I built an interactive Music Theory course 8 years ago over a winter break and it continues to bring in enough to pay my rent each month.
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
Over the years I have run a few A/B tests on the landing page. I tried some variations I thought MUST improve the conversion rate. However, this one, which is basically the original one, is still the best performer.
Another plus for your landing page. It’s amazing how many landing pages vomit features the developer is excited about but never explain why I need their product.
I clicked through to the website after your comment. Landing pages are too often a wall of text, this one is a great example of how they can be done correctly.
Yeah, this is one of the most compelling landing pages I've ever clicked on. Actually dropping me straight into the first lesson before I hit the paywall is very effective.
I'm impressed! Every couple of years I come across a different music theory website and I try to follow along, but inevitably after a few sentences I'm completely lost and the rest becomes incomprehensible.
I got really far along in yours, which was great, until I got to 6 (Keys): "When a song says that it is in the key of C Major or D Minor this is simply telling you which of the 12 notes are used in this song." You then give examples of Major and Minor keys, each of which contains seven notes. This threw me for a loop. Are you saying every song consists of exactly seven notes (some repeated, obviously) from only one key? Or are you saying every song uses at least some notes from a key? Also, don't some songs switch keys in the middle?
Not looking for answers here, just wanted to point out where I got stuck so maybe you can add some clarity to that section.
You have to understand that music theory is not a set of rules to follow, its a set of ideas that sound good to western ears and therefore are very commonly found in most music.
Not every song, but much western music, especially pop music and nursary rhymes, will stick to the same major or minor scale of notes for the whole song. Going outside of this scale is quite normal too and changing the scale/key multiple times in a song is also quite common.
The point of learning music theory is to give you a toolbox so that you can both recognise patterns in music you are listening to, as well as give you some ideas of what sounds good when you compose or improvise.
This is quite similar to mathematics where in school we dogmatically teach students how to do arithmetic in the base-10 euclidean system, because having deep fluency in one system is more useful than having a little understanding of many systems.
I certainly understand that in any system (not just music), some rules can be broken at certain times for various reasons (safety, aesthetics, etc.). To combine what you're saying with what I was saying, I would like to see, at least in this case, a better explanation of what exceptions are commonly made to these rules (e.g. using non-standard chords) and when they are made (e.g. in music from region XYZ).
In fact, I'd argue that such explanations are critical even when you're learning any kind of theory since it tells you when the theory breaks down, whether that's because it simply doesn't fit the task, because people like to get creative, etc.
You've missed my first point. It's not rules. There are no rules to break. The "broken rules" simply describes systems within music that you haven't been introduced to yet. For example, major and minor are also called "ionean" and "aeolean" "modes" respectively, and these sit within a set of 8 modes. There are also blues and jazz scales, names for music that break out of standard tuning. There is a style called "12 tone" (of which an example is Also Sprach Zarathustra) which uses deliberate dissonance.
You simply aren't up to that part yet, because classical western music training teaches the more common ideas which are in music that the punters listen to first. (Mainly because people generally need a few years playing music before they develope a taste for these things anyway)
I am aware you didn't specifically ask for answer, but I was not satisfied with the answers you got :-), so I'll add my two cents.. I have 3 points to make.
(1) The first is about 'when does it make sense for a song to use more than 7 notes?'
WHEN we do this, we will often say "this song uses a key change".
Some keys have partial overlap - note-sequences they share, and ranges where they differ.
One elegant way to exploit this, is to let the song meander into the common range of the two keys, and then meander OUT of that range into a different key that we used to get IN to that range.
This can produce a cool surprise effect, a bit like looking at those optical illusion pictures that you can look at two ways. A similar trick can be used with rhythms that overlap, instead of frequencies that overlap.
(2) Where does the "rule" of 7 come from, ie what shapes it:
As you know, notes have harmonic friends that they resonate well with.
So when you are picking a 'colour palette' of notes that go well together, you will of course often pick such 'friends'. However, the more notes you already have in your picked pool, the harder it gets to add another note, that will still mesh nicely with all those previous choices. Your remaining choices will be more and more likely to clash; in particular it will be more and more likely to be "close" to one of your existing choices. And close notes clash. So, on a 12-note scale, 7 is about the optimal number of tones you can pick without them clashing too much. It is just a convention however, so some stubborn individual might come up with an 8-note scale. Once you start with 8 notes, you would be tempted to employ extra "OK I have 8 notes, but I try to avoid playing THOSE TWO back to back"-rules.
