birdears 0.3.3

Functional Ear Training for Musicians

birdears

• Introduction
  • birdears
  • What is musical ear training
  • Features
• Installing
  • Installing the dependencies
    • Arch Linux
  • Installing birdears
    • In-depth installation
    • Alternative installation: Cloning this Repository
• Running
• Keybindings
• Documentation
• Contributing

For the support chat, please /join #birdears channel on freenode (chat.freenode.net/6697 - ssl).

TUI

CLI

Introduction

birdears

birdears is a software written in Python 3 for ear training for musicians (musical intelligence, transcribing music, composing). It is a clone of the method used by Funcitional Ear Trainer app for Android.

It comes with four modes, or four kind of exercises, which are: melodic, harmonic, dictation and instrumental.

In resume, with the melodic mode two notes are played one after the other and you have to guess the interval; with the harmonic mode, two notes are played simoutaneously (harmonically) and you should guess the interval.

With the dictation mode, more than 2 notes are played (ie., a melodic dictation) and you should tell what are the intervals between them.

With the instrumental mode, it is a like the dictation, but you will be expected to play the notes on your instrument, ie., birdears will not wait for a typed reply and you should prectice with your own judgement. The melody can be repeat any times and you can have as much time as you want to try it out.

What is musical ear training

this needs to be written. The method.

Features

• questions
• pretty much configurable
• load from config file
• you can make your own presets
• can be used interactively (docs needed)
• can be used as a library (docs needed)

Installing

Installing the dependencies

birdears depends only on python >= 3.5 and sox (which should be installed by your distribution's package manager, supposing you're using linux, and which provides the play command.)

Arch Linux

sudo pacman -Syu sox python python-pip

Installing birdears

pip3 install --user --upgrade --no-cache-dir birdears

In-depth installation

You can choose to use a virtualenv to use birdears; this should give you an idea on how to setup one virtualenv.

You should first install virtualenv (for python3) using your distribution's package (supposing you're on linux), then on terminal:

virtualenv -p python3 ~/.venv # use the directory ~/.venv/ for the virtualenv

source ~/.venv/bin/activate   # activate the virtualenv; this should be done
                              # every time you may want to run the software
                              # installed here.

pip3 install birdears         # this will install the software

birdears --help               # and this will run it

Alternative installation: Cloning this Repository

This way you can have the mainline version of birdears, which sometimes takes time to be updated to pip.

1. Install python3 and sox for your linux distribution.

2. Clone the repository:

ex. cloning it ro a directory named birdears-root

git clone https://github.com/iacchus/birdears.git birdears-root

3. Set the PYTHONPATH environment variable to the directory you cloned birdears

first example:

export PYTHONPATH='/home/YOUR_USERNAME/my-git-repos/birdears-root'
python -m birdears

second example:

PYTHONPATH='/home/YOUR_USERNAME/my-git-repos/birdears-root' python -m birdears

tip:

You can also add an alias to your .bashrc to simplify this

alias birdears="PYTHONPATH='/home/YOUR_USERNAME/my-git-repos/birdears-root' python -m birdears"

explantion: the PYTHONPATH environment varible will make the birdears module be executed from that especified directory, having preemptiness even if there is already another version installed via pip.

Running

After installing just run:

birdears --help

Keybindings

The following keyboard diagrams should give you an idea on how the keybindings work. Please note how the keys on the line from z (unison) to , (comma, octave) represent the notes that are natural to the mode, and the line above represent the chromatics.

Also, for exercises with two octaves, the uppercased keys represent the second octave. For example, z is unison, , is the octave, Z (uppercased) is the double octave. The same for all the other intervals.

Ionian (Major)

These are the keybindings for the Ionian (Major) Scale; black keys are the chromatic notes.

Dorian

Phrygian

Lydian

Mixolydian

Aeolian (minor)

Locrian

Advanced

this is still being improved

Legend for the keys on the diagram above:

Text Format	Scale Direction	Octave
blue (bold italic)	descending	second octave (shift or caps lock)
pink (bold)	descending	first octave
black/white (bold)	ascending	first octave
black (italic)	ascending	second octave (shift or caps lock)

White keys are the diatonic notes, black keys are the chromatic ones.

Descendent mode are usable for exercises with -d or --descendent.

Chromatic keys are usable for exercises with -c or --chromatic.

Second octave is usable for exercises with -n 2 or --n_octaves 2

Documentation

Full documentation for this software is available at birdears Read The Docs and also in PDF format.

Contributing

Those who want to contribute to this project can read CONTRIBUTING.md.

Etc

the screencast was recorded with a command similar to

COLUMNS=120 LINES=36 ttyrec
seq2gif -s 2 -i ttyrecord -w 120 -h 36 -o use.gif

ttyrec and seq2gif

keyboard layouts were generated with http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/