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ryanatkn / ear-sharpener

a simple game for practicing pitch perception
https://ryanatkn.github.io/ear-sharpener
The Unlicense
63 stars 10 forks source link

A few things! #2

Open benjylamb opened 8 years ago

benjylamb commented 8 years ago

Hello, Love your work friend. A few suggestions,

  1. The pitches you use seem to be slightly flat by a few cents, I'm trying to work on my 'perfect pitch' and love your 3 game system but I don't want to ingrain notes that are a little under. (ie the octaves on honky tonk piano sound)
  2. In the 'Note name' game relabel the most common notes (i.e. A# to Bb & D# to Eb) or better yet, put both names in the box (i.e A#/Bb)
  3. This last point I've been desperately searching for and it's to assign random sounds to the pitches, I.e. a piano is great but maybe a violin, voice (male/female), tuba, flute, clarinet, trumpet etc. It means in real life when we encounter instruments with different overtone balances we can know to listen to the true center note and not get confused. The hard thing with this is finding a) real sound files not just midi/synth versions & b) making sure all the examples you are sourcing are in exact tune (equal temperament to a piano)

I have other ideas for this but I don't want to flood with comments -

Lastly thank you so very much for building the program!! I greatly appreciate it. I've used it for about an hour all up and plan to do 10 minutes a day. I'm already fluent on all the hardest lvls of this stuff (including bizarrely spaced intervals) I conduct a few different choirs/orchestras. I'm just looking to get monstrously fast at it so it's useful on the fly.

Cheers mate, Ben

ryanatkn commented 8 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions! Have you tried other ear training apps? I honestly wasn't expecting this game to compete with professionally developed apps, but I'm delighted that you find it useful.

  1. I'm sorry the notes are a bit flat. I'll look around for a different set when I have some time to see if they can be improved.
  2. I appreciate the input here and I'll make the change soon. Would it be preferable to use the symbols ♯ and ♭ here?
  3. I totally agree here, and I'll look around to see if I can find some permissively licensed samples. Using generated synths would be fairly easy, and would ensure that the pitch is correct, but I understand that it wouldn't be as desirable as real instruments. Maybe I could add synths as a toggleable option. There seem to be three simple ways to integrate additional instruments into the games, and I'm not sure which is best:
    • Randomize the instrument for each individual note. So if an interval is played, the first and second notes would possibly be different instruments.
    • Randomize the instrument for every set of notes after a correct guess. So an interval will use the same instrument for both notes, and the instrument stays the same until you get the answer right.
    • Randomize the instrument for every set of notes. An interval would have the same instrument for both notes, and if the interval is replayed, like after an incorrect guess, the instrument would be randomized.

Any more feedback is welcome. This is just a little hobby project but I'd be happy to keep improving it if you continue to find it useful.

benjylamb commented 8 years ago

Yeah, ♯ and ♭ would be great I appreciate the time you spend, not pressure just some suggestions! I think the most important thing would be to get the pitch as absolute as you can so it's not under, But all these things would be sweet!

ryanatkn commented 8 years ago

The note names now include both the flats and sharps. Any more suggestions are appreciated!

I found a collection of samples of many instruments from the University of Iowa Electronic Music Studios. Hopefully it's as amazing as it looks! I uploaded a single set of C4 test samples from their piano samples. The original sample does seem flat compared to the new ones, so hopefully they're in tune. Would you mind taking a listen to judge the quality of the new ones? Also, would you suggest using the ff or mf versions, or letting the user choose? There is also a pp version that seems too quiet.

Here are the links to download the files directly. You can also find them in static/audio/test-samples.

Not every instrument has the range that a piano has, so I'll need to think about the best way to integrate them, in addition to figuring out how randomization should work. (see the notes in the previous comment) Hopefully these samples work out, because it seems like there's an entire orchestra in there!