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Comment by davay | Hacker News Reader

Chromatone is useful on the way there while you're still learning those keys and scales. Just open that panel with a note name on the left, choose click the tonic note and choose a scale and you will immediately see the notes to play on your keyboard and guitar/ukulele without any need to memorize or calculate the interval steps. Then you memorize them and don't need the colors any more. But they help you get there much faster and with less pressure on memory and long hours of practice.

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From personal experience, I think having to unlearn the trigger(s) - in this case a specific colour creates more difficulty than its worth. You're intentionally coupling then de-coupling neuronal networks, and the de-coupling is harder than the coupling.

It also makes me wonder how much cognitive dissonance this may cause for those with synaethesia who already have their own thing going on.

I'm super curious about this project because I am currently trying to deeply learn music, but it is very difficult to get to a meaningful point of really "understanding" music and theory if you only have the time of a modern adult to commit to it. However I largely agree with you about this unfortunately. Do you think this person's project, where they use colors for relative notation is better?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41442831

I couldn't say. I only know that my personal experience of using Rocksmith to learn guitar meant I couldn't bust out a song perfectly without looking at the screen, even if I could get 100% in expert (no visible notation) mode for some songs.

The 60hz refresh visual input was 'expected' by my brain to be there in order to coordinate my body with correct timing, intonation etc. i.e. it seemed to be mixed in with my so called 'muscle memory'.

One other thing that was most noticeable is the gamification noises (e.g. the noise you get for reaching the 25x multiplier) became part of my mental model, and when I recognised this and turned them off in the options, my inability to play that part of song nearly as well became extremely evident, although persisting with the option set to off allowed me to overcome it.

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