Sources & credits
Clear provenance is part of the instrument. Original NSM work, historical sources and third-party audio are identified separately.
NSM Sight-Singing Method
The 384-exercise NSM Method is original, deterministic material by Nathaniel School of Music. It is generated from pedagogical rules; no protected source melody is sampled, traced or rearranged. Every item records its unit, role, learning focus, generator version and reproducible seed.
Jason Zac Originals
Six hand-composed teaching melodies by Jason Zac. Each is mapped to a named NSM syllabus unit and carries an explicit originality statement. These are visually distinguished from the generated NSM Method and from historical source material.
Melodia
Samuel W. Cole and Leo R. Lewis, 1909. Exercise numbers are retained on every record. Source edition: Open Library / Internet Archive record. NSM transcribed the notation; the historical exercises are never presented as NSM compositions.
One Thousand Exercises
Arthur Somervell, 1911. Exercise numbers are retained on every record. Source edition: IMSLP score record #287508. The work, edition and digital exercise identity remain linked.
Historical hymns
The digital four-part source is the Open Hymnal Project. Every hymn separately names its tune, composer or traditional source, arranger/setting and printed hymnal where known. Only settings dated 1930 or earlier and reviewed for public-domain use in the United States and India are included.
Open Hymnal correctly warns that its catalogue follows United States law and that users elsewhere must review local law. NSM therefore treats the melody, harmony/setting, words and translation as separate rights layers. This app distributes notation only; it does not bundle hymn lyrics.
Piano samples
The local piano sound is derived from the Salamander Grand Piano by Alexander Holm, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0. No endorsement by the creator is implied.
Software and fonts we build on
Prima Vista is assembled from open-source work. Two of these licences require that we say so, and all of them deserve it.
- VexFlow — the music engraving engine that draws every stave. MIT licence.
- Bravura — the SMuFL music font used for every clef, notehead and accidental, by Steinberg Media Technologies. SIL Open Font Licence 1.1.
- pdf.js — renders the PDFs you bring to the music stand. Apache Licence 2.0; a copy of that licence ships with the package in our dependencies.
- Bodoni Moda, Archivo and Spectral — the typefaces. All SIL Open Font Licence 1.1, self-hosted here rather than loaded from a font CDN, so no third party is told who visits.
- React and Vite — MIT licence.
The pitch detection, the scoring, the drone voices and the exercise generator are our own.
The drone
The tanpura is a real acoustic instrument, not a synthesiser: multi-key Sa–Pa loops from Rāga Junglism, one recording per chromatic key so the instrument is never coarsely retuned. The string drone uses FluidR3 GM violin multi-samples at true pitch per note. Both are the same libraries our Melakarta Sphere app uses.
What leaves your device
Nothing. Your singing is analysed in the browser and never uploaded; there is no account, no tracking of what you sing, and no server that hears you. PDFs you bring stay in your browser's own storage. A result card is only shared if you press the share button yourself.
Protected teaching books
Modern books in NSM's private teaching library are used only to research abstract learning principles. Their melodies, prose, engraving and page design are not imported into this public app.
Every bundled exercise contains a human-readable source plus a structured provider ID, provider item, rights status and review date. The release build fails if any one of those fields, or its provider registry entry, is missing.
© Nathaniel School of Music. Public-domain and third-party material remains subject to its own attribution and licence terms. This source register records NSM’s review; it is not legal advice.