These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.
So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.
Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.
It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.
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.
It already has that feature! :) It’s just not very obvious. If you click the small lock icon near the top, it will snap and to that difficulty so you can practice only sequences with that specific number of notes.
For https://www.asmusictheory.com, I built in a spaced repetition test section to aid memory retention, along with "a free play" mode for when you just want to explore.
1. Even the practice mode has a high bar as it expects me to get the whole thing right in the first shot. It should let me try some before jumping to tell me I got it wrong and automatically playing it again.
2. Show me the first key of the sequence and have me figure only the rest. Why: When I hear the note sequence, I cannot pick the absolute scale, only the intervals. So I practically always get the first key wrong, which then goes to #1 above.
May be there are some settings related to the above. I could not find if there.
I'm going to be implementing number 1 - a "playground" that lets you sort of plink around until you're happy. I've gotten a number of requests for this.
The second request has me a bit confused, so I may be misunderstanding.
Under “Note hints” in the options, there are three different modes for practice. In all of them in Practice Mode, the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation. Then depending on the "Note Hints", you can basically change the exercise from an ear training exercise to a sheet reading exercise.
If you change Mode from Practice to Simon, even though it doesn't show the first note - it's always the root of the signature - e.g. if it says G Major, then the first note of the sequence is always G. I should probably make that more clear.
Does that description line up with what you’re seeing?
1. Doesn't work on Firefox because of compatibility. (Web MIDI could not be enabled: DOMException: WebMIDI requires a site permission add-on to activate index-C82-1cwq.js:10:56869
doInitialize https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net/assets/index-C82-1cwq.js...
) . Might be worth detecting browser and telling users straight up before they waste any time.
2. How did you come up with the melodies? Hand crafted? AI? Asking because I plan on building this for Gitori(www.gitori.com) at one point and my original idea was taking snippets from MIDI files of famous classical pieces/jazz solos
Also, TIL about the Simon game. Might buy this for my 6 year old :)
I'm completely new to ear training. Could you give some advice on what a newbie should think while doing this? For example, should I try to sing the thing in solfeges in my head, or it's considered bad practice? And if I do, should I sing the first note as Do?
So the only problem is that until you've internalized the intervals a bit better, you might get frustrated trying to sing out solfege since you might say "re" when the note was "mi" in the context of the key signature and that might reinforce a bad intervalic relationship. However you could still hum/whistle the pitches as an assistive tool.
If you’d like to make things a bit easier, you can go into the options and restrict the key signature. That way you can keep it simple and just practice in a more common keys like one major scale like C major and its relative minor, A minor.
Where I really recommend "singing" out each note is when I'm teaching my students to improvise on the piano since it creates a sort of intentionality about what you’re about to hear and sing.
For example, if they had a chord progression or melodic idea in mind but accidentally played a wrong note, they’ll notice right away because what they’re singing won’t match what they’re playing.
Whereas if you don’t sing or whistle the notes as you play your instrument, you might not notice that you’re drifting off from what you actually intended to play because within the confines of the key signature it might still sound melodically acceptable (if that makes sense).
> So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice.
As someone who had ongoing formal musical training from childhood through university, I can attest that multiple teachers used a similar technique, focusing on finding a group of commonly-heard melodies such that the first intervals encountered in them cover as much of the set as possible.
Haven't tried the game yet, but looking forward to checking it out later to see if I can offer it to some of my friends who want to learn music better!
I remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.
I think this is smart. I have never done ear training apps because I just don't like to learn music that way - it doesn't "stick" for me.
I like to learn in the context of a song. Here's what a melody sounds like when you start it over the 1 of a chord. Here's a melody when you start it on the 3 over a chord. But, again, in the context of a known song.
I just don't think "non-musical" exercises have ever moved me forward as a musician, if that makes sense.
I’m with you. I rarely use mechanical drills, even though I recognize that they can sometimes have value (cough Hanon cough), especially when you’re focusing on ergonomics. I tend instead to focus on things my student already enjoys, because it gives them a grounding.
Another trick I like to do is take a popular song, rip out the melody, and keep the chord progression. Then I’ll usually scaffold a nice accompaniment using Band-in-a-Box so the student has something looping in the background while they try to piece out the original melody themselves on their respective instrument.
