Readit NewsAs an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.
One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.
Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
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!!
* aurally identify key signatures
* aurally identify chords
* sing a given note on command
Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:
* Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor
* The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor
* Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A
* Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat
* Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor
* etc.
A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these
My Steam collection won't work because it needs the Internet and DRM to work.
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
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
There's a bunch of web apps in the "Practice" section of the site:
https://chromatone.center/practice/
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://youtu.be/RKT-sKtR970?si=qvTXK6YSMsPaE-GE