This application is a series of games with different levels of difficulty. ChordSchool is a Processing desktop application allowing the user to challenge her/his memory about Melody Progression, Chord Progression and Scale Correction. According to the rules of scale harmony and melody progression.
Our application is focused on the educational aspect of Scale harmony, therefore we are visually representing the user choices in key references, relative chords and modes as colors as well as notes over the keyboard, so to help him visualize the relevant music theory aside from hearing the result.
A working version of Music Memory can be found here: https://polimi365-my.sharepoint.com/:f:/g/personal/10703215_polimi_it/Em3uXTNlhKpEhK2_3zg48VkBH3_u_HD0NM3vFUvd9Tz8cw?e=bNcwB8
The Music Memory user interfaces consists of the following main components:
- The Menu where the user mainly chooses among three game. The user can choose the game of her/his choice.
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The Keyboard that extends over one octave and is displaying the notes composing the major scale of reference as well as the placement of fingers over it for the modal notes in their first position as well as all the possible alterations when applied by the user. Please note that the keyboard is only appear in one of the games
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The Galaxy Shooting The goal behind this game is to test the player's knowledge on scales. It randomly generates a group of notes, some of which are not a part of the selected scale. The player must use his spaceship to shoot the wrong one/s.
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The **Melody Memory ** The aim of this game is to tease your memory by playing a sequence of notes respectively and then wait for the player to finger the exact sequence on notes in one by one and at the end the game will show you performance result.
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The **Chord Drag ** The aim of this game is to challenge your knowledge about scales and famous chord progression. You must order the given chords in the right manner by dragging and dropping them in the boxes. The game is available in 3 difficulties. After you succussed in the game the results will be shown automatically, and the game will move forward.
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As you can seether are many options before you start playing
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The ChordSchool app workflow can be summarized by the following steps:
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INSPIRING
. Random sequence of notes in a given scale can inspire musicians to help their melody composing process.
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SIMPLE UX
. It’s so simple to use, anyone with minimum knowledge of computers would be able to use it.
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DIDACTIC
. In a innovative and entertaining way it helps you to learn some basic music theory.
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GOALS
The main goal of the project is to support users in their path of learning music theory by allowing them to exercise with entertainment. Since there aren’t any similar Works like this, it also offers a different creative experience. Since the UX and doing the exercises are pretty simple a wide range of users are able to use it.
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MAIN FEATURES: a. Random note generation (According to given scale) b. Note and Mode selection c. Different Exercises d. Different type of scales e. Didactic
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IMPLEMENTATION
. Project is mainly implemented in processing, with some extra features which will be implemented via Python such as motion-tracking. For sound generation minim library available for Processing is used.
- FIRST GAME (MELODY MEMORY)
• In the Piano game, we aimed to improve users' ability to distinguish between different notes in each scale.
- To play:
• The first user has to select the root note. Then has to select Scale; only Major and Minor are available currently. • Then difficulty, three difficulty levels are available. Easy, Medium, and Hard. If Easy is selected, there will be fewer notes to remember; if medium, there will be more, and in Hard, there will be many, like 32 notes in total. • Afterward, the game starts. First, there will be an amount of time given for playback of the generated sequence. The user has to listen and observe to remember it correctly. • Then when the timer shows up, the user has to repeat the exact melody generated by the system. If the user reaches a certain amount of points in a given time, he/she has the right to proceed to the next level. Otherwise, the "Play Again” button shall be shown by the system, and the user shall be redirected to a new game screen.
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SECOND GAME (GALAXY SHOOTING)
a. First you choose difficulty,
b. Then select the scale (there are 4 different scales for each of the 12 notes, so 48 in total)
c. In the third step you press play.
- when you press play the buttons vanish and a new button "change" appears which lets you change again the parameters in case you want to play with different difficulty or scale, the procedure is again the same.
d. You must shoot the boxes with wrong chords in order to eliminate the chord/chords which doesn’t or don’t belong to the scales that you selected in the first place
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It worth to mention that there is scoring at the end.
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The selected difficulty changes the number of appearing notes. The harder the level the more boxes appear
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Making the game harder changes the number of wrong chords number.
