Closed pganssle closed 9 months ago
Quick status update:
Currently I'm thinking we'll at least start by expanding out to the 14 "main sequence" chords. We will call the chord names by their letters, which will be superposed on the flags when I get around to it. The 10 additional inversions will have to be added later, and maybe in a separate mode.
We managed to get a copy of the Eguchi method book and have had parts of it translated from Japanese. The colors they use are:
黄緑 - AC♯E - Chartruse 肌色 - DF♯A - "Skin color" 藤色 - EG♯B - Grey-blue 灰色 - B♭DF - Light grey 水色 - E♭GB♭ - Light blue
Some of these are not familiar to English-speaking audiences, and definitely not to children. Since the book makes it clear that these color choices are arbitrary, I ended up changing them up a bit:
黄緑 - AC♯E - Gray ("GrAy major") 肌色 - DF♯A - Tan 藤色 - EG♯B - Light green ("GrEen major") 灰色 - B♭DF - Light purple / lilac 水色 - E♭GB♭ - Sky Blue
I'm also switching the chord generation from manually recorded chords to Tone.js, which will allow us to easily expand chords, durations, and instruments. This will slightly change the sound of the existing chords, so I've added an instrument selector pulldown that allows you to pick the old piano. When I get more time I might add additional instruments in case it's fun for the kids to try it out on different instruments.
If anyone wants to try it out and provide initial feedback, I've deployed a working beta here: https://pganssle-bug-mwes.github.io/cim-beta
Note: I changed what color "Pink" represents because I felt that pink, purple and lilac all looked to similar in the old UI. Open to suggestions about that.
This is mostly implemented, closing it in favor of #23.
Right now this only covers the "white" chords. The child is supposed to master the 9 white chords, and when you are at 100% accuracy for the 9 white chords, you add 5 more black chords. Excerpt from the paper:
The 5 chords are (if I am reading this right):
This raises a problem, beause the paper does not explain what the tone names are, and I am not confident that I understand music theory enough to say what they should be. If anyone out there know what the names for these 14 chords (and the 10 additional inversions of the black chords), please let me know.
I am not sure the best way to approach the UI for this. I don't think I want the children to need to read AC#E or whatever, but the "black chord" period is designed to sensitize the children to the single tones that make up the chords, as mentioned later in the paper:
I'm thinking that the "black chords" version of this needs to be a separate app, not just adding more chords to the existing UI. Instead of a "level" drop-down, we'd have a 2D-drop down with check boxes for which inversions to include, so it would be like:
( )
AC♯E[ ]
C♯EA[ ]
EAC♯(·)
DF♯A[X]
F♯AD[ ]
ADF♯( )
EG♯B[ ]
G♯BE[ ]
BEG♯Or something of that nature.
I also am not sure how to do the selection part. Potentially the kid could be looking at up to 24 different chord options. I'm thinking we might assign colors or patterns to each note, and then have a compound symbol for each button, but do we want something like a 4 × 6 grid? Particularly if people want to use this on their phones? Another option might be that in "black chord" mode, with each new chord we choose a random subset of the full grid (maybe 6-9 options?) that we know includes the correct option and a few options that are most likely to cause confusion.
This is a kind of long post, so to summarize, here are the major action items that need resolution before we can start: