Hi all! Thanks for checking out the side project my family and I have been working on (on and off) for the past year. We were playing wordle when we thought: wouldn't it be fun if you had to guess musical notes (ABCDEFG) instead of words? And what if the notes you had to guess were actually the first six notes of a familiar melody?
My brother and I both have perfect pitch, which has been really helpful when we want to cover a song that we like, or improvise in a jazz or blue grass setting. We don’t promise that this game will help you gain perfect pitch, but it is possible to train your ear to more accurately gauge sounds, and our hope is that this game will help with that.
So far we’ve gotten feedback from consistent players that the game has helped non-musicians more easily identify notes based on relative pitches, and helped even musicians improve their ability to remember tunes better, which is good to hear.
The game has evolved with different instruments and difficulty modes (easy, normal, hard), but the essence has remained the same:
- One new musical puzzle a day
- The octave moves with the melody, so you don’t need to worry about the octave; you just need to guess the pitch
There are a few things we want to improve as well, like:
- improved mobile support (especially Android)
- a “practice mode” - allow users to play more than one game per day, or multiple variations of notes, with visual feedback on how close they were to guessing the note
- making it easier to add new songs to the database (currently it takes 5-10 minutes to code in a new song)
any other feedback that we get here or in our Discord. :)
PS. If you already have perfect pitch or want to challenge yourself to the impossible, I'd recommend playing the "bird_tweet" instrument in "hard" mode!
I know you're invested in the 'perfect pitch' framing, since you mention that you have it in the family. Since it seems like your goal is to have this be a useful and accessible educational tool for those breaking into music, I would highly recommend pivoting this to have a strong focus on relative pitch, and specifically _intervals_, instead. Knowing how to distinguish intervals is both more accessible, and also much more useful for actually playing and creating music. As is, this tool clearly deprioritizes intervals with the fixed piano-key input and melodies in a key other than C. This will really only help one get better at this specific game.
If you haven't already, give Earmaster a try and see how they approach it - it's one of the most referenced and well-regarded training apps on the market. Earmaster, and others like it, start with a focus on relative intervals, then expand out from there to enhance instant recognition and memory of relative intervals across a melody - but the focus is almost never on absolute pitch 'across the piano'.