Then again, I often hear my 10-year old loudly playing .. sounds(music?) from tiktok and its ilk,
and as an old geezer, I am starting to think that some of our youngsters have given up on scales altogether..
I have no idea what my third point was, at this point.
The sentence you quoted is a decent simplification but you probably shouldn’t take it too literally. It’s not really that the melody uses exactly seven notes. It is that these seven notes form the harmonic context that the chords and melody sits in. Normally that also means that the notes in question will be the most common ones in both chords and melody, but you can certainly use other notes as well.
A key is really an “I know it when I hear it” thing. The notes used are just one of many clues working together.
Taking a look. For the past two years I've been thinking about drawing. Why it's difficult, how its possible for people like Kim Jung Gi to draw from their imagination. My theory is that it's a learned thing (as opposed to innate ability), but that it's not taught from primitives well. For example, rotating a cube is something that you cannot really find an explanation for. I think the actual difficulty in drawing (representational-ly) boils down to preserving the identity of objects through rotation. This difficulty is preserved in the presence of perspective or not (orthographic projection).
Drawabox is based on doing exercises to improve your mark making (the accuracy of the marks you draw on the page) and eventually leads to you drawing hundreds of boxes in perspective as a consistent exercise. A lot of people swear by it. I enjoyed the first week of it but decided that drawing is not a priority right now.
Forget it. There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
Drawing from model is about being the kind of character that enjoys spending hours tweaking at tiny details and measuring measuring measuring. Anybody willing to sit 3 hours in front of the model every day can learn it, if he understands that he must measure.
Drawing from imagination like Kim Jung Gi on the other hand is about doing that every day most of the day since you were a little kid, and you probably need an innate ability to boot (and that might be some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder / autism...).
Yeah, I'm not referring to drawing which is copying.
> There's very little that can be taught about drawing.
While drawing from the imagination is largely about using the intuition. The intuition can be trained just like the more analytical side of the brain. I can teach you a few properties of rotation/space, etc, and then give you the right exercises, and then you won't need to use construction to draw.
KJG does have some innate ability, and he was clearly obsessed, but it's not actually the bulk of his method. He has a video about drawing scissors. He can articulate nearly everything he is drawing, specifically the function which guides the design. There are others who can draw like him. Look up Tom Fox.
I've been building something in a similar space over at https://muted.io/. It's been just about paying out my rent and food in the past year.
I've been pretty impressed at Lightnote and how its executed and actually tried to reach out to the creator a couple of times for potential collaborations. Not sure if my messages made it through.
You site is insane! I clicked the keyboard as a lark and it totally got me intrigued about the entire rest of the site. I was smiling as I read the explainations.
The landing page is what I built over the winter break, including those first 7 lessons. Since then that page has remained largely unchanged.
However, when it started getting a lot of traffic I added a pre-order form for a full course. THAT took me 6 months to code up all the additional lessons. Building all the interactive pieces (drum synths for rhythm lessons, an ear training game for intervals, a virtual guitar, etc.) was really fun but a lot of work. For example, the interactive guitar uses samples I recorded note-by-note from my acoustic guitar in my bedroom. Afterwards I couldn't look at it for months. And then over the years I've added more.
Would love it if you could go into more detail about those two weeks. Had you already played around with tone.js beforehand? Did you have an idea or a draft written up for that initial lesson so you knew what was gonna be in it, and was it your initial vision to have a picture of each waveform accompanied by the sound, and buttons for each note in the scale? Did you have to change part of your design (even small details) when you discovered that it was hard to build something a certain way and that another way would be easier?
Related thought - Is there a good way to search for projects like this? I know there are hundreds of these passion projects that never show up in google.
Ex) This year I want to get better at playing piano. Reddit and google bring up a few consistent big name links. I'd love to support a well-produced course by a creator like this, but have no idea how to find it.
I sent you an email in Feb 2023 about a video that wouldn't load. I'm not sure whether you saw it, as I didn't see a reply:
One of the embedded videos on the progressions page is no longer available on YouTube. I'm not sure whether you're still maintaining lightnote, but thought I'd let you know anyway :)
I’m a customer and it’s awesome. I think we’ve even exchanged emails about some questions I’ve had. When I paid for the premium version I thought it was super good for what I was getting. You must be getting a ton of traffic for it to still be paying rent after 8 years! Congrats!
