The story
Ruud Vleij learned pitch the long way: playing along with cassettes until his ear caught up. His son Jamal did not. When Jamal was learning to play, Ruud would tell him he was in the wrong key, and Jamal could not hear it. That became a question neither of them could put down: why is the one skill that makes everything easier taught last, if at all?
Musicality is their answer, begun in 2013. Jamal built the app. Ruud composed the music: twenty-six tracks, two albums, written so that practice would be music from the first note.
13 years is not 13 unbroken years. Both of them went off and did other things: other work, other countries, other lives. The project kept pulling them back. Neither could let it go, and neither wanted to. It has never been anyone’s job. It is a passion project in the oldest sense: made because not making it stopped being an option.
Roughly 17% of adults believe they’re tone deaf. About 1.5% actually are (Peretz & Vuvan, 2017). Musicality is built for the gap between those numbers, on the belief that everyone is musical, and that the doubt is the only thing standing between most people and their first played note.
It starts before the first lesson: a four-chapter introduction that builds music in front of you, from a single pulse to a tone to music itself. No notation, no instrument, no prior knowledge. The introduction is an experience you watch become one you’re doing.
The exercises are music because the music came first: one Training and one Tune per interval, and the Tunes obey one rule. A melody may never leap further than the interval it teaches. In the app they play on the lock screen like any album, because that is what they are.