That can sometimes give them more guidance, since it locks them into a specific key signature and helps them feel the flow and explore the space.
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.
Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music.
I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer.
Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.
First I’ve heard of aphantasia applied to sound / music. Though I have on a number of occasions thought about the concept.
I have (visual) aphantasia. But am better able to remember / hear notes and timbres in my head than images. Never really tried composing and for the number of years I took piano lessons I’m pretty crap at it (lessons don’t matter if you don’t practice in between).
But sounds stick with me more than visuals. So interesting that it’s all on a spectrum with these various facets.
I've been doing these exercises regularly for years and haven't made much progress ;). I still perform music regularly and get positive feedback. I do hope that some day I'll get to where these exercises seem easy - I haven't made much progress, but I do make a tiny bit at a time.
the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.
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?
I tried this years ago to try to develop my ability to play by ear.
What I ended up learning is that if you want to learn to play by ear, learn to sing, don't bother with exercises like this, at least not until you've gotten some singing practice in.
When singing, you have to hear the intervals in your head before you sing them, so developing that ability to generate the intervals in your head will help you to recognize them later on.
With some practice you can even get a decent idea what note a given sound is by humming it - it's far from precise, but at least you can tell e.g. E from G.
For the Note Quiz, it was not immediately obvious to me what I need to do - i.e., pick from one of the four what were answer choices. Consider adding some instructions for newbies like me.
I got 90% right for the Note quiz. On Key Quiz, I won't even get 20%. :-) Either way, it would help to have a "Teach" mode also, not just Quiz/evaluate mode. This may show me two keys/chords/sequences side-by-side along with the answers (and prioritizing the cases that I tend to get wrong). I could then hear those repeatedly at will to learn to distinguish.
For the pitch tracking, I wish for a view that is not centered on a waveform but on the instrument. My goal is to improve my voice to sing the right notes/sequence, not the entire time history of it. So a long/moving waveform is less helpful.
A simple view for notes training could be a horizontal piano roll (seeing it like a piano in the front of me) showing a red mark on the piano roll itself for the note / frequency I am singing.
For note sequences and transitions, the same view could show (vertical) waveforms like you have in the Note Quiz (three notes lasting for some three seconds) comparing the desired vs. the actual.
All interesting suggestions. I might add a toggle for horizontal mode, but would probably retain both modes to not lose functionality. For my other apps I have forks of each version, with the idea that if it changes radically from one version to the next, one can always go back to a live copy of the old version.
I pushed an Apache 2.0 license. Feel free to clone the GitHub repo and throw Claude at it. It might surprise you how well it can add features to a single file HTML; it can work out basically how the entire thing works without needing to read any docs. So by all means, vibe code a fork :)
I've used this site for quite some years now. Shameless plug: As someone struggling with ear training I created an app that tackles something that the usual suspects wont; the concept of been in tune or not: Probably worthless for trained musicians, but if you can't even tell if something is in tune, or why are 5th so used: https://intunetrainer.conpixel.es/
Nice job. There's also a relatively well-known app called "TE Tuner" which I've used when helping my students become familiar with fretless instruments (such as the violin) specifically because it lets you visualize the sound you're playing at the cents level. I've found it can be quite helpful at the early stages of learning.
I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)
Very cool! Many people don't know this, but all kids can learn perfect pitch before age ~5-6. So if you have kids, use the perfect pitch trainer function :)
This site insisted on having write access to my connected MIDI devices, which is a bit concerning as it's not required for what the site actually does.
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.)
I figured the same, but I did not encounter such exercises, and regardless having the ability to send sysex to my MIDI devices is not required for such a thing.
I attend a music school and as I progress through the subjects have built my own tools as well. It includes a variety of things, intervals, chords, musical dictation, scales, theory. Feel free to try it out: https://music.nicotejera.com/
I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.
If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.
Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.
I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.
It's related to this https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript... which generates all the individual lessons for each stage in the guide. It has nothing to do with generative AI. The software is not really needed if you just want to jam along your own songs, I just didn't have a better place to put the guide.