I've wanted to learn Music Theory for about a decade (only learned guitar tabs as a teen and to read sheet music as an adult). Love what you made and just got the premium course.
But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to. Then I just manually create a new account and send an email saying so-and-so bought you this course with the login! nathan [at] lightnote.co
> But every year around the holidays a bunch of folks request this. I tell them to buy the course, and then email me who they'd like to gift it to.
You could add an MVP by having a "Gift a subscription" link that leads to a page saying "buy a subscription and then click this link to email me who you want to gift it to". That at least means you don't have to keep answering the question for people.
On Firefox Android, in step four, I managed to get into a situation where one of the notes kept playing. It occurred when pressing too many keys on the keyboard demonstrating the chromatic scale. Pressing each key again for not "unstuck" it.
And if I'm already providing feedback, then a nice improvement for the end of step two would be an option to hear the two notes of the displayed waves, together.
Very nice. I'd suggest adding another deluxe bundle for non-Guitarists without the guitar theory. I'd pay extra for the ear training + the base package.
Hey! My son used your site! So, thanks for that. This was a couple of years ago that a music teacher recommended it to him to help boost his progress. I think you continue to sell because your prices are very good for what you are offering, and the site is designed in a way that allows anyone to pick up on things fairly quickly.
Wow. I’m very impressed by the site and even more so by how you did it over a winter break. It’s definitely very intuitive and I’ve been looking for a way to learn music theory as an adult. Thank you!
When I was learning guitar a few years ago, I came across your website and really loved it. But after that, I forgot about it. Your website is great, very easy to undersand, and the UI is also great.
Thank you for mentioning the effect of Paypal, that's very interesting. Did you add it as a full-on alternative to Stripe, or just activate the payment method in Stripe ?
Love it, and I very much understand the level of work that went into making it (beyond your initial landing page). Good way to test the water then build the full product.
I've often wondered what impact an "enhanced ui and interface" would have on the audience HN attracts. Would more people visit? What demographics? Would it change what gets upvoted (both in content and what's above the fold)? Would there be more comments? Would there be an impact on comment quality?
Poor UXs act as barriers to entry. Barriers to entry can be beneficial depending on the goal.
That being said, I've still changed the HN styles many times over the years to make it easier for me to scan.
[shameless plug] I built http://lightnote.co for exactly this. Starting from basic sound waves, it teaches music theory while skipping all of the technical notation. It definitely doesn't go as deep as this post, but I don't think that's essential to getting started.
Using recordings from my guitar (of each and every note) I was able to build an interactive fretboard that could play guitar tabs/chords. Also the Transport API made it simple to build a drum looping machine very quickly.
+1 This is a Fabulous site. I've been playing guitar and keyboards for over 30 years, and I just learned so many new things about music theory from your site. Great work, and I shall spread this around to anyone I know who is learning music theory. Love your work!
I've been looking at your site and I like your music theory lessons a lot. Great work!
One request - could you use a slightly longer attack on your 'basic tone' sound in the lessons? Currently there's a harsh click each time the tone plays. Just 0.05 seconds of attack would still give a 'punchy' sound, without the clicks.
Note that looks like you are assuming 4% investments after retirement. Per the passive investment chart, this implies a fairly high level of risk? I'm unclear if you're also assuming we will live forever?
* It is looking at a 30 year time horizon. For longer periods you'd need a but more money, but not double. 3% is incredibly safe, and wouldn't take that much longer to acquire once you're at 4%.
* Slight reductions in expenses during down years have a huge effect on the overall success of the portfolio. If you could reduce expenses to 3.5% during severely down years, that would significantly help the success and longevity of your portfolio.
Hi, I'm the guy making this course. A little more about this project:
I'm looking to help people who know almost nothing about photography. Maybe they've only taken photos with their smartphone, or maybe they own a DSLR but never really learned to use it.
My goal was to create an interactive course to "show them what they're missing" and what they can do with photography at a very high level. In later lessons I'll dive deeper into the each of the topics briefly covered in this first lesson.
I'd love any feedback you might have on my first lesson! Is it engaging? Do you know people who would benefit from this? If you were starting over in photography do you think this would be a good beginner approach? Thanks in advance!
It's very western-focused, especially when you describe the chromatic scale as "modern music".
I would also lose the "from first principles" by-line. The pentatonic scale description was neat in that you talked about how frequencies that sound good together have certain clean ratios, but when you jumped to chromatic scale, there was nothing about how that was derived other than "filling in the blanks." I love the site in general, but the "from first principles" by-line implies a few things that are kinda missing. It's more accurate to call it a visual introduction to western music theory.
