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

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

#151

Nice! Would love to use it. I don't have a midi piano. Wondering if it is easy for you to support my inputs using microphone. I think there will be several noobs like me with the same problem.

https://imitone.com/ is what I use.

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

#152

Nice! Would love to use it. I don't have a midi piano. Wondering if it is easy for you to support my inputs using microphone. I think there will be several noobs like me with the same problem.

Thanks! It's definitely on my TODO list. Ideally I'd like to add support for pitch recognition for acoustic pianos and guitars.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey catapart, Thanks for the feedback. Oof that's weird. Maybe I'm triggering some kind of odd aftertouch? EDIT: Just saw ta2112's note. That's super helpful I'm definitely only responding to standard MIDI NOTE_ON and NOTE_OFF messages. I'll try to get this fixed this evening.

Sweet! Thanks for the follow up. I hope it's a straightforward fix! Aside from that, nice work on the app! Looking forward to giving it another try. ETA: a shameless plug, but since you may have an interest in this kind of thing - I built and published a free, online midi piano (and drum kit) available for anyone to use. It's pretty bare-bones and doesn't really explain itself, but in case you ever want to use it, ch…

Okay I think it's fixed - I'm testing for NOTE_ON with velocity of 0. Let me now if that solves it for you. I simulated a test of it because my midi controller just sends the regular NOTE_ON/NOTE_OFF messages!

Tried out your site - super clean interface. I noticed you are using the Salamander Grand Piano samples. For some weird reason I thought that those samples were pretty huge (50+ MB) but it loaded up pretty quick so great job!

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

#154

The starting difficulty is too high for your average beginner. Start with just one interval, then increase. Also, you should let people try a few times rather than just allowing one attempt.

Thanks for the feedback. I've adjusted the Practice Mode so you can turn the starting sequence down to a single note. The "grace note" allowance (see what I did there) for allowing a player to sort of find the right note has been asked for a few times - I'll try to get that implemented later this weekend!

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

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll look into this, is it possible that you have Silent Mode enabled? I tested the app on an old iPad and it worked okay but unfortunately I don't have any other iOS devices.

iPhone 14 in Firefox (still Safari under the hood of course) - no silent mode, no sleep/DND/etc., volume turned up (confirmed via other browser tab playing YT) - and still no sound from the app. I’m guessing you may be using a JavaScript API which possibly doesn’t exist in whatever version of Safari (fuck Safari…fuck Apple’s control of browsers…etc). My advice: Use the free tier of BrowserStack to test basic function…

Hey EdNutting - that's a good idea about Browserstack! Yeah my circle of friends only have android phones and/or iPads and we haven't encountered this issue yet.

If you get a chance, could you see if the Metronome works? It'll only play if you're in the middle of a game but it doesn't use the old soundfont-player, just direct web audio.

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm - I was hoping that the Practice Mode would cover this, but I think there's probably some room to add an option where you can freeze the difficulty level - I'll see if I can add this later in the evening. The "construed melody" is a harder problem. I've been playing around with the idea of using a markov model or even borrowing what CPU Bach did to try to create more coherent melodies over time. Thanks for the fe…

Transformers are nice. You can train a very minimal network that can output reasonable sequences very easily. They won't be high quality, or too pretty, but they will "make sense" way more than randomness and (usually) change keys in a coherent way.

Hey viraptor! I haven't even thought about using transformers but that sounds like a great idea. The current generator is just a standard random walk across the major/minor intervals and could definitely use some TLC!

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

#157
post #143

Great idea! Small nitpick, on my phone the last played key remains highlighted after the "Wrong" message. That got me quite confused in the beginning.

Hey c7b - thanks for the feedback I'll address that. I'm glad the audio is at least working on your phone though~

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

#158
post #38

It's a very cool little game! One suggestion: could you make it so you can noodle around on the keyboard without submitting the answer and then once you've worked it out, have a submission mode? Right now, it's frustrating that if you enter a wrong note, it shows a message, so you can't experiment on the keyboard to try to work it out.

Thanks everyone for the feedback! I've added a bunch of new updates, just thought I would consolidate to this message since its pinned near the top.

*Changes*

- Ableton keyboard layout for ladidahh also thanks for a user name that I had to type about four times because of my phone's autocorrect! :)

- Tempo sliders for practice and Simon modes

- Lock icon which lets you freeze the difficulty at a certain number of notes in Practice mode instead of constantly increasing

- Floating display window in settings which displays stave and note that you are currently playing on a midi keyboard.

*Future Updates*

- Noodle time (let you play around to experiment before going O'Reilly Live)

- Markov or Transformer (thanks viraptor) approach to generate more sonically pleasing melodies

- Pianistic echoes (caetris24) - an optional visualization for the onscreen keyboard almost like a heat map pattern

- Fix the weird iPhone audio issue (EdNutting had some good advice on this)

- still looking at adding the Tracker 4-layout as proposed by moosedev

*Helpful fixes*

- Some midi controllers don't send a corresponding NOTE_OFF, instead they send a NOTE_ON with velocity of 0 (Thanks ta2112 for this helpful info)

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, but (or "and") use the 4-row layout that dozens of tracker programs used[0], to fit over 2 octaves on the computer keyboard. On a US keyboard: QWERTYUIOP[] is the white keys starting at middle C. (The row above is the black keys; the 2 key plays C#.) ZXCVBNM,./ is the white keys starting an octave lower. (S plays a low C#.) The two ranges overlap; e.g. Q and , both play C in the same octave. Grew up composing m…

Can you name a piece of software that uses this scheme? Or, better still, the OG software that used it. If I steal this, I'd like to have something to call it. (I've seen this scheme before: I think it might be used by the keyboard built into the Squeak image that comes with Scratch 1.4.)

FL Studio (fka Fruity Loops) uses this layout, or something very close to it.
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