Functional Ear Training for Musicians
Project description
birdears
For discussions, questions and the like, you can use the Birdears Discussions Forum or the Issues here on GitHub repository.
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.
It is currently being written here
Features
- Different kind of exercises for ear training.
- Pretty much configurable: you can create more difficult exercises as you progress.
- Exercises from configuration files: you can make presets and share them:
- you can make your own presets
- Can be used interactively from a Python console. (docs needed)
- Can be used as a Python 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
.
-
Install
python3
andsox
for your linux distribution. -
Clone the repository:
ex. cloning it ro a directory named birdears-root
git clone https://github.com/iacchus/birdears.git birdears-root
- Set the
PYTHONPATH
environment variable to the directory you clonedbirdears
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
keyboard layouts were generated with http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/
Project details
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