Mastodawn

Jonathan Rodriguez Feb 22

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.
https://files.jantrid.net/simus/

Simus

Jamie Teh Feb 22

Just pushed a new version of Simus. Fixed the bug where the note gets stuck at game over. Loop music is a bit quieter so you can hear the melody more easily. You now get a life back (up to a maximum of 5) every 10 correct responses.

victor tsaran Feb 22

@jcsteh What's Simus?

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@vick21 It's a musical memory game for the web. https://files.jantrid.net/simus/

Simus

Jonathan Feb 22

@jcsteh Sounds quite fun honestly. But yeah a way to test how which key sounds before would be nice.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@jonathan859 Note that you can press the keys in the first two bars before it starts playing notes to get a sense of what notes are where.

Sarah E Bourne Feb 22

@jcsteh That sounds (oops, sorry about the pun) like something I'd enjoy playing! Maybe a "beginner" mode could spot the beginning note. Or the other way around, an expert mode that doesn't.

Chris Cooke Feb 22

@jcsteh @technocounselor Oh, I'm down for this! I have perfect pitch and I would love it!

@jcsteh Got a bug for ya. If a note is still being held when the game over sound starts, often times here it'll stay playing that note forever and ever. Happens more with the computer keyboard I think, but I can't be certain of that yet.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@Scott Yah, I saw that one too. Will look into it.

@jcsteh The melody could be nudged a few dB louder by default. Sometimes hard to pick out the subtleties at the moment in a way that's more annoying than difficult.

Marie Elizabeth Bayar Feb 22

@jcsteh I feel like that would keep some people busy for ages! LOL

Sukil Etxenike Feb 22

@jcsteh Can you believe the A minor thing is killing me? I know which notes they are, I can probably hum then perfectly. But I keep thinking in C major for some dumb reason.

ondrosik Feb 22

@jcsteh Goog idea, I love it. Currently, when I fail, last note plays endlessly.

@jcsteh How cool is this! You vibe code any of it?

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@remixman Nope, coded entirely by hand.

@jcsteh @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.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@x0 @remixman ML is an area I have pretty much 0 expertise in unfortunately.

Kara Goldfinch Feb 22

@jcsteh I love this even though I keep failing at it miserably.

Pratik Patel Feb 22

@KaraLG84 @jcsteh It's funny how terrible at this I am. I don't see this improving. I suppose it's just like typing Yes. I'm one of those people without perfect pitch.

@ppatel @KaraLG84 @jcsteh 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 Feb 22

@zersiax @KaraLG84 @jcsteh I can't wait to be at the bottom of the leaderboard.

Kara Goldfinch Feb 22

@ppatel @zersiax @jcsteh Race you to the bottom. lol

@KaraLG84 @ppatel @jcsteh lol I got a score of 32, good enough for now :P

Pratik Patel Feb 24

@zersiax @KaraLG84 @jcsteh Showoff! My last score was 22 or something in the low 20s.

Jamie Teh Feb 25

@zersiax @KaraLG84 @ppatel Best I could do was 54.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@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 Feb 22

@jcsteh Yes. Exactly. That's how I've learned to tune my guitars and how I used to learn piano music. @KaraLG84

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@ppatel Note that you can play the keyboard for the 2 bars before the melodies start, which should help you calibrate. But ideally, I'd like something more guided. @KaraLG84

@ppatel @jcsteh @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

Day Garwood Feb 22

@jcsteh This might sound dumb but... how do you play with NVDA? If I'm in browse mode I'm obviously getting quick-letter navigation issues, if I try focus mode I get nothing - is NVDA still eating my keystrokes?

Day Garwood Feb 22

@jcsteh When I say I get nothing, I mean keys aren't playing notes and I'm still told to try again after five turns.

Day Garwood Feb 22

@jcsteh Love the idea though. Definitely a game I would play if I could work out what I'm doing wrong. It's not just this one I struggle with either - just can't seem to get NVDA to play properly with web games for some bizarre reason.

@daygar @jcsteh Yeah, same here. Looks like it would be fun if it would get my key presses.

@daygar @jcsteh 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 Feb 22

@musicalman @jcsteh Yup, that worked. Thanks.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@musicalman @daygar That's weird. The game auto focuses that node when it starts. I don't understand why that would be overridden or ignored on your systems.

@jcsteh @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.

@jcsteh 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

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@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?

@jcsteh 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.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@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.

@jcsteh 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!

Andre Louis Feb 22

@jcsteh I like this a lot. Great things.

@FreakyFwoof @jcsteh The music is really cool.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@FreakyFwoof @remixman Haha, that's just a quick loop I threw together with REAPER, Komplete Kontrol and Shreddage. I need to make a few more at some point to keep it interesting..

@jcsteh @FreakyFwoof @remixman Oh yeah, with different tempos and everything! Like beatstar or something.

Lino Morales the no good ham Feb 22

@FreakyFwoof @jcsteh Hey I'm game. Sounds like fun.

@jcsteh That's cute. I noticed I lost a round and a note kept playing for some reason, had to Ctrl+F5 to stop it. Are there levels that you have to play more than one note at a time?

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@Jage Yeah, will try to fix that bug. Not currently polyphonic levels, but that's an interestingly nasty idea.

@jcsteh I'm here for interestingly nasty ideas. You could always implement a cord CAPTCHA.
https://bestmidi.com/captcha/cords.htm

Chord CAPTCHA

@jcsteh Seriously, it's a cool idea though and the music gives it some life. Can you control the diffficulty, i.e. make level 1 on expert start faster

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@Jage I'd need to make more loops for different tempos, but yeah, I'd like to do that when I get time.

@jcsteh Ah didn't know if you wanted to just apply some tempo compression, but that probably makes the loops sound off.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@Jage Yeah, I tried that with granular synthesis and the timing felt a bit wrong. I guess I could render the same loop from REAPER at various tempos.

@jcsteh Ya even if it's just 2, that being said, I guess I should beat the game as it is before asking for expert mode lol.

Pratik Patel Feb 22

@Jage @jcsteh Can you also allow for no background music? I don't think I have a chance to not lose if there's background music.

@ppatel @jcsteh Maybe a BG music volume.

Jamie Teh Feb 22

@Jage @ppatel I think it'd be harder to play without background music because of the timing, unless you're very rhythmically precise. I've turned the background music down a bit though now.

Pratik Patel Feb 22

@jcsteh @Jage that makes sense. I aappreciate the lower volume though. I'm one of those people who never has music on in the background when working or listening to my screen reader. My brain just doesn't work that way. It could explain why I'm terribly bad at games with loud background noises.

Pratik Patel Feb 22

@jcsteh @Jage Thank you for the game. It's a lot of fun.