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I've just spent far too long writing the beginnings of a ridiculous music game for web browsers. You use either a MIDI keyboard or the computer keyboard (a s d f g h j k). The game plays a bar of random notes and you have to play it back, correct notes and correct timing. As you level up, the patterns get more rhythmically complicated. If you make 5 mistakes, game over; you have to start again. Still probably a lot more to do to make this more interesting, but I'm curious as to whether anyone finds this remotely worthwhile.
One challenge right now is how to calibrate if you don't have absolute pitch. I feel like I might need to add some sort of screen where it plays you a few notes until you find the right ones or something. For now, note that it's in A minor, A3 to A4.
files.jantrid.net/simus/

Simus

files.jantrid.net

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in reply to Pratik Patel
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Florian

@ppatel @KaraLG84 lol I keep thinking A maps to C so i keep overshooting, but this is one Simon variant I actually enjoy for longer than five seconds. A scoring system would be awesome :)
@Pratik Patel @Kara Goldfinch
in reply to Pratik Patel
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Jamie Teh

@ppatel Perfect pitch shouldn't be necessary once you find the relative position - good relative pitch should be sufficient. But I definitely need to find some way to help calibrate your ear at the start. @KaraLG84
@Pratik Patel @Kara Goldfinch
in reply to Pratik Patel
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Florian

@ppatel @KaraLG84 This is a wildly different concept to what you're doing but it popped into my head just now. With some modifications, what you have here could be a fantastic tool to learn pieces of music on the keyboard by ear. Take a thing of sheet music, split it into bars, allow user to pick one or two hands, keep playing the bar until the user plays it correctly, then move on. I don't think anything like this exists currently
@Pratik Patel @Kara Goldfinch
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

x0

@remixman OK now what would be kind of cool is if you used some kind of old-style machine learning a la the pi composer or whatever it was to output melodic fragments that are a bit less randomly generated and a bit more musically correlated? Trained on, MIDI melodies probably. Loads of free MIDI out there. And the higher level you get perhaps the influence factor goes down and heads towards randomness for difficulty levels.
@Andy
in reply to Day Garwood
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Ray Dog

@daygar I think you have to get keyboard focus to the right part of the window. What worked for me was as follows:

In browse mode, I saw a line with the word application. I pressed enter on that, then wwent into focus mode, and the game would then see my key presses.

@Day Garwood
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

x0

@musicalman @daygar What browser? And what's the value of that NVDA setting for automatic focus mode for focus changes? Using firefox here with that disabled and it still engages by itself, applications have always been the exception to that checkbox.
@Day Garwood @Ray Dog
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Ray Dog

Oh boy I love this. Level 3 is a killer for me though, I'm great at melodies but am weaker with dense/syncopated rhythms. For me level 1 is easy, level 2 is moderate, level 3 is very hard (or impossible right now). Maybe I'll get better with practice.

My only suggestions are that the levels feel a tiny bit too long? Might just be me getting impatient though. Also, I think there should be a way to earn lives/mistakes. I need all I can get for level 3 hahaha

in reply to Ray Dog
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Jamie Teh

@musicalman Yah, I was wondering about the lengths of the levels. Part of the problem is that I'm running out of ideas to make more levels, haha. I probably need to add more loops so we can do faster tempos and stuff. Agree on adding lives. Any suggestions as to how to earn them? Maybe every 10 correct responses gives you 1 life back or something?
@Ray Dog
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Ray Dog

Yeah that was the first thing I thought of with getting lives back, and I think it would work well. I also like the idea of adding different loops at different tempos.

Big thing I'm worried about is just how to curve the difficulty progression of the melodies. I actually experimented with a similar idea a few months back. I tried adding more notes closer together to increase difficulty, but I didn't like it. I don't know if i'll be coming back to that project any time soon, but if I did, I'd likely make a probability system where certain steps of the sequence are much more likely to have a note dropped on them. As just one example, the first note of each beat has a higher chance than the rest. Or something like that, I'm still nowhere near done mulling it over. Anyway that could be a powerful dimension for difficulty adjustment.

in reply to Ray Dog
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Jamie Teh

@musicalman Yeah, I tried a pattern with all eighth notes and I couldn't do it. The pattern just wasn't melodic enough for my brain to process it. Wondering whether I need to manually enter patterns at various levels of difficulty and have it randomly choose them, but I'd need hundreds of them.
@Ray Dog
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Ray Dog