Awesome, this is a great resource. I've been working on https://www.asmusictheory.com , which focuses excercises around an interactive onscreen / midi capable keyboard (where it makes sense). I'm building it as I learn myself.
Let's not forget MusicTheory.net Been around forever and has a very robust set of exercises and lessons. Free online and a great app as well. https://www.musictheory.net/exercises
Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.
I've never been able to identify keys except for the higher E. Just that seemingly one low bar skill has helped me tune up my guitar to normal over the years instead of searching for a tuner. It's incredible how some folks do this effectively across all keys, modes etc
One comment - the perfect pitch exercise becomes a relative pitch exercise as soon as you get one note right. I don't believe I have perfect pitch but I got 100% on the quiz I just did.
I’ve always been curious if blindly plucking guitar strings could map the pitches in your mind. So you would eventually play any melody by ear just as easily as whistling it.
I appreciate the extremely low fuss interface, but I'm always a little disappointed by chord progression ear training that just plays triads one after another with no thought for voice leading. Generating a nice voice leading for an arbitrary chord progression is a little tricky to do automatically but far from impossible, and might be a fun exercise either for you or your favorite LLM.
I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
B D G I K
A C EF H J LA
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)
To +1 the "no objective foundation": browse music theory research a bit! There's a ton of caveats and poor-sounding fits and whatnot for literally every approach, and there's endless discussion of it. E.g. have a MinutePhysics take on how the common 12 note western scale falls apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4
(maybe to clarify: there are objective aspects, in that sound is measurable. but there is nothing like a "grand unified theory" that covers all music, nor are roughly any of the popular ones internally consistent - it's far, far too varied for that, and physics often doesn't allow the desired consistency, causing more variety)
In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
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.
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.
There's also a huge amount of math behind music that is fascinating.
The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.
Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.
The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.
Yeah, I work in programming languages and always liked the idea of notation do-overs. But after getting more into music these days, I've returned to learning and appreciating musical notation. For better or for worse, it is the standard way of writing music. If you want to get serious at music, you need to know it.
There's a lot to hate about musical score, but the A-G notes and sharps and flats aren't all that bad once you realize that everything is based on the 7 note diatonic scale. In C major, it's just the names of the letters with no sharps or flats. On the piano, C major is just the white keys, which will get you pretty far--tons of songs are in C major. You have to remember B-C and E-F are the short intervals, and memorize the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 semitone pattern, but after that, a lot follows. Then minor is just starting a different note in this pattern, as are all the other modes. There are other scales too, but this one main pattern is going to cover 98% of all music you run across.
There's a huge amount of stuff that gets unlocked when you just give up fighting the standard and instead learn to go with it. Music is a language, and the way we write it down is maybe a little suboptimal, but then again, the "optimal" way to write it down has a maximum on how much better it could possibly be.
I do have a beef with the notation for rhythm, because as it is, the standard musical notation is just a shorthand form for fitting more music horizontally. For computer-based music, I find it a lot easier to follow a display where horizontal length is proportional to time. We've got infinite screen space, so no need to compress anymore.
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:
He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.
We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
>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!
I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?
The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".
My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.
Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun
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 think music— essentially expressing ideas and emotion through sound— isn’t approachable enough to children because the notation lacks a solid foundation in math? I very much disagree. In fact, I think teaching children to experiment more with musicality well before they’re introduced to things like notation and formal theory would do far more to pique their interest. I happily played guitar for a decade before I learned to read music.
Indeed, likely the most widespread teaching method today is the Suzuki method, and it doesn't introduce reading until after at least the first couple of years. There are books, but they're more for the parents to follow along than for the kids.
American teachers were horrified by this idea when I was a kid. But the Suzuki method has been successful, and I think it has raised the level of playing overall. Many famous musicians self-identify a "Suzuki kids." On the other hand, many of them admit to not being the strongest readers, but reading takes practice. You can also pick up repertoire by following the sheet music while listening to a recording. Like many skills, it fades if it isn't used. I'm fortunate to be a fluent sight-reader, but not a virtuoso.
