dberst

You (or anyone interested in sound/physics/code) may find this video / series interesting

https://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970?si=qvTXK6YSMsPaE-GE

Ah thank you for the correction, I'm just a hobbyist and have not practiced in a few years

I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly

Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.

Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know

If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition

You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.

Best of luck!!

I'd be happy to see any "songs all in the same key" type playlists if anyone wants to share one

I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these

I've used the emulator "Retroarch" on the Steam Deck and had good success playing with it in offline mode. It has a bit of a learning curve, but it's been a great fit for me

When I did this a number of years ago, and it was only around 5-6GB, or about 20GB with all the images. I also added about 4GB for windows, android, iOS, Linux, and Mac OS apps to parse/view the data. All of that fits on a 32GB flashdrive that I used to keep on my keychain but currently is in my glove compartment I think.

It sparks some amazement in me still to wrap my head around the reality of so much information in a thing the size of my pinky. Or the size of my pinky nail if you use a micro SD card. And yeah, just took a weekend of downloading and setting it up, and flashdrives/microsd cards are easily found at department stores, or even gas stations sometimes.

Even disregarded any potential doomsday utility, the amusement/amazement it's brought me was well worth the modest time/money it took. I hope more people give it a try

I can imagine a tax so high that it's effectively a ban, and a tax half that size that might be a compromise between black and white ban/no ban

I'm a novice at machine learning, but Open AI made a python library for reinforcement learning in video games, and a fork of it is still actively maintained [1]. It's been a few years, but I remember being able to get it up and running in a day or two (maybe a weekend). It used the Retroarch emulator, which is compatible with a huge number of emulators and consoles.

https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Gymnasium

There also SethBling's excellent video on YouTube about machine learning specifically with Super Mario World:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qv6UVOQ0F44

I encourage you to give it a try! I feel that video games are a bit underrated by current AI buzz, I think there's lots of potential for a machine to learn a skill through playing a game. And lots of potential for a game being selected or even created with the goal of teaching a specific skill. However at that point maybe it's better to forego the audio and visuals and speak to the machine in text or with pure data.

On the other hand, I have seen a video about convolutional neural networks that feed on each pixel of an image. So perhaps training with sound data, or with the pixels of a spectrogram, could have some positive results. And certainly I would be amused to see a game played in time with music, or possibly even dancing with a songs melody, harmony, and story as well.

Anything that's ever been created by humans, existed first in the imagination of a human brain. And you've got one of those. A mental vision pursued and brought from the mind into physical reality is a beautiful thing, a gift for all of humanity in my eyes. I think it's quite worthwhile. But that's just my perspective. Thank you for sharing your imagination. Have a nice day

For those lost from the landing page here's a visualization that worked for me on mobile (chrome/android) https://see.chromatone.center/

There's a bunch of web apps in the "Practice" section of the site:

https://chromatone.center/practice/

https://chromatone.center/practice/experiments/

https://chromatone.center/practice/sound/

The landing page doesn't seem very exciting (on mobile at least) but the "practice" area of the site contains quite a few web apps to demonstrate the concepts. I think the basic idea is that western music uses 12 tones, and chromatone gives each of those tones a color, and uses those 12 color/tone pairs as a basis for teaching music theory in a visual way.

Here's a simple app that works on mobile (android/chrome anyway): https://see.chromatone.center/

And also here's where I found a lot of additional web apps. I'll look through them more when I'm at my PC. But just thought I'd post these here for anyone who clicked on the hn link but was underwhelmed or confused by the landing page: https://chromatone.center/practice/

https://chromatone.center/practice/experiments/

https://chromatone.center/practice/sound/

I'm not a professional writer, but as someone with severe ADHD I have battled frequently with my own version of "writer's block". When I'm stuck in this way sometimes small things can make a tremendous difference (positive or negative) in my productivity.

I guess what it comes down to is distractibility. This app seems focused on reducing the distraction of perfectionism: the thoughts of possible improvements to the structure of the current paragraph or feelings that a sentence could've come out better. For me, and I expect for some writers, this type of second guessing may take up a significant amount of the time I've allocated to sit down and write. Especially if there's a lot of external pressure for my work to be of a certain quality, correctness, or completeness.

So while I don't personally use a tool like this, I can see how reducing distractions could raise productivity. And if it I were my livelihood, then even a 20-30% raise in productivity could be well worth installing and learning to use a dedicated piece of software.