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Ear Training Practice

tonedear.com

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Re: Ear Training Practice

#81

Post by alok-g »

titzer wrote: post #78
alok-g wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very nice! My wish list for UX / features: For the Note Quiz, it was not immediately obvious to me what I need to do - i.e., pick from one of the four what were answer choices. Consider adding some instructions for newbies like me. I got 90% right for the Note quiz. On Key Quiz, I won't even get 20%. :-) Either way, it would help to have a "Teach" mode also, not just Quiz/evaluate mode. This may show me two keys/chor…

All interesting suggestions. I might add a toggle for horizontal mode, but would probably retain both modes to not lose functionality. For my other apps I have forks of each version, with the idea that if it changes radically from one version to the next, one can always go back to a live copy of the old version. I pushed an Apache 2.0 license. Feel free to clone the GitHub repo and throw Claude at it. It might surpri…

Lovely!

I have been wishing to make an app like this for years. I have Sing-and-See, Ear Master, etc., but none seems to get the UX right (for me).

Will play around with vibe-coding when there's opportunity. Thanks for adding the license!

Re: Ear Training Practice

#82

Post by alok-g »

vunderba wrote: post #77
alok-g wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice! My wish list for this: 1. Even the practice mode has a high bar as it expects me to get the whole thing right in the first shot. It should let me try some before jumping to tell me I got it wrong and automatically playing it again. 2. Show me the first key of the sequence and have me figure only the rest. Why: When I hear the note sequence, I cannot pick the absolute scale, only the intervals. So I practically…

Hi alok-g, I'm going to be implementing number 1 - a "playground" that lets you sort of plink around until you're happy. I've gotten a number of requests for this. The second request has me a bit confused, so I may be misunderstanding. Under “Note hints” in the options, there are three different modes for practice. In all of them in Practice Mode, the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet…

>> ... the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation.

Oh, the sheet notation! I can't read that :-), so had completely ignored it.

I would like to see the same notes on the piano roll!, say as labels on the keys "*1", "2", "3", "4" (the same options could control the visibility).

Re: Ear Training Practice

#83

Post by vunderba »

alok-g wrote: post #82
vunderba wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi alok-g, I'm going to be implementing number 1 - a "playground" that lets you sort of plink around until you're happy. I've gotten a number of requests for this. The second request has me a bit confused, so I may be misunderstanding. Under “Note hints” in the options, there are three different modes for practice. In all of them in Practice Mode, the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet…

>> ... the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation. Oh, the sheet notation! I can't read that :-), so had completely ignored it. I would like to see the same notes on the piano roll!, say as labels on the keys "*1", "2", "3", "4" (the same options could control the visibility).

Oh! I completely hadn't really thought of that. So maybe what I could add is an option in the settings where it lights up the first note on the piano roll.

In the meantime you can open the piano roll and set the "Show note labels on key" in the settings so that when it shows the key signature at the top "G Major", you can match it with the corresponding note label.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#84

Post by alok-g »

vunderba wrote: post #83
alok-g wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> ... the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation. Oh, the sheet notation! I can't read that :-), so had completely ignored it. I would like to see the same notes on the piano roll!, say as labels on the keys "*1", "2", "3", "4" (the same options could control the visibility).

Oh! I completely hadn't really thought of that. So maybe what I could add is an option in the settings where it lights up the first note on the piano roll. In the meantime you can open the piano roll and set the "Show note labels on key" in the settings so that when it shows the key signature at the top "G Major", you can match it with the corresponding note label.

Great! I had turned "Show note labels on key" already, but had not known that the label at the top tells me the first key. :-) Thanks.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#85

Post by trane_project »

I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.

If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.

I wrote a guide on how to do this: https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript...

Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.

I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#86

Post by jessetemp »

functionmouse wrote: post #3

I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7? We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?

The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".

My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.

Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun

Re: Ear Training Practice

#87

Post by trane_project »

functionmouse wrote: post #3

I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7? We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.

Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#88

Post by analog31 »

fl4regun wrote: post #37
xlii wrote: post #35

Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music. I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer. Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.

can you tell if a piano is out of tune? I'm curious since I don't know anyone with aphantasia. Can you tell if someone is playing your composition correctly?

It's possible to tell from one note. The reason is that the unisons will be out of tune with one another and change the tone quality.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#89

Post by LearnYouALisp »

trane_project wrote: post #85

I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely. If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along the…

You "wrote" a guide, yet it's in "generated_courses"? Interesting

Re: Ear Training Practice

#90

Post by skulk »

xlii wrote: post #35

Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music. I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer. Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.

the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.
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