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!
As a slight aside, I have always wondered (and never really found a conclusive answer) whether it's possible to train your absolute pitch perception. I have perfect pitch so I can't really test myself fairly (although it does make this puzzle very easy for me!). I've read on multiple occasions that exposure / training as a child is the best way to get it for life, and being musical as a kid might explain my ability to detect absolute pitch.
relative pitch is not just useful, it is absolutely mandatory to do any music at all. Absolute pitch on the other hand is just a convenience.
Virtually everyone has at least some relative pitch, enough to know "the next note should be right/left of the last one." Moving the whole octave, and only really showing that with the highlights on a tiny keyboard above is just confusing.
I'm one of those people who virtually never puts my phone in landscape mode, but I would rather unlock landscape mode for one puzzle a day so you could display the full range of applicable keys for the featured section of the song than try it the current way again.
There is one question that I haven't entirely figured out how to ask but am curious about -- if we let you adjust the octaves, and if you select the correct note but the wrong octave, would you want the game to highlight the note as "green" (correct) when you submit the attempt? Or would you prefer to have to guess the right octave along with the right note before the answer is accepted?
(Unrelated side note: I am a desktop person, and thus surprised that so many people are playing it on their phones, haha. I'll have to check the google analytics for that.)
Recommendation: add a 4th color for correct note, wrong octave.
Err on the side of just making it wrong.
Another recommendation: make an easy mode in a single octave for practice. Allow progression to more octaves once easy mode is mastered.
Maybe a simple mode (one octave) and an advanced mode (more octaves..).
Thanks for the nice game! And because there is a keyboard right there to compare with the recording, this is just as much a game of relative pitch as it is perfect pitch. (With that said I don't mind the name, it is a fun one and can be good branding.)
If I understand OP correctly that should help with their issues as well. I don't know what an "e" sounds like, but if I'm allowed to play the tones,I can quite accurately decide if it's the correct note or not.
I didn't try hard mode yet, but I suppose one of the harder difficulties could be that you have to choose octave as well. That'd really make it difficult!
I don't think this would really be an issue, since anyone who played the sample and then played their entry would immediately hear that it isn't the same.
Or... is that the game, I should be able to ID the notes irrespective of octave?
For example, if the solution was:
Bb3 Bb4 Dd5 Db5 C5 Bb4 (the first 6 notes of a "Believer" melody)
... the piano octaves will be [3,4,5,5,4]
In today's puzzle, the first note is in octave 4, and the second note is somewhere in octave 3.
In a VERY early version of the game, we didn't show where the octave positioning was, only 7 white keys, and people got confused because even when they accurately thought that the next note was higher based on the interval, it actually ended up being a "lower" note because it was a lower note on a higher octave scale.
So now we give you the octave positioning.
Thanks for mentioning it! I really struggled with this octaves decision, and wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38410228
However, starting to also think that maybe I should just write a note on the page explaining what it's doing, lol.
I also wish there was a way to play more than one. Maybe allow me to do the previous days?
Oof... we'll have to make sure the piano keyboard is more visible earlier in mobile mode :sweat-smile: I'm glad it worked for you in mobile, though! I've gotten mixed feedback about the notes sometimes not playing in mobile.
> I also wish there was a way to play more than one. Maybe allow me to do the previous days?
That's a great idea! We were originally thinking we needed to add support for user accounts to support this, but actually, it shouldn't be hard to allow people to toggle back to previous days as is. Thanks for the feedback!
Edit: Ah, it's because the phone was in silent mode. That usually doesn't prevent website sounds playing. Not sure what's different here.
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'.
We originally just thought of the game as "musical wordle" since we didn't want to infringe on the "wordle" name itself in case there were copyright issues, and PPP seemed like nice alliteration, which is how we ended up with the current branding. But I've started to realize that people have expectations when they hear it -- i.e. I've heard someone ask if the game was only for musicians who have perfect pitch, and that was not my intention at all!
Re: intervals -- right now in "easy" mode, we give users the first note, which gives them a start at identifying intervals. But I'm starting to wonder if maybe a given first note should be the default "normal" mode, now. And maybe "easy" mode will give more visual cues, maybe? (Just thinking out loud here.)
> melodies in a key other than C Funny story -- it took me forever to add in support for sharps and flats to the game, which is why the first ~50 songs in the database all had melodies whose first six notes had to be in C major. Luckily this is not the case anymore (we're at Day 111 now).
> If you haven't already it would be good to give Earmaster a try and see how they approach it Thank you for the recommendation! I've checked out a few other online ear training games but not Earmaster yet.
[0] https://offtonic.com/theory/applets/intervaleartrainer.html (NB on my Firefox I needed to enable auto-play for this to work, even though it doesn’t actually play anything automatically)
Being able to backspace and replay my selection makes it too easy. I can just keep changing my first guess until it sounds the same.
Hard mode seems a little too hard.
