Piano Hero

Piano Hero is a falling-notes rhythm game. Notes drop down the board towards a line at the bottom, and you play each one as it lands — on a real piano keyboard or on five coloured arcade pads, whichever you pick. Fourteen public-domain tunes are built in, from a plain C major scale up to the chromatic descent of Bizet’s Habanera — and four of them can be played as a short cut or in full. There is nothing to download, no account, and no score of yours ever leaves your browser.

The two keyboards

Piano gives you the real thing: white keys and black keys, in the right places, with the note names where they belong. The keyboard is sized to the song rather than fixed, so Mary Had a Little Lamb gets seven fat white keys spanning C4 to B4, while Für Elise opens out to seventeen keys — ten white and seven black — from C4 up to E5. That matters most on a phone, where a fixed two-octave keyboard would leave every key too thin to hit.

Arcade is the five-lane layout the genre is known for: green, red, yellow, blue, orange, left to right. Pitch is gone — five buttons cannot stand in for a keyboard — but the shape of the tune survives, because each of the song’s distinct pitches is assigned a lane by its rank from lowest to highest. A melody that rises still rises across the pads. A song with fewer than five distinct notes simply uses fewer than five buttons: Mary Had a Little Lamb has four, so the orange pad stays quiet the whole way through.

Playing it: keys, one finger, or several

Every key can be played three ways, and they are all live at once. Tap or click the on-screen keys. Multi-touch works — each finger is tracked separately, so holding one key while striking another does what you would expect. Or use your computer keyboard: in arcade mode the five pads are A S D F G; in piano mode the key that plays each note is printed on it.

That piano mapping is worth a second, because it is not arbitrary. One whole row of your keyboard is the white keys, and the row above it is the black keys. For most songs that is the bottom row — Z X C V B N M , . / — with S D, G H J, L ; sitting above it. The alignment is exact, and the keyboard’s own stagger is what makes it work: each key of the upper row sits over the seam between two keys of the lower one, which is exactly where a black key sits on a piano. The upper-row keys that get skipped — A, F, K — are skipped in precisely the two places a piano has no black key. Every letter is physically where its note is, and your hand holds the same shape the keyboard on screen is drawn in.

A bottom row has ten white keys, which covers twelve of the fourteen songs. Silent Night and Greensleeves reach an eleventh, so for those two the whole mapping moves up a row: the white keys become A S D F G H J K L ; ’ and the black keys the top row above them. Same alignment, one more key — and since the key that plays each note is printed on it, there is nothing to remember either way.

The keyboard is live even when no song is running, so you can just play it. A key you press with nothing falling on it is not a mistake and costs you nothing — it makes its noise and the run carries on. That is deliberate: this is drawn as a piano, and a piano key that stays silent reads as a broken tool rather than as a penalty.

On a phone, and filling the screen

Fullscreen hands the whole display to the game: the board grows, the keys grow with it, and everything else gets out of the way. Press Escape or the Exit button to come back. It is worth using on any phone and it is close to essential on a small one — bigger keys are the single thing that most improves how the game plays.

Turning your phone sideways works too, and is the better way round for a piano: a landscape screen gives the keyboard roughly twice the width, so each key is twice as easy to hit. The board and the keyboard resize themselves to whatever shape the screen is, rather than sitting in a fixed square. Starting a run scrolls the instrument into view, because on a sideways phone this page’s own heading takes up most of the screen on its own.

Timing and scoring

Notes take 2.2 seconds to fall from the top of the board to the line, whatever tempo you are playing at — speeding a song up makes the notes come closer together, never faster to read. Each note is judged on how close your press was to the moment it landed:

• Perfect — within 50 milliseconds. 100 points.
• Great — within 100 milliseconds. 60 points.
• Good — within 160 milliseconds. 30 points.

Past 160 milliseconds the note is gone and counts as a miss. That number is doing two jobs at once: it is the last moment a note can be hit and the first moment it is scored as missed, so there is never a note sitting on the board that you can neither hit nor have failed yet.

Consecutive hits build a streak, and the streak multiplies what every note is worth: ten in a row doubles it, twenty trebles it, and thirty takes it to four times, which is as high as it goes. A miss drops the multiplier straight back to one. Playing the fifteen notes of the C major scale perfectly is worth 2,100 points — nine at single, five at double, one at treble — and a flawless Mary Had a Little Lamb is worth 5,000. Jingle Bells is the longest of the short cuts at 14,700, and the full-length Scarborough Fair is the biggest thing here at 21,500.

