Pitcher

A set of three small games that teach and test absolute pitch recognition. At least, that's what I hope it will do.

The apps are:

• Quick pitch, which trains your pitch chroma identification under time pressure
  • Select a target note, then hit the x key produce a random note and either x again (quickly!) to confirm that it matches the target note, or wait for the button to go green if not.
  • Hit the n key to jump to the next note in the circle of fourths
  • Increase the "notes in chord" value above 1 to increase the difficulty by playing multiple notes simultaneously. At first, I found it difficult to answer quickly even with just two notes.
  • If it's too hard, increase the "target note probability" and "time to answer" values.
  • If it's too easy, decrease those values. I suspect decreasing the time to answer is the most effective way to improve.
• Incremental piano, which exercises your estimation of pitch height AND pitch chroma (but with no time pressure), and
• Pitch test, which tests you on a series of random notes with no feedback until the end, where you can see your mean absolute semitone error and results for each note.

Try it here!

Further reading on the topic

• Rush's 1989 thesis, a good summary of the literature on absolute pitch training up to that time.
• Wong's 2018 paper, showing positive results for a small fraction of the experimental group after between 12 and 40 hours of training each.
• Hedger's 2019 paper showing impressive results after about 40 hours of training for each student in the experimental group.

TODO

• Redesign UI with Tailwind or similar so it's responsive and better looking
• Add instructions in-game

Future ideas

• Generate several different timbres of note, rather than the same simple triangle+square wave oscillators
• Shepard tone generator to disrupt short-term memory of the target note and reduce the influence of relative pitch between trials?
• Another tab for perfect pitch production
  • show randomly placed range on piano
  • give some kind of control of pitch starting at a random continuous note, maybe a knob, or up/down arrows?
  • clicking OK validates whether chosen pitch is within target range
    • if yes, then next level reduces range as before
    • else game over