Filter Music by Difficulty When Searching

• Jan 25, 2016 - 06:04

This is a request for the Musescore site itself, not the program. Musescore is getting A LOT of sheet music submissions, and there are some filters available for sorting so far: date uploaded, number of views, number of comments, overall relevance, by instrument, by number of instruments, and by license. These are great, but it may be useful to have more specific search criteria. The most obvious one would be difficulty. There is a problem with this though: what some people think is difficult (to play/perform) would be very easy to someone else. I think I have a reasonable solution to help fix this.

When registering, each user can rank themselves in terms of their technical ability on their instrument. If they do not play an instrument then they don't rank themselves and are unable to do this next part. When we visit the sheet music page of a song posted on the Musescore website, we will view the piece and have an option to rank its difficulty (Maybe from 1 to 5?). So let's say I rank myself a 3/5 for technical ability and I come across a piece on musescore which I think is very difficult so I rank it a 5/5. Because I am only a 3/5 my 5 will only count for a 4. The formula is then to take:

([user level] + [user chosen difficulty])/2 = [difficulty].

So, this makes it more reasonable for someone who is a 1/5 in technical skill. If we didn't use the formula, a 4/5 person would maybe say a piece is a 1/5 difficulty, and yet, it would be still way too difficult for the 1/5.

The reason I suggest out of 5 is because it is easy to calculate and that I'd say giving people a spectrum of say 1 to 10 would produce less accurate results. The distinction between a 6 and a 7 isn't all that great, we might say. But then again a scale of 1 to 3 would be too vague.

Thank you for reading and considering!

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