Music education, made for Uganda.

Why we built this

Most music software is built for conservatoires and recording studios in New York or Berlin. It assumes a desktop, a piano, a steady connection, and a teacher trained at a private music college. That isn't the reality for an S5 music teacher in Mbarara or a candidate preparing for UNEB Practical Music in Gulu.

Music-Forte starts from the other end. Tools that work on a phone, a tablet, a shared school computer. Lessons that map to the actual topics on the NCDC syllabus. Set works and traditions that include baakisimba, bwola, embaire, and a Mukasa hymn arrangement — not as a token but as set works the system can compose, harmonise, and analyse on the same footing as Bach or Mozart.

Two systems, one workspace

Music-Forte AI

The AI surface is a chat. Four modes — Guest, Teacher, Student, Expert — change which tools are available and how the assistant interprets ambiguous requests. Teacher mode reaches into the NCDC corpus and emits lesson plans, schemes of work, scenarios, and rubric-anchored feedback. Student mode is drill-shaped, with intervals, cadences, sing-back, and dictation. Expert mode opens the music-generation models — choral baroque, hymn SATB, folk monophonic — and lets a composer iterate on variants.

FORTE Notation

FORTE Notation is a manuscript editor with four ways of editing the same piece, each fully reversible:

• Score — direct manipulation on the engraved staff.
• Code — ABC source as plain text with a notation-aware keypad on mobile.
• Story — natural language. "Make this sadder." The model proposes a diff; you accept, edit, or reject.
• Phrase — deterministic command grammar. "At bar 5 beat 1, insert quarter D." Parser-driven, no model, fully auditable.

Other surfaces fold in around the four modes: a Voice mixer, an Inspector that flags voice-leading issues, comments anchored to notes, live multi-user collaboration, hum capture and contour sketching for melody intake, and Practice mode — where the score listens to you play and follows along.

Who Music-Forte is for

• Music teachers in Ugandan secondary schools — especially those preparing students for UNEB Practical Music or working through the NCDC 2025 syllabus.
• Students at S5–S6 and earlier, drilling intervals, sight-reading, ear training, and analysing set works.
• Composers and arrangers who want a manuscript editor that handles equal-temperament and the equidistant tunings of Ugandan traditional instruments (amadinda, embaire, adungu).
• Choirs and arrangers of liturgical music — Mukasa-style hymn settings are first-class in the corpus, not an afterthought.

Music-Forte runs on phones, tablets, and desktops. The mobile shell is purpose-built — not a shrunk desktop — and the tablet picks landscape or portrait based on orientation. Schools share devices; the design assumes that.

Principles

• Reversibility before generation. Every AI proposal in FORTE is a diff you can accept or reject. We never overwrite without permission.
• Determinism where possible. Phrase mode + the command-editor parse 78+ tested edit patterns without ever calling a model. Faster, cheaper, auditable.
• On-device when reasonable. Pitch detection, polyphonic following, and the practice audit run in the browser. Your audio doesn't leave the device unless you opt to share.
• Honest empty states. No fake content. If you have no lessons, the library says so. If your streak is zero, we say zero.
• Curriculum on equal footing. Western tradition and Ugandan tradition trained side-by-side. The same composition tools handle a fugue and a baakisimba.

Contact

Reach us at support@music-forte.app. For privacy, security, or data-rights requests, see the privacy policy.