exactly -- music consists of notes.
I think therein lies the problem with the app. The beauty about (Irish) traditional music is in the way it is played. In the hands of a competent musician it constantly varies and changes as the tune goes along. A musician like that does not have a string of notes memorised that s/he plays back a few times, it works in a differrent way. An app like this treats music like a string of notes, repeating it a few times in exactly the same way. And as you feel this app is a tool for beginners, it will teach those beginners that's the way to play tunes. In other words, you teach them to learn and retain tunes in a fundamentally different way from a player who is immersed in the playing of living musicians.
One wellknown fiddleplayer is on record saying 'when I hear a man play a tune, I don't listen to the tune. I listen to what he does with it'. Which, to my mind, sums up how traditional; music is listened to, where the enjoyment lies. This is very simple music and its lifeblood is variation, nuance and above all rhythm. Without all that, there's nothing to it, it brings to mind an image of groups of learners by internet plodding through the same version of Drowsy Maggie three times with each and every note the same each time. Whereas in the hands of a well versed player, any old tired and overplayed tune can take on a new life. Learning (Irish) traditional music as a string of notes repeated is a flawed way of learning it, this app only promotes that.
I can, to an extend, go with the
aide memoire argument. Notation functions like that. But again I will have to wonder if it's not better to go to a real life player (or a recording of one) rather than a lifeless mechanical app running off the notes. All I can say is I lost a few bars of 'Bunker Hill' a few months ago. Listening to Paddy Canny once brought them right back but what came back was not only the little turn of phrase that had gone missing, it was the spirit, drive, the zest for life and bounce that was present in Canny's playing. I was given back living music, so much more than the notes.