In my view the notation is what it is. Changing it would be hard. "Standard" notation creates a kind of symbiosis between composers and players. If a composer uses a nonstandard notation, nobody will play their stuff. And the standardization is why musicians can learn the skill of reading.
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.
Bach did not invent equal temperament. He probably had thought of it at some time, but his writings make it clear that he would be against such a concept. He was in favor of a 12-tone temperament, but it wasn't equal. It's not clear, but I generally doubt he invented it, only that he heard it at some point and favored it.
Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.
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 :-)
These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.
So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.
Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.
It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.
https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
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.
It already has that feature! :) It’s just not very obvious. If you click the small lock icon near the top, it will snap and to that difficulty so you can practice only sequences with that specific number of notes.
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For https://www.asmusictheory.com, I built in a spaced repetition test section to aid memory retention, along with "a free play" mode for when you just want to explore.
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Nice!
My wish list for this:
1. Even the practice mode has a high bar as it expects me to get the whole thing right in the first shot. It should let me try some before jumping to tell me I got it wrong and automatically playing it again.
2. Show me the first key of the sequence and have me figure only the rest. Why: When I hear the note sequence, I cannot pick the absolute scale, only the intervals. So I practically always get the first key wrong, which then goes to #1 above.
May be there are some settings related to the above. I could not find if there.
Hi alok-g,
I'm going to be implementing number 1 - a "playground" that lets you sort of plink around until you're happy. I've gotten a number of requests for this.
The second request has me a bit confused, so I may be misunderstanding.
Under “Note hints” in the options, there are three different modes for practice. In all of them in Practice Mode, the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation. Then depending on the "Note Hints", you can basically change the exercise from an ear training exercise to a sheet reading exercise.
If you change Mode from Practice to Simon, even though it doesn't show the first note - it's always the root of the signature - e.g. if it says G Major, then the first note of the sequence is always G. I should probably make that more clear.
Does that description line up with what you’re seeing?
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This is amazing! A couple things:
1. Doesn't work on Firefox because of compatibility. (Web MIDI could not be enabled: DOMException: WebMIDI requires a site permission add-on to activate index-C82-1cwq.js:10:56869 doInitialize https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net/assets/index-C82-1cwq.js... ) . Might be worth detecting browser and telling users straight up before they waste any time.
2. How did you come up with the melodies? Hand crafted? AI? Asking because I plan on building this for Gitori(www.gitori.com) at one point and my original idea was taking snippets from MIDI files of famous classical pieces/jazz solos
Also, TIL about the Simon game. Might buy this for my 6 year old :)
Worked fine for me in Firefox, both on Linux (though it first popped up a permissions request to access MIDI devices that I had to grant) and Android.
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First of all, thank you for making it free!
I'm completely new to ear training. Could you give some advice on what a newbie should think while doing this? For example, should I try to sing the thing in solfeges in my head, or it's considered bad practice? And if I do, should I sing the first note as Do?
So the only problem is that until you've internalized the intervals a bit better, you might get frustrated trying to sing out solfege since you might say "re" when the note was "mi" in the context of the key signature and that might reinforce a bad intervalic relationship. However you could still hum/whistle the pitches as an assistive tool.
If you’d like to make things a bit easier, you can go into the options and restrict the key signature. That way you can keep it simple and just practice in a more common keys like one major scale like C major and its relative minor, A minor.
Where I really recommend "singing" out each note is when I'm teaching my students to improvise on the piano since it creates a sort of intentionality about what you’re about to hear and sing.
For example, if they had a chord progression or melodic idea in mind but accidentally played a wrong note, they’ll notice right away because what they’re singing won’t match what they’re playing.
Whereas if you don’t sing or whistle the notes as you play your instrument, you might not notice that you’re drifting off from what you actually intended to play because within the confines of the key signature it might still sound melodically acceptable (if that makes sense).
> So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice.
As someone who had ongoing formal musical training from childhood through university, I can attest that multiple teachers used a similar technique, focusing on finding a group of commonly-heard melodies such that the first intervals encountered in them cover as much of the set as possible.
Haven't tried the game yet, but looking forward to checking it out later to see if I can offer it to some of my friends who want to learn music better!
I remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.
