Musical Perception Game

Software	Language with good GUI tools, possibly MIDI
Covers	Programming, interface design, game design, basic music theory
Skills Required	Programming, interest in music
Challenge	Conceptual ?? Technical ??? Programming ???

Brief Description

The aim of this program is to build a system to help people learn to recognise what they hear when they listen to music. It should enable people to practise recognising musical intervals and chords. Another possibility is practising recognising rythmic patterns or short snatches of music (two bars or less) and mapping them to the corresponding musical notes (in conventional Western musical notation or some other system).

Programs like this exist, but building another one would be a worthwhile project. However the challenge offered here is to gamify learning to recognise the elements of music, by designing a game that driven by succeeding or failing at a long sequence of tasks, so that the very repetitive practising recognising musical elements of different complexity is built into the mechanism of playing a game. Ideally, the sequence of easy and more difficult tasks would be adapted according to what the players succeeds with or fails with.

Variants

You could just focus on having a good tutoring system.

A very different project would reverse this, and require the player to produce particular sounds or sound sequences with a musical instrument to succeed with each small task, as a way to get the player of the game/instrument to practice particular fingerings or rhythms or note sequences when prompted by the appropriate bit of musical notation. The challenge here would be getting the recognition process to work well.

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