Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.

This is really simple and great!! Thanks for not stuffing it with ads.

Is there a way to make it work a bit better for phones? On mobile Safari, just tapping to enable sound doesn’t seem to work until I reload and tap again.

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?

They're asking for midi device control & reprogram, my guess is that for some of the exercises you can use your own midi keyboard to input the note (dictation etc.)

"ear training" is the term we use as musicians to refer to the skill this website is dedicated to. It is a fundamental skill of music.

You expected one thing but found it was not what you thought. What is the takeaway for us?

If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4

He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music, UI design, and programming.

>We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

Do you mean trying to teach all children perfect pitch even though society has no expectation of that? Unlike knowing at least your primary colors which is expected of everyone. I suspect that could be unnecessarily stressful for many.

Or do you mean as some kind of metaphor or analogy? If the latter, I think it would be quite confusing as there are aspects of vision and hearing that are quite different. Pitch classes have no analog in vision that I can think of. Color vision is roughly 3 dimensional but sound is not. The aspects of timbre don't map to color.

I think that understanding music theory does require work. It emerges from physics and physiology and a very long history including a bunch of culturally specific things. Did your ancestors make music with long skinny strings or pipes with nice integer-ish overtones? Here are some tuning systems for you (among them the set of C-D-E-F-G-A-B you mentioned). Did they use bells or gongs with decidedly non-integer ratio overtones? Here's a set of different systems for you!

Anyway, if you have a mapping/analog/metaphor you think is useful between music or sound and color I would be interested to hear it / see it!

None of this is objective. The construction of our scale is subjective, other countries use different scales. Even with this same scale, there are multiple different tuning systems. There is micro-tonal music. Musical keys are arbitrary too. We teach the way we do because it is a culmination of musical history, our particular western musical history, and it's own arbitrary decisions that western musicians have made over the past hundreds, even thousands of years. If you like, there is also solfege, which replaces letter names with just sounds, "do re mi" etc, Also what makes you think colours are objective? Different languages have words for a single colour that map onto multiple other words in other countries, does not seem very objective to me, unless you are talking about notating colours as hex or RGB number values, or wavelengths (which we don't do in natural language)

You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html

Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.

There is no "objective" foundation to music.

Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:

     B D  G I K
    A C EF H J LA

Do you have much experience reading musical notation?

I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.

Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.

To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.

>For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge might be easier for some people.

Haven't heard about CDEFGAE up until I was in my mid 20s trying to learn guitar (after 7 years of music school and musical calsses in regular school)

I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.

As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.

A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.

The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.

We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.

For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).

Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p

Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.

Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?

Sounds like you don’t understand scales if you’re confused about why we have 7 note names.

Also, in your own color analogy: we have a small number of main color names, then a bunch of in betweens.

I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.

I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)