Yes! "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is another popular one for demonstrating a major 6th.
Side note but I'd love to see a nicely printed stack of physical cards with popular melodic hooks/jingles, the demonstrated intervals, notation, etc.
I think this is smart. I have never done ear training apps because I just don't like to learn music that way - it doesn't "stick" for me.
I like to learn in the context of a song. Here's what a melody sounds like when you start it over the 1 of a chord. Here's a melody when you start it on the 3 over a chord. But, again, in the context of a known song.
I just don't think "non-musical" exercises have ever moved me forward as a musician, if that makes sense.
I’m with you. I rarely use mechanical drills, even though I recognize that they can sometimes have value (cough Hanon cough), especially when you’re focusing on ergonomics. I tend instead to focus on things my student already enjoys, because it gives them a grounding.
Another trick I like to do is take a popular song, rip out the melody, and keep the chord progression. Then I’ll usually scaffold a nice accompaniment using Band-in-a-Box so the student has something looping in the background while they try to piece out the original melody themselves on their respective instrument.
That can sometimes give them more guidance, since it locks them into a specific key signature and helps them feel the flow and explore the space.
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.
This is quite a nice idea and works well, but I think I would rather spend the time listening to and imitating real Miles Davis solos etc.
This is very fun!
Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music.
I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer.
Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.
First I’ve heard of aphantasia applied to sound / music. Though I have on a number of occasions thought about the concept.
I have (visual) aphantasia. But am better able to remember / hear notes and timbres in my head than images. Never really tried composing and for the number of years I took piano lessons I’m pretty crap at it (lessons don’t matter if you don’t practice in between).
But sounds stick with me more than visuals. So interesting that it’s all on a spectrum with these various facets.
I've been doing these exercises regularly for years and haven't made much progress ;). I still perform music regularly and get positive feedback. I do hope that some day I'll get to where these exercises seem easy - I haven't made much progress, but I do make a tiny bit at a time.
the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.
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?
Yes I can.
That's also the reason why I can compose at all. The analogy would be like: I don't know how pink color is named, but I can say it's pretty.
And on the output: I don't know what colors I used, but the image is pretty.
Only my music teacher tried to play and I knew it didn't work well. It's a peculiar thing.
It's possible to tell from one note. The reason is that the unisons will be out of tune with one another and change the tone quality.
I tried this years ago to try to develop my ability to play by ear.
What I ended up learning is that if you want to learn to play by ear, learn to sing, don't bother with exercises like this, at least not until you've gotten some singing practice in.
When singing, you have to hear the intervals in your head before you sing them, so developing that ability to generate the intervals in your head will help you to recognize them later on.
This.
With some practice you can even get a decent idea what note a given sound is by humming it - it's far from precise, but at least you can tell e.g. E from G.
Excellently built, no nonsense site. Refreshing to see a site that just loads instantly without spinners. The exercises are also well thought out.
This is a great domain for vibe-coding your own apps. I put together a combined music notation / ear trainer app as a single HTML app: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/titzer/Rif...
I've been working on a voice trainer that uses DSP to analyze a signal and do real-time pitch tracking: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/titzer/Rif...
The latter I've been using to suck just a tiny bit less at singing.
Very nice!
My wish list for UX / features:
For the Note Quiz, it was not immediately obvious to me what I need to do - i.e., pick from one of the four what were answer choices. Consider adding some instructions for newbies like me.
I got 90% right for the Note quiz. On Key Quiz, I won't even get 20%. :-) Either way, it would help to have a "Teach" mode also, not just Quiz/evaluate mode. This may show me two keys/chords/sequences side-by-side along with the answers (and prioritizing the cases that I tend to get wrong). I could then hear those repeatedly at will to learn to distinguish.
For the pitch tracking, I wish for a view that is not centered on a waveform but on the instrument. My goal is to improve my voice to sing the right notes/sequence, not the entire time history of it. So a long/moving waveform is less helpful.
A simple view for notes training could be a horizontal piano roll (seeing it like a piano in the front of me) showing a red mark on the piano roll itself for the note / frequency I am singing.
For note sequences and transitions, the same view could show (vertical) waveforms like you have in the Note Quiz (three notes lasting for some three seconds) comparing the desired vs. the actual.
