Hi, I'm James

As much as I enjoy living in Toronto, I've had enough of the crazy rent prices that make saving a meaningful amount of money a truly glacial process. On top of that, as someone who's naturally a bit of a minimalist, I wanted to test myself a little and see if I'm able to actually live minimally enough that I'm able to do so with no fixed abode.

We all needed something to keep ourselves occupied through COVID, and mine was rediscovering piano for the first time since I was a child.

For a while now I've had on-again off-again development going on Shimi, my typescript library for working with MIDI. The modern web standards include MIDI support as standard, and this builds on top of that, providing many conventient musical objects for working with MIDI, such as Scales, Chords, Clips, Metronomes etc.

During COVID, I developed a system for myself which radically transformed my life. Before, I'd been a chronic procrastinator, desperately trying various approaches to get myself into the habit of being productive. While this tool has served me very well, I want a version of it which I can carry on my phone.

For a while now, I've liked the idea of having my own little corner of the internet which I can tinker around with every once in a while and show the things that I'm proud of in a way that's more flexible than any of the social media platforms would allow. In the process of getting this all set up, I figured that I might as well further develop a skill in the process.

My goal when I decided to start relearning piano was to become the most rounded musician that I could be, meaning I don't care about playing the most technically advanced pieces, but could play with some level of technical proficiency, could improvise, could sight read somewhat well, and most importantly, could hear music well. To this end, I built myself my own little ear trainer.