the recital hall. And I got used to that."
Giovanetti's still tweaking aspects of the app, mostly its social nature: While she believes that sharing goals and successes with your peers is helpful for self-esteem, she's not interested in developing another social network. "I was building this mainly for myself, but the further I got in the process of making the app, the more I was asking my peers for suggestions and everything, and some people seemed interested, so I think it might go public at some point."
Irene Giovannetti's PracticePro app
The app also lets you set an estimated amount of practice time to achieve certain goals, and greets you with different motivational quotes when you log in. "Coming from an undergrad in Italy, I experienced a very steep learning curve in terms of learning how to manage my time and here at SFCM," Giovannetti adds. "This is a very high-level school so there's a lot of work to do, and I had some trouble also learning how to approach that."
The app is meant to be personalized, Giovannetti explains: There are questions about a user's instrument and their long-term goals before they assign an amount of practice hours to one. "With our instrument and all the work we do," she says, "it's funny that we can work a lot but then the moment we put the instrument away, it's like, 'Where's all that progress? Where did it go?' So the more you practice here, then you can see what you're building towards."
"I think everyone should code a little," Jabr says of Giovannetti's work. "It's great how new tools can help people get started so quickly. Irene is taking it to the next level by honing her idea and following through."
"It's been interesting because it makes me think a lot about how I manage my time, what I do, what keeps me motivated, what makes me practice more—or less," Giovannetti laughs." So if it ever goes public, I hope it will help other students get better at their instrument and have a better relationship with their own practice routine."