Yeah that would suck if that's the only way you could do it. In any case, an audio game that allows me to use my midi keyboard is certainly a new one. I know of other games that can make use of midi, but none that integrate it into gameplay. I hope you can continue to work on it!
in reply to Scott
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Jamie Teh

@Scott Heh, I still don't think you should need absolute pitch to do this. As noted in the instructions, use the first few bars of the song to calibrate your ear to relative pitch by playing keys while you wait. That said, it does require very snappy relative pitch that way.
@Scott
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Brandon Tyson

This could very well just be me, but I feel like sometimes I'm playing the notes correctly and on the correct rhythm and it still occasionally seems to be counting it as wrong sometimes. Again this could very well just be me not hearing something right, but this has happened a number of times now where I'm wondering if there's something going on under certain conditions? I am playing using my computer keyboard. This is a great game and I am really having a great time with it! Thanks for putting this together.
in reply to Brandon Tyson
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Jamie Teh

@BTyson Yeah, I think I've seen that once or twice, particularly if I game over and restart. But I'm not entirely sure if it was just me either, haha. I was seeing bugs like that before I released it, but I thought I'd squashed all of those bugs. Can't rule out one lurking somewhere though. Getting the timing right for this in the code is tricky.
@Brandon Tyson
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Brandon Tyson

I wonder if I happened to start playing as the last note was finishing up instead of fully waiting for it? I'm not sure. I felt like I saw this even on level 1. It was also late at night so maybe I was tired too.
in reply to Brandon Tyson
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Jamie Teh

@BTyson That should be fine. I only meant if you pressed other incorrect notes long before you were supposed to start playing. There's a bit of timing tolerance, so starting a tiny bit before should be fine.
@Brandon Tyson
in reply to Jamie Teh
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Jage

@BTyson How many levels are there? So far I have not got past 3 so I guess I can't ask for faster modes lol. Are you tracking people's scores? In addition to tracking correct notes, 1 point per loop it seems like currently, perhaps some score bonus, or more points based on timing, or points for streaks, etc. It's a cool timewaster for sure.
@Brandon Tyson
in reply to Jage
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Jamie Teh

@BTyson @Jage I think I did 6 levels or something? Can't quite remember right now. I've only reached level 4 myself. Yeah, I guess the score could be multiplied by the level or something, though ultimately it just results in a bigger number. :) I've more been wondering whether something should gain you extra lives, since you really need them later in the game. I'm not tracking any stats at this stage. That would require server side code, which I can do, but there's always a chance of abuse: some troll overfilling the database with data, etc. I don't have the cycles to do all of the required security work to protect against that.
@Brandon Tyson @Jage
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

Brandon Tyson

I also have occasionally hit a thing where sometimes, it sounds like one of the notes will get stuck while it's playing the sequence to me, and that lead me to think that the note was supposed to be played twice, but it counted it as an error. So I'm wondering if it's very occasionally missing a note when it should be playing another. This also seemed to happen on level 1.
in reply to Jamie Teh
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Brandon Tyson

I think I just saw the bug happen again. When it happened, I heard both the sound of getting it correct, plus the wrong sound at the same time. Then, after that, every other sequence I tried to play back correctly was counted as wrong. This seems to happen for me on level 1, at completely random times.
in reply to Brandon Tyson
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Jamie Teh

@BTyson Urgh. I'm sorry. I can't reproduce it, which is going to make it rather hard to debug. It sounds like there's a timing issue where somehow two melodies get scheduled at once - only one plays but both get checked - but I don't know why that would happen.
@Brandon Tyson
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

x0

OMG it's like how I played Simon Trickster! Was there ever other hardware that did this? I loved doing this kind of thing, when I was in Jazz Band at my high school for a year me and one of the percussionists would do this. He would play phrases at me on the vibes and I'd play them back on the piano, and vice versa.
in reply to Jamie Teh
glitchsoc - Link to source

x0

Feature request; Can we get a pause button? ANd is there a quit button? Perhaps p and q, or x, or escape or something. If I pause and resume mid-playback, it should reset to the top of the bar. To avoid cheating you could put a grace period of a sort on pausing so you can't use it every turn or something like that.