A while back this article popped up on HN: https://arxiv.org/html/1202.4212v2 That one dived more into the physics and math that derive different music systems. As I was reading it, I wanted some interactivity like this. So well done! There's a lot of detail in there that could give you ideas for additional visualizations. It was also criticized here on HN a bit for also failing short of it's "first principles" promise, so worth finding and reading that discussion too.
The other thought I have is make the notes keyboard-playable. A lot of the examples are around playing notes together, and shifting between them using a mouse is too slow.
Sure, but even in western music the chromatic scale is considered to have been exhausted in the 20th century. Modern music has moved on to use other notes and sounds and in many cases is not even pitch-centric.
>Sure, but even in western music the chromatic scale is considered to have been exhausted in the 20th century.
Yeah, but by people like Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and the like, or the wilder jazz guys. Not exactly what most people enjoy with a cup of coffee.
>Modern music has moved on to use other notes and sounds and in many cases is not even pitch-centric.
I think that for e.g. electronic, dance, experimental music etc, the chromatic scale/classical harmony/etc. is still a good foundation -- the additional not pitch-centric focus is either in rhythm (which is orthogonal) or in sample/noise-based focus which usually just goes with "if it sounds good, it's ok" kind of approach.
So, not much micro-tonal or other approaches going on in practice.
It's out there if you open your eyes a bit. There is a TON of microtonality in blues guitar playing - they just don't use the $10 academic words for it.
Well, I'm from a country where lots of folk music is microtonal.
That said, I don't consider the blues guitar playing a major example of microtonic music, $10 words or not. There are some elements, but you can find much more impressive examples in African music for one (part of which could have been inspiration for early gospel/blues musicians).
That's a bit like saying the alphabet has been exhausted, so we should come up with new letters.
There is a huge, potentially indefinite space of possibilities of combinations of melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre, even within the constraints of the chromatic scale
It's less from a be-PC point of view and more from a "what (in some sense arbitrary) decisions led to the western system of rules, and what are alternative ways of making rules?"
You know, understand that this isn't the only way of doing it, and see how the physics could be applied in other ways (and have been). Appreciate the full breadth of complexity out there.
While the name that you propose might be technically correct I would recommend sticking to the "from first principles" kind of name. This introduction was created for beginners (like me), and the name was attractive and was what I expected. Maybe a footnote with this information could be useful.
Yeah, it would be nice if he mentioned the ratios the chromatic scale is based on, as well as the difference between Pythagorean tuning and equal temperament. Honestly, I thought even the pentatonic scale should have been explained.
I like the demos. The transition from ratios to equal temperament was kind of jarring. It might help to not jump straight from the pentatonic scale to a chromatic scale and then go back to the major scale later, but to introduce the pentatonic scale, and then describe major and minor chords as 4:5:6 and 10:12:15 ratios, and then show how the major scale can be constructed simply by trying to get as many usable major and minor triads out of the least number of notes (while emphasizing that the major scale isn't the only solution, and that other "modes" exist).
Once you've established that the major scale is useful and in no way mysterious, then you can point out that if you divide the octave up in 12 logarithmically equal parts, you end up with equal tempered notes that almost line up with the ratio-based major scale. (I once threw together a diagram to illustate this that you can find here if you scroll down a bit: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/cbg/justintonation.html) From then on, you can treat equal temperament as an approximation that implies the ratios you described at the beginning.
(Side note: One idea I try to impress on anyone who demonstrates the slightest inkling to write about music theory is that I really wish there existed something like Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", but for music. Music is full of lots of little "tricks" that you can find scattered about in books, but I haven't ever seen anyone try to systematically collect as many of those as they can in one place, with a clear dependency graph.)
> The transition from ratios to equal temperament was kind of jarring
I agree. I'd like the course to comment on the fact that the ratios used in the pentatone scale and the 0th, 2nd, 4th, 7th and 9th powers of the 12th root of 2 don't match exactly.
I think you explain things very well. I've tried several music theory courses and quit all of them partway through. They were too fast or too tedious. It's hard to strike that balance, but somehow you did.
One thing that you did that helped me get further is sticking to that rainbow row of notes, as you explained notes and chords. I think most of the lessons I've tried move quickly to piano keys, where the relationship among the notes is more cluttered, because of the black and white keys.