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THIRD GAME (CHORD ARRANGE)
a. You have to fir select “Church mode”
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also called ecclesiastical mode, in music, any one of eight scalar arrangements of whole and halftones, derived by medieval theorists, most likely from early Christian vocal convention. Thematically, the mature modal system may be represented as follows:
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Dorian • Lydian • Mixolydian • Aeolian • Phrygian • Locrian A Dorian scale is the scale that begins on the second step of the major scale and keeps the major scale key signature. For example, D - Dorian is related to C major and has no sharps and flats, but it starts on D. A Mixolydian scale is the scale that begins on the fifth step of the major scale and keeps the major scale key signature.
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To summarize:
- Ionian – Major (no altered notes)
- Dorian – minor +raised 6th, lowered 7th
- Phrygian – minor + lowered 2nd, lowered 6th, lowered 7th
- Lydian – Major + raised 4th
- Mixolydian – Major +lowered 7th
- Aeolian – minor + lowered 6th, lowered 7th
b. Then you must select the difficulty level. These level changes the time of gam e and also create more random chords.
c. And you select “PLAY”
d. First you hear the randomly generated chords. Then the countdown begins. You have to order the chords in the progression you have been asked.
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During the implementation, we had many challenges, but for sure, one of the major ones is "Thread Separation for Sounds and the Game". It was a bit tricky to make new threads in order to make sounds play without disrupting the game. Since there should be a wait time before each note, we could not come up with a solution that does not freeze the game for some time. Then we have decided to make use of Java Threads and implemented a second class that extends Thread. So in that sound thread, we could easily use the delay() function without freezing the actual game. However, since we lack knowledge about avoiding this issue, it was a complex and stressful stage.
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Erasing the blocks after shooting since they were not actual objects that could simply be removed.
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Coping with latency, definitelly.
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Sync of sounds and animations, sometimes they would crash.
- Melody Generation with Markov Chains Markov chains, named after Andrey Markov, are mathematical systems that hop from one "state" (a situation or set of values) to another. For example, if you made a Markov chain model of a baby's behavior, you might include "playing," "eating", "sleeping," and "crying" as states, which together with other behaviors could form a 'state space'. In Music Theory arcade, Markov Chains are widely used to generate automatic random melody progressions especially present in the #2 Game – Piano Repeater. Each note has a transition state which could be possible in given scale. For example, in C – Major, the possible states are: "C" {"CC", "CD", "CE", "CF", "CG", "CA", "CB"}. As known from the Music Theory the possible notes in the C – Major are C, D, E, F, G, A, B. In the melodyGeneration.pde first the Chromatic Scale is defined:
As also mentioned during the lectures the Major scale is defined by the intervals between these notes starting from the root note by: W W H W W W H. W indicates the whole step while H indicates the Half-Step. On the other hand, minor scale is defined as: W H W W H W W. The program simply defines scales according to those formulas given above.
If we convert the formula for major scale, say W is equal to 2 and H is equal to 1. So one can define them easily in any programming language. Here in the0 corresponds to the note C so 0 + 2 D, 0 + 2 + 2 E, 0 + 2 + 2 + 1 F. The melody generation is then moves into the next stage where notes are moved next to each other with respect to their probability distribution from online available databases mainly regarding to EDM.
To install the game, you must download the “.rar” file first. then in the file “imagetest.pde” you must change three addresses in your PC:
String sketchpath =
"C:/Users/User/Desktop/MusicTheoryArcade/2PianoGame/soroushPiano";
String sketchpath =
"C:/Users/User/Desktop/MusicTheoryArcade/1ShooterGame/sound_sketch_v1/Latest Version/shootTheNote";
String sketchpath =
"C:/Users/User/Desktop/MusicTheoryArcade/3DragGame/drag7/drag4";
Simply change “drag4”,” shootTheNote”,” soroushPiano”. Folders in the above codes.
Here is a short demo of our project: https://youtu.be/hOSSSHiEU8Q
Developed by :
- ANTONIOS PAPPAS antonio1.papa@mail.polimi.it
- METEHAN PALA metehan.pala@mail.polimi.it
- SOROUSH JAMALI soroush.jamali@polimi.mail.it