Accuracy is a separate figure and deliberately ignores the multiplier. It weighs each note by the window you hit it in, so a run of scraped-in good judgements does not report as flawless the way a hit count would. It measures how well you played; the score measures how well the run went.

Short and full-length

Most of these tunes are cut short, because a forty-second run is a better first run than a three-minute one. Length lets you play the whole thing instead, on the four songs that have a whole thing to play:

• Silent Night — the repeat of “sleep in heavenly peace”, which is the line that actually ends the carol, descending to the tonic rather than resting above it.
• When the Saints Go Marching In — the answering strain, “I want to be in that number”.
• Scarborough Fair — the whole verse rather than its first couplet.
• Greensleeves — the “Greensleeves was all my joy” refrain.

In every case Full is more music, never the same music twice. On the other ten songs the button is greyed out, and the line under it says why — some are complete as they stand, and Jingle Bells has a reason of its own: its “Dashing through the snow” verse drops to the fourth below the tonic, which in the key this one is written in would need a twelfth white key, and the keyboard tops out at eleven.

The keyboard does not change when the length does. It is fitted to whichever of the two forms is wider, so switching to Full never moves the keys, the note names or the typing row out from under a tune you have just learned.

Tempo, and why your best score is kept per setting

Every song can be played at 75%, 100% or 125% of its written tempo. At 100%, Mary Had a Little Lamb runs 23 seconds from the count-in to the last note; at 75% that becomes 30 seconds and at 125% it drops to 20. Slowing a song down is genuinely easier — the same notes arrive further apart — so a single best score shared across all three tempos would be a number that meant nothing. Your best is recorded against the song, the keyboard, the tempo and the length together, and the Best figure above the board is always the record for exactly what is on screen.

Listen

Listen plays the song through by itself, hitting every note perfectly, so you can hear a tune you do not already know before trying to play it. It is a demonstration rather than a run, and it never records a best score — a perfect automatic performance would put the record permanently out of reach.

The songs

All fourteen melodies are in the public domain, and each one’s origin is shown under the picker. Easy: the C major scale (a warm-up rather than a tune, and the quickest way to learn where the keys are), Mary Had a Little Lamb, Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, Row, Row, Row Your Boat, Happy Birthday, Frère Jacques and When the Saints Go Marching In. Medium: Beethoven’s Ode to Joy, Jingle Bells, Silent Night, Scarborough Fair and Greensleeves. Hard: the opening of Für Elise and the Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen.

Six of them use the black keys, which is what stops the realistic keyboard being decoration — a tune in C major never leaves the white notes. Habanera is the extreme case: it is a chromatic scale walked down twice, so it plays every black key in its range and nothing else here comes close. Greensleeves puts three of them under the hand rather than at the top of the reach, and Happy Birthday and Frère Jacques each turn on a single B flat.

Silent Night and Greensleeves share the widest keyboard here — eleven white keys, C4 up to F5 — and are the two songs that move the typing up a row. Silent Night climbs to that F on “heav’n”; Greensleeves gets there in its refrain, which is also why it is set in G minor rather than the A minor it is usually printed in. A minor would need a twelfth white key, and there is no third row of letters to put one on. It is a traditional tune with no key of its own, so it can be moved; Für Elise and Jingle Bells are compositions and are left where their composers put them, even where that costs them a longer version.

Sound

Every note you hear is built in your browser as it plays, from oscillators and a little filtered noise: a triangle wave carrying the pitch, a quieter sine an octave above it for shimmer, and twelve milliseconds of noise for the hammer. There are no audio files anywhere in this tool, which is what keeps it working offline, adds nothing to what your device has to store, and means there is no recording of anything to license. Notes higher up the keyboard decay faster than low ones, the way real strings do.

Nothing plays before you touch something — browsers only permit audio after a deliberate action. Sound on turns it off, and your choice is remembered on this device.

Sharing a song, and what is stored

The song you are playing is in the page address, along with the length if you are on the full version, so copying the link hands somebody else the same cut of the same tune. Nothing else travels: your keyboard, tempo, sound setting and best scores are kept in your own browser and are never sent anywhere. There are no accounts, no leaderboards and no tracking of any kind.

If you switch tabs mid-song the run pauses and waits for you. That is not politeness — a browser stops animating a hidden tab but does not stop the clock, so a game that carried on would come back with the notes and the timing disagreeing. It waits for a click rather than restarting itself, so you are never dropped back into a song already in progress.