Can I have a kinda-hard mode? :)
I think we'll definitely have to do more brainstorming to figure out the right features for each difficulty level; I think I saw some ask for an even more difficult mode.
My partner (who finds these puzzles more challenging) does this but still often completes the puzzle in more than one guess because they just want to test out how accurate they were on the first try and make use of the grey/yellow tiles to get closer to the answer, haha.
I challenge you to the "bird_tweet" instrument in "hard" mode, lol. The bird tweet notes are almost indistinguishable it might as well be silent. It's hard even for me!
Just my two cents
Thanks for the feedback!
> leave the keys that have been used colored like in the original wordle game so there is some visual reference of what was previously used/correct/incorrect/misplaced
Oh, this is a good feature call. I'll need to look up how the original wordle deals with multiple of the same letters in the same solution -- e.g. if the puzzle is EEFGGF (the first 6 notes of Hallelujah) and you entered EFEGGE, should "E" display as yellow or green? (On second thought, probably yellow.)
> please let us manually scroll the keyboard
Letting people change octaves instead of letting the game pick the right octave for each note was something I really struggled with, because I think it would make the game a lot harder.
For example, if the right note was "C5" and the user picked "C4", they would hear "C4" when they played the note on the keyboard to input it, but if they clicked the button on the right side to listen back on their guess, should they hear the note in the correct "C5" pitch, or the wrong "C4" pitch?
If we accepted the entry even though it was in the wrong octave, it might be a little confusing since the playback would be different from what they heard when they input the note.
However, if we did not accept the entry because it was the wrong octave, we'd have to refactor to adjust the tiles to show the full octave number (like "C4" or "C5" instead of "C" or "Bb4" and "Bb5" instead of "Bb")... and maybe this would be a good candidate for a harder mode than the current "hard" mode.
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Letting users scroll the keyboard to change octaves is something I definitely want to put into the future "practice" mode, though! Since the feedback will be quicker, it will be easier to tell a user immediately if they chose the right note but the wrong octave.
Otherwise what we see and what we hear don't match (showing CC and playing C4C5 for instance)
We do hope to allow octave selection in a future "practice" mode where you're not limited to one puzzle a day, though.
The reason you can't right now is because it gets a little complicated if the user selects the right note but the wrong octave; they'll hear the correct pitch when they play the note, but should we record the wrong octave in the playback, or play the right octave (but potentially cause confusion, because it wasn't exactly the note the user selected?) The easiest thing to do seemed to select the octave for the user, but I'm open to feedback on how to make this less confusing with the maximum fun.
Is there a big downside to storing and displaying the octave along with the note? (Perhaps you could also give the player an easy way to change the octave of a note after inputting the note, to save them from having to backspace -> change octave -> input note again.)
I think it would be great to have an option that disables playing the pitch that I select, as for me the pitch removes most of the challenge.
Would you prefer to play a "super hard" mode with disabled pitch and no backspace (and 8 tiles and only 3 listens), or the option to disable the pitch at any level?
I had to replay a lot of times the tune and my versions to be able to get it right in three attempts.
One feedback is that I would like to be able to play more times a day. Unlike Wordle, your game has a few interesting variations. In particular, the instrument options. I would like to keep playing with it to explore those options. I imagine other people would like to test the hard mode as well, to see if they can get it right with the replay limitation. But after playing the first time to understand the game, you can’t explore more.
Finally, I personally would like to choose the music genre of the puzzle. I would likely choose classical music, so it would also add some discoverability aspect on a music genre that I enjoy.
Anyway, congrats on the well done game!
> One feedback is that I would like to be able to play more times a day.
We will consider making the previous days' songs available to play.
> Finally, I personally would like to choose the music genre of the puzzle.
Nice idea! :) Maybe once we have more songs (right now there only 125) and user accounts we can support genre selection.
Thanks again for playing!
Suggested fix: play a very short but silent sound before the actual game.
> I think the easy mode could be easier - people without perfect pitch need to warm up a bit first
Will think about that, thanks! Maybe immediate visual feedback to give you a hint if you're close to the note, or the first two notes are given instead of just the first note? Otherwise I can't think of other ways to make it more easy, but am open to ideas!
You are maybe the fifth person to mention the octaves, haha. At the moment, I'm starting to think something like:
Easy mode: we give you the octave guardrails Normal, hard: you have to select the right octave and the right note; if it's the right note but wrong octave, the tile turns pale green. Also, maybe some new design for the grid so that you can toggle the octave up or down beside the superscript of each tile
The octaves moving are too easy tho. Just lemme enter C4 instead of any C.
But I was still able to get it right in the first row by running the sample lots of times, hitting a key and listening if my combination matches the original music. My point is that I don't think this is for checking pitch perfection if it can be done this way be someone who don't understand a thing about music.
Could I suggest adding some extra challenges? Maybe define notes in terms of intervals to the root. Or maybe removing the sample tune and give us more guesses? I don’t even know if that would work TBH, I’m just spitballing.