Also the interactive little things, simple as they are, are very helpful. I know even these simple things took quite a bit of work to throw together. I think they are critical to how engaging your lessons are.
This is the first time I've understood diatonic chords, how a key called C Major could have a chord called D Minor.
(I am not much of a musician nor a serious student of music theory. If I were, I guess I would have eventually learned diatonic chords some other way. But it just goes to show you how good this course is, that a person with a passing interest in music theory was able to quickly learn even that.)
>> I've tried several music theory courses and quit all of them partway through
I feel like I'm a musician at heart. If I could delve into music with a purely exploratory and child-like fascination, I think I would enjoy it immensely.
But I can't fathom beginning. Every. single. intro. into. music., is a lecture forcing theory unto you as though "theory" is the very definition of "music". The consensus from experienced musical folks is to shove theory down your throat; you should not be allowed to even touch an instrument until you've drunk the "super serious music cool-aid"! Music is supposed to be one of the most intimate ways we express ourselves, and yet Western culture dictates that there is a singular method to begin exploring it, and it's far too serious and far removed from any kind of natural process.
Had my introduction to programming, starting at the age of 7, been the shoving of books down my throat about Object Oriented programming and how to write 20 different sorting algorithms, I never would have become a software developer. It took me 5 years of accomplishing nothing - and enjoying that exploratory process - just to figure out the basics. Another 5 years to begin digging into the core things that make a developer a developer. And then another 5 years (and counting, a decade later) actually learning how to tie it all together and use the acquired knowledge as a set of skills.
Music in the Western world is taught in such a way that they're trying to cram 10 years of knowledge - that you should be picking up along the way - as pre-requisite knowledge. It is taught as a job aiming to produce immediate ROI rather than skill/talent that accumulates over time.
Sample phrases from the OP that are spreading the all-too-serious cool-aid - the same things you hear from every music professional (italic emphasis mine).
>> A lot of music theory is about limiting which notes to use in your song to a small set that sound good together.
>> not all of them sound good together... Lets listen to some garbage
>> Because not all of the 12 notes sound good together, we must select a set of notes to use in a song.
>> start exploring which chords are safe to use in each Key
Why is it deemed necessary to instruct first-timers about "limiting" the notes we might use (some notes are not "safe" you know!), and telling me what does or does not "sound good". Music should have absolutely no "must"s attached to it. Let alone labelling certain combinations of notes as "garbage" - the use of that term is horrifically off-putting to someone who is looking to explore. This method of teaching completely destroys the discovery process. You tell me that "XYZ" chord is garbage, so I avoid it from day one. What if, left to my own devices, I were to discover that chord - and wind up loving it?
tldr; Teach me to play an instrument without teaching me anything about theory. Don't even teach me how to read sheet music. Just teach me how to play a few songs I enjoy. Once I can actually play with some confidence, then - and only then - bring in the information that ties together with what I have first learned hands-on. Basically, how any 3rd-world child with instruments carved out of wood would learn. No books. No sheet music. Just an instrument and a patient MENTOR, rather than a classroom teacher who's trying to make a classical prodigy out of me in record time.
I agree. If you want to learn to be a musician, you should start with practice instead of theory. The same goes for learning a language. It's better to learn a few phrases and sentences before the teacher sits you down and starts diagramming the nouns, verbs, prepositions, and so forth.
But just because this course exists doesn't mean you have to go through it first. Go and learn your instrument. Then come back in a couple years when you want to round out your understanding.
Thanks for the idea, but sadly that would not fit me whatsoever. Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar - too independent to start.
I'd need the human element - a real person, in an intimate setting - to guide me through the initial pains. A mentor, to the extent that someone would be teaching me their trade - or perhaps even their (our?) ancestors' traditions. Someone who is going to have the humble attitude of: "You will learn this, and it is OKAY for you to be complete garbage for the first year. A music teacher would give up on you after 3 months, but I will not and we will get through the tough beginning together."
Yep, like a helpless dog who keeps peeing on the carpet and just can't figure out why the humans are so agitated - until it finally clicks and the problem permanently vanishes. ;)
I get where you're coming from. I'm that way with many things I'd like to learn. There's something that feels just right about learning from someone who already has the skills.