Thanks!
PS: Are you planning to add some FOSS license?
All interesting suggestions. I might add a toggle for horizontal mode, but would probably retain both modes to not lose functionality. For my other apps I have forks of each version, with the idea that if it changes radically from one version to the next, one can always go back to a live copy of the old version.
I pushed an Apache 2.0 license. Feel free to clone the GitHub repo and throw Claude at it. It might surprise you how well it can add features to a single file HTML; it can work out basically how the entire thing works without needing to read any docs. So by all means, vibe code a fork :)
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Amazing, I just used the ear training one to hum a tune and then find the notes to play it
I've used this site for quite some years now. Shameless plug: As someone struggling with ear training I created an app that tackles something that the usual suspects wont; the concept of been in tune or not: Probably worthless for trained musicians, but if you can't even tell if something is in tune, or why are 5th so used: https://intunetrainer.conpixel.es/
Nice job. There's also a relatively well-known app called "TE Tuner" which I've used when helping my students become familiar with fretless instruments (such as the violin) specifically because it lets you visualize the sound you're playing at the cents level. I've found it can be quite helpful at the early stages of learning.
The Show HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10117072 34 comments
I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)
You expected one thing but found it was not what you thought. What is the takeaway for us?
"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.
Very cool! Many people don't know this, but all kids can learn perfect pitch before age ~5-6. So if you have kids, use the perfect pitch trainer function :)
For a more complete training program, shameless plug for an app I built / ported for that purpose: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsharp.app
This site insisted on having write access to my connected MIDI devices, which is a bit concerning as it's not required for what the site actually does.
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.)
I figured the same, but I did not encounter such exercises, and regardless having the ability to send sysex to my MIDI devices is not required for such a thing.
I attend a music school and as I progress through the subjects have built my own tools as well. It includes a variety of things, intervals, chords, musical dictation, scales, theory. Feel free to try it out: https://music.nicotejera.com/
I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.
If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.
I wrote a guide on how to do this: https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript...
Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.
I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.
You "wrote" a guide, yet it's in "generated_courses"? Interesting
It's related to this https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript... which generates all the individual lessons for each stage in the guide. It has nothing to do with generative AI. The software is not really needed if you just want to jam along your own songs, I just didn't have a better place to put the guide.
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Awesome, this is a great resource. I've been working on https://www.asmusictheory.com , which focuses excercises around an interactive onscreen / midi capable keyboard (where it makes sense). I'm building it as I learn myself.
Thank you, any feedback is appreciated.
Let's not forget MusicTheory.net Been around forever and has a very robust set of exercises and lessons. Free online and a great app as well. https://www.musictheory.net/exercises
Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.
I've never been able to identify keys except for the higher E. Just that seemingly one low bar skill has helped me tune up my guitar to normal over the years instead of searching for a tuner. It's incredible how some folks do this effectively across all keys, modes etc
There's this wonderful android app called perfect ear:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...
It has interactive exercises and singing practice
One comment - the perfect pitch exercise becomes a relative pitch exercise as soon as you get one note right. I don't believe I have perfect pitch but I got 100% on the quiz I just did.
I’ve always been curious if blindly plucking guitar strings could map the pitches in your mind. So you would eventually play any melody by ear just as easily as whistling it.
This is great! For scale degree after chord progression exercise, I'd love a variation where the chord progression is in a minor key.
The Android app link doesn't seem to work
Maybe they should add a level zero - tell if the second tone is higher or lower.
It looks a little basic but it's actually pretty cool.
Very useful, thank you for building it and sharing it.
was just looking for good ear training materials, found a couple of awesome ones from this post. Thanks!
website refuses to play sounds on mobile safari; extremely frustrating.
I appreciate the extremely low fuss interface, but I'm always a little disappointed by chord progression ear training that just plays triads one after another with no thought for voice leading. Generating a nice voice leading for an arbitrary chord progression is a little tricky to do automatically but far from impossible, and might be a fun exercise either for you or your favorite LLM.
This looks really good!
I love how the site's name reads almost "tone deaf" with one letter changed.
