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Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

lend-me-your-ears.specr.net

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Re: Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

#23

Post by GistNoesis »

I like the game up until 7 or 8 notes, but it keeps adding note.

I couldn't find a setting to freeze the difficulty where it's comfortable and where the melody can still be construed to make sense.

When adding more notes, it breaks the flow and turn a training for pitch practicing into a memory game for rain man, even more so when we make a mistake and must redo the melody partially.

Re: Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

#24

Post by RyanOD »

I took several years of Suzuki piano method when I was a kid. Suzuki focuses initially on developing the ear.

During lessons, we did this kind of stuff all the time. I would close my eyes and my instructor would play a series of notes and I would need to play them back by ear.

I would also listen to whatever song I was learning before I went to be bed and again when I woke up in the morning, visualizing every note.

Give me a guitar today and I can work out pretty much any song I hear on the radio in under a minute just by listening.

EDIT: To be clear, I also played a LOT of guitar and piano. Ear training was in addition to the hard work of becoming a player.

Re: Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

#25

Post by user574275 »

jbl0ndie wrote: post #18

I'd like more tries to pick out the notes when pecking at the on-screen keyboard. I don't need to hear the pattern again, I need to learn where the note pitches are on the keyboard.

Is that teaching a bad habit though? Is it one of those things where's importantly to be confidently wrong or right?

Re: Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

#26

Post by ta2112 »

catapart wrote: post #12

Just a quick compatibility issue: for some reason, my midi board triggers a key input both when I press it down, and when I let it go. I'm assuming that it might just be something wrong with my board, but I did want to let you know in case there might be some nuance you haven't considered with respect to the midi commands. I know my first crack at it didn't distinguish between note-on and note-off commands, for insta…

I can add a bit of information to what might be behind this bug.

In MIDI, there are NOTE_ON and NOTE_OFF events, for when you press and release each key. The NOTE_ON has pitch and velocity parameters. The NOTE_OFF just has pitch parameter (maybe it has velocity as well I can't quite remember, it's off the point). So if you push middle C, it might look like this:

NOTE_ON 60 (middle C) 98 (velocity), NOTE_OFF 60

Some keyboards never send NOTE_OFF events, instead they send NOTE_ON with velocity 0. On these keyboards, pressing middle C looks like this:

NOTE_ON 60 98, NOTE_ON 60 0

Both are valid MIDI streams, and all stream processors should react appropriately to both. This app likely does not correctly map zero velocity NOTE_ON events to NOTE_OFF with the same pitch.

Re: Show HN: I made a memory game to teach you to play piano by ear

#27

Post by ianbutler »

Fraterkes wrote: post #13

[flagged]

There are plenty of musicians here saying this is useful for them or would be useful while learning.

As meta commentary, those not in a subgroup sometime fail to see utility of a thing built for that subgroup and it's easy to feel a sense of superiority "oh how dumb and trivial this thing is", but it may be better to first have curiosity and see how the intended audience responds. Often it's not dumb or trivial, you're missing context and experience to see the value.

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