NotesLearn

I recently bought an alto saxophone. It was quite a while I haven’t seriously been playing an instrument, so I came across a little challenge when it was time to read a music sheet. You know, that thing with a pentagram and some notes of various shapes drawn over it.

Since playing a note on the saxophone is not straightforward as it would be on a piano, I actually had two separate challenges: the first was to recognize a note on the pentagram, the second was to play it well (it means play the correct note steadly for some seconds – and in tune).

So I decided to code a little app to aid me doing so. The app is pretty simple: it shows a (random) note on the pentagram, and then listens to the microphone waiting for a note, identifying the pitch and, after some seconds of playing, says if the played note was correct or not. This app has proven quite useful in the process of improving my reading accuracy and speed, and I guess it might be useful to someone else too.

It’s published here: https://dmnk.cloud/noteslearn.

Technical infos

On the technical side, it is entirely coded using Javascript, and has been a cool challenge to code since it was the first time for me interacting with the microphone data on a web app. It uses some advanced Audio features of HTML5, based on the AudioContext component. Recognizing the pitch was a minor issue, obtained by playing a bit with the FFT of the signal, some other challenges included volume thresholding and octave recognition (less trivial).

In the end, the result is pretty usable for my alto sax, even though it may be less accurate if used with other instruments I didn’t test. The piano version is not perfect, for some notes it needs to repeatedly play the key to make the app recognize it. I guess it should work best with constant-volume-notes kind of instruments, like violin or flute, but as I said it was only fully tested with my alto sax.

Who wants to be millionaire?

You probably know the tv show “Who wants to be a millionaire”. Lately I’ve been invited at the graduation party of a friend, and thought about creating a game for it.

So I decided to create a HTML5 simulation of WWTBAB, complete with webcam support, sounds and introduction video. It has been quite fun, and I’ve been releasing the code on github.

Questions are hardcoded in the index.html file, but it’s trivial to modify them. Recently I’ve added support for images in questions.

I really don’t know if someone can actually make use of it, but who knows?

Just a quick overview about the keys used to control the simulation:

  • [Left arrow] – to skip to next step (video is not skippable by now)
  • [Down arrow] – to unveil the next answer
  • [A,B,C,D] – to highlight the selected answer
  • [Y,N] – when an answer is highlighted, Y makes it correct, N makes it wrong
  • [F] – to switch between the default background or the webcam image
  • [P] – to flash the background to induce some suspance

Github.

Example-link.

A try for a 3D game

Recently I’ve been experimenting a lot with 3D in the browser with Three.js, and although this is my first post about it, there’s a lot more I’m working on about 3D in JS, but it’s involved in my professional work and it’s not time to publish it yet.

Anyway, as usual I like to keep track of my projects here, so I link to this simple game I developed as a joke for a friend some days ago. The game is here, descriptions are in italian but if you don’t understand just click and everything will be fine.