On the other hand, Rocksmith really is far more than guitar hero. It's instrument-learning gamified, with a somewhat quasi-human guide who's always talking you through what's going on, what you're learning, how to tune, etc. You get to tackle learning songs at your own pace, and there are quite a number of silly little games that--for me, having first picked up a guitar and messing with them off an on since I was 17--have really helped cement actual chords in my head ... without overloading me with theory and all that. I tend to make natural connections with things as I learn them, and Rocksmith has been a pretty fun way to engage with guitar & bass.
Anyway, the fact that it's all in a game form certainly can be an understandable turn-off. But it doesn't always feel like a game. It strikes a pretty good balance. Could be just a fun thing to do in between sessions with a human. :)
Very good post. My tip would be you should learn like Jimmy Hendrix did, and many others: turn on your radio/spotify/tidal/whatever and try to play along on any instrument you can find. Just finding the one note that sounds like the song's resolution will teach you what you need to know about the tonic, then try to catch bits of melody. 10 years of a bit of this every day and you're golden
Go grab a guitar, twiddle about with the machine heads so the strings are randomly tuned, and start hitting the strings with a book.
Absolutely no-one is stopping you from doing that (well, perhaps folk within earshot). Hell, there are guitarists, bass players, drummers and singers (whole bands!) who know pretty much nothing of music theory and still play stuff.
I majored in music and I like what I see so far. The interactivity is nice. Looking forward to seeing more. Pretty solid on the concepts that are covered but I could do with a review on part-writing and other intermediate/advanced topics :).
I haven't read it, yet, only did a quick search to see if I could fine the words "tonal center" somewhere. I think that concept is under-emphasized and resolves a bunch of common confusion about music. e.g. this post[1] that was on the front page a few weeks back in which the author did not understand what's the difference between C major and A minor.
Poking around on this, this strikes me as a good, simple introduction to the basic concepts, without burying the newcommer under a ton of jargon, which has been been a recurring frustration of mine.
Some suggestions:
I might include a bit on the diatonic scale between the sections of the pentatonic scale and the chromatic scale. Anyone familiar with Western music should recognize quickly, as a great deal of well-known music has been composed using it. It should also serve as a nice half-way point between the pentatonic and chromatic scales -- introducing more notes from which to compose melodies but all of them still mostly sound nice with each other.
I suspect the reason you covered the diminished chord in addition to the major and minor ones is because that's the chord that works on the 7th interval of a scale, as you cover in the later section. But you might want to cover the augmented and suspended chords as well (perhaps in a later section). I'm probably not the only one who, when attemting to finger a chord on a piano or guitar, missed the 3rd or the 5th, and discovered another triad that sounds interesting.
Nice work. I love that you included the pentatonic stuff first, actually. it's a great starting point for music. If I could change one thing, I would put the chromatic scale section more towards the end; I would teach it by starting like you did, but expanding pentatonic into diatonic, then harmony, and finally dealing with chromatic scale.
Looks good, I think there is a great foundation. The Pentatonic Scale feels out of place; but that's probably because I feel that pentatonic is just a mutation of other modes. Chords are really just stacked intervals, it might make sense to move them immediately after the 'harmony' section? The interface is really nice, but I don't think it clearly communicates or reinforces the idea of 'tonic', which is fundamental to understanding music theory. Please keep working on this, there needs to be a good interactive explanation of music theory!
EDIT: You might benefit from filling out the intervals section. Clearly articulate each interval, which are classified as consonant vs dissonant, etc. That would get the user/student thinking about 5ths vs 7ths, etc.
"This is known as an Octave and is not considered a new note. An Octave is the same note with a higher pitch."
Why is this so? I guess I'm totally tone deaf since I get no understanding of the sameness of notes separated by one octave by listening to them. In the same vain the good sound/bad sound example that opens the harmony section sound both good to me.
The notes that sound good together have a basis in the harmonic series, the 1st and 3rd are octaves of the fundamental, 2x an 3x the frequency. the 2nd harmonic and 4th harmonic make up the other 2 notes in a major chord. Periodic sounds that are not pure sine waves (like vibrating strings) have harmonics. Our ears are attuned to hear these harmonics and this natural phenomenon is the basis of all pitch, melody and harmony in music.
If you want the first-principles answer, it is that sounds in nature tend to occur as multiple overlapping tones one or more octaves apart, so our ears and brains have evolved to hear a sameness in them.
That is, when you pluck a guitar string that's tuned to 400hz, it also vibrates at 800hz, 1600hz, and so on. (Do an image search on "guitar string harmonics" if it's not obvious how that would work.) But we hear such overlapping tones as a single "note", whereas a 400hz tone overlapping with a 600hz tone sounds like a chord.