There is also a similar site on https://musictheory.net - I wonder if the functionality is the same
-- edit --
This one has this nice chord progression excercise.
> Uncaught TypeError: can't access property "resume", MIDI.WebAudio.getContext() is undefined
Every other time I try to launch a test. Someone's bad at asynchronous programming.
thank's for your tips !
I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
There is no "objective" foundation to music.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)
To +1 the "no objective foundation": browse music theory research a bit! There's a ton of caveats and poor-sounding fits and whatnot for literally every approach, and there's endless discussion of it. E.g. have a MinutePhysics take on how the common 12 note western scale falls apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4
And that's before even getting into completely alternate approaches, or how strongly harmonics affect perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgXpCK_4gA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ8qZCGg4Bk
(maybe to clarify: there are objective aspects, in that sound is measurable. but there is nothing like a "grand unified theory" that covers all music, nor are roughly any of the popular ones internally consistent - it's far, far too varied for that, and physics often doesn't allow the desired consistency, causing more variety)
>There is no "objective" foundation to music.
Well, there is a number of "objective" factors which play a significant role. For example, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl6ZcY9ag
In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
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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.
In a way, string instrument players already think this way
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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.
There's also a huge amount of math behind music that is fascinating.
The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.
Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.
The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths
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Yeah, I work in programming languages and always liked the idea of notation do-overs. But after getting more into music these days, I've returned to learning and appreciating musical notation. For better or for worse, it is the standard way of writing music. If you want to get serious at music, you need to know it.
There's a lot to hate about musical score, but the A-G notes and sharps and flats aren't all that bad once you realize that everything is based on the 7 note diatonic scale. In C major, it's just the names of the letters with no sharps or flats. On the piano, C major is just the white keys, which will get you pretty far--tons of songs are in C major. You have to remember B-C and E-F are the short intervals, and memorize the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 semitone pattern, but after that, a lot follows. Then minor is just starting a different note in this pattern, as are all the other modes. There are other scales too, but this one main pattern is going to cover 98% of all music you run across.
There's a huge amount of stuff that gets unlocked when you just give up fighting the standard and instead learn to go with it. Music is a language, and the way we write it down is maybe a little suboptimal, but then again, the "optimal" way to write it down has a maximum on how much better it could possibly be.
I do have a beef with the notation for rhythm, because as it is, the standard musical notation is just a shorthand form for fitting more music horizontally. For computer-based music, I find it a lot easier to follow a display where horizontal length is proportional to time. We've got infinite screen space, so no need to compress anymore.
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 composition, UX design, and programming.
We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
>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!
I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?
The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".
My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.
Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun
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 think music— essentially expressing ideas and emotion through sound— isn’t approachable enough to children because the notation lacks a solid foundation in math? I very much disagree. In fact, I think teaching children to experiment more with musicality well before they’re introduced to things like notation and formal theory would do far more to pique their interest. I happily played guitar for a decade before I learned to read music.
Indeed, likely the most widespread teaching method today is the Suzuki method, and it doesn't introduce reading until after at least the first couple of years. There are books, but they're more for the parents to follow along than for the kids.
American teachers were horrified by this idea when I was a kid. But the Suzuki method has been successful, and I think it has raised the level of playing overall. Many famous musicians self-identify a "Suzuki kids." On the other hand, many of them admit to not being the strongest readers, but reading takes practice. You can also pick up repertoire by following the sheet music while listening to a recording. Like many skills, it fades if it isn't used. I'm fortunate to be a fluent sight-reader, but not a virtuoso.
In my view the notation is what it is. Changing it would be hard. "Standard" notation creates a kind of symbiosis between composers and players. If a composer uses a nonstandard notation, nobody will play their stuff. And the standardization is why musicians can learn the skill of reading.
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>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.
Bach did not invent equal temperament. He probably had thought of it at some time, but his writings make it clear that he would be against such a concept. He was in favor of a 12-tone temperament, but it wasn't equal. It's not clear, but I generally doubt he invented it, only that he heard it at some point and favored it.
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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.
Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?
I never had a music class at any point in school in California.
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Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.
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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 :-)
I'm quite disappointed this wasn't about ear waggling.