Show HN: KeyByKey.app – Daily piano game for practicing playing melodies by ear | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: KeyByKey.app – Daily piano game for practicing playing melodies by ear

keybykey.app

Hi,

I whipped up this daily piano challenge game after noticing my partner struggling to play a tune by ear. She could hum the tune, but was struggling with recognizing whether the next note would be higher or lower than the previous.

That gave me the idea of KeyByKey. A simple Wordle-style daily challenge game, where you are given a tune to play back by ear.

There's no limit to the number of attempts, but after successfully completing the challenge it will show how you compare to other players.

Still ironing out some bugs.

Let me know what you think!

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Having played with this a couple days:

1. there's no need for the welcome pop-up every time.

2. the player timing is not good. Are you randomizing durations as a stylistic choice to sound like a first day piano player? it frequently runs together 3 or 4 notes 1/32nds so i have to play it 3 or 4 times to hear the notes with something approximating an appropriate duration.

3. when making a mistake - if you're playing on a keyboard, i can see value on starting over from the beginning. but if you're clicking on the mouse, it's kind of pointless.

That's very nice. I used to do http://perfectpitchpuzzle.com daily, which is similar but shorter and with wordle mechanics.

I don't know how other people do these things but I've got my keyboard next to my computer so that's where I work it out and the number of attempts (that you know about) isn't meaningful. But it's still great practice.

Nice job. Having built a couple of play-by-ear training games, my recommendation would be to add support for MIDI controllers. If you use the WebMIDI.js project, it should be relatively easy to set up.

https://github.com/djipco/webmidi

That cool, I'll look into that. I am having some lag issues with the mp3 playback on mobile that midi would likely fix.

The game is client side, and the stats are stored in a tiny Pocketbase instance. Ensuring the stats aren't spammed is an interesting problem with a client side browser game. If it becomes a problem I might look into a server issued token solution.

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