For the octave, if you heard them at the same time they would be a bit harder to distinguish than most other ratios, so it would be nice if the example let you do that.
And yeah, the "bad" example is not really very bad. It's a little bit tense, but there are much worse ratios they could have chosen.
Agreed. Saying they're the "same note" is an oversimplification. They're "equivalent" in certain contexts, which is an important distinction.
They aren't the same note: if someone plays A3 (fundamental is 220Hz) and then A4 (440Hz) you can easily tell them apart! In contrast, if they play 220Hz and then 221Hz an untrained listener will most likely hear them as the same note.
In some contexts a note and its octave can be thought of as equivalent: if you are playing a chord you can often replace A3 with A4 (and vice-versa) without changing the chord's feel and function. However, that isn't always true. For example, playing G#3 and A3 at the same time will sound more dissonant than playing G#3 and A4 (a minor 2nd is more dissonant than a minor 9th).
IIRC octaves are what's referred to as harmonic frequencies in physics/kinematics/etc. "Why is it the same note?" AFAIK it's because the higher ones are multiples of the base freq.
But TBH I know next to nothing about music so I could be off.
Close. Each shift of an octave doubles the frequency, so octaves are specifically harmonics that are powers of 2. Other harmonic ratios make other intervals (including intervals that aren't in our scale, when you get to bigger prime numbers).
Most instruments produce harmonic multiples of the base frequency. (Percussion instruments don't.) So if you play a note at 110 Hz, there are also pitches at 220 Hz, 330 Hz, 440 Hz, etc. contained inside it. If you play a note an octave up, at 220 Hz, it contains pitches at 220 Hz, 440 Hz, 660 Hz... which is similar enough that it sounds like "the same note".
(This doesn't explain why 330, 660, 990, ... sounds like a different note, though. Maybe it doesn't to an untrained ear.)
I haven't tested this, but my intuition is that any musical sound with harmonic (as opposed to inharmonic) partials will sound like a single note, if the first fundamental is clearly the loudest, and the harmonics follow some kind of natural distribution in terms of loudness and temporal decay.
Two notes played in an octave would be quite distinct since you have a clear first fundamental for both notes, and the loudness/decay of the harmonics is slightly different between both notes
Hmm, odd; works on my machine. iPad Air running iOS 10. Haven't spent a lot of time on the site, and I see the occasional alignment glitch, but a long way from "not usable".
I've been wanting to do something like this a while now, and I think you've done a great job! I really appreciate how you used the sine waves to demonstrate consonance, and the pentatonic section is a great intro into the world of 'just-intonation'. Cheers!
Keep up the work. If only a few people get their start into understanding the physics of music through this, it will be worth the effort. Plus I think this kind of education will be a lot more prevalent in the future. Congrats & thanks for the huge effort!)
It would have been so much easier and fun if the notes were played on hoover not on click. Or even using the keys. And you could activate a specific section by clicking it, or parking the mouse in a certain spot.
Please keep going. I've been dabbling with instruments for almost 30 years, and this is the first time theory started to click with me. Look forward to seeing more. Thanks!
However, I really had no idea what this product did from the landing page. Had to create an account, and wait for a psd to process. Then I had to click around before actually understanding what was going on. Most people aren't going to get that far before they leave and you don't want to lose that audience.
The line "if you're a web developer you no longer need photoshop" was confusing. Because I read this as "another web-based photoshop alternative". And for some reason I couldn't figure out what you meant by Photoshop styles (maybe just me).
I think I'd personally describe your product as 1. Upload a PSD, 2. Download the CSS, thats it. Maybe a landing page more like: http://jade-lang.com/
If you didn't know what the product is just by reading the site, you might not be the target market. Converting PSD's to markup is the bane of many designers' existence, and I think most of them would know immediately what this is for. (I'm not a designer, but work with them all the time on sites that would benefit from this, and fwiw it was immediately apparent to me).
I just thought there had to be a more intuitive way to learn music theory than the very boring and jargon-heavy alternatives.
It uses Tone.js to include little interactive pianos, guitars, and other demos.
I've done no marketing, it hit the HN front page for a day, and after that initial spike in traffic has been fairly consistent over the past 8 years.
It uses Stripe for payments and for the first few years it was only Stripe. 3 years in I decided to add PayPal support... revenue doubled overnight, mostly from international customers.
https://www.lightnote.co/