Re: OT: singing training

[Graham Percival]

On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 12:21:38 -0500
Tim Litwiller <address@hidden> wrote:

> What I would like to find is some kind of program that would play a
> note or tone and she would try to sing that note or tone back into a 
> microphone and then it would continue to the next note when she hits 
> it.  Just dreaming now it would be nice if i could  use lilypond
> files of the children songs I have entered as the source of these
> notes. then as she gets better at hitting the correct note. it should
> start going faster and train her on timing also.

My Master's project is very similar to what you want.  Compared to
the above, MEAWS:
- does not play notes (student must be able to read music)
+ grades pitches (some users call it an "addictive game")
+ exercises can be user-created lilypond files (although for
  display reasons, I only recommend one line of the score)
- does not do rhythm and intonation practice at the same time (a
  deliberate design choice based on pedagogy and politics).

However, there are two huge problems:
- isn't compiled for Windows.  (your email client reports you as
  being on windows)   The source is available, and all the
  libraries used are cross-platform... but windows is a *terrible*
  environment for developers, so it'll probably take 2-20 hours
  to get the libraries compiled and installed.
- the note segmentation is TERRIBLE at singers.  MEAWS was
  designed for violin and cello (it works very well for those
  instruments!)   It only works for singers if you add rests in
  between every note.  Not terribly useful... but then again, it
  might be better than nothing.

At the moment, neither of those is a priority for me, I'm afraid.
I don't have a windows machine, so fixing the first issue would
require external help or trying to do it on my Mom's computer.
And to be honest, I have a hard time motivating myself to start
fighting with windows again.  I haven't used that OS myself in
eight years.

Fixing the second issue is much more interesting, but there are
more important tasks that I need to finish first.  I'll probably
start a google code or sourceforge project for MEAWS in a few
weeks (once I've fixed some of those more important issues), so
in theory this feature could be added by somebody else.

Currently:
http://web.uvic.ca/~gperciva/meaws/

Soon to be:
http://percival-music.ca/

Cheers,
- Graham