One of the hardest things to do if you’re born pretty much tone-deaf (like I was) is ear-training, or learning how to identify notes and intervals just by hearing them. For my project, I want to create an Arduino that has a couple of different ways to test your ear. The basic principle of the project would be having the Arduino play a note or a series of notes and have you respond to them in different ways. For the purposes of this class I would limit the notes to one chromatic scale- all thirteen notes from middle C to the C above it.
How the device would function is this: first, you would select if you wanted to train pitches or intervals. I’ll get to intervals in a minute, since that one will be harder. For pitches, the Arduino would choose a random pitch and play it. According to the Arduino website, something as simple as a Piezo speaker (which I think we have at school) would be good enough to play back the note at the randomly selected frequency. So the user hears the note and, using either a small MIDI keyboard or a series of buttons arranged in the style of the keyboard, presses the note that they think the Arduino played. If I can get my hands on a small keyboard, I’d prefer to use that. If the user gets the note right, a green LED will turn on, and if it’s wrong, a red LED will turn on. The user has as many guesses as he/she wants, but will be able to press a button that signals they want a new tone.
Intervals might be a little bit trickier, because they would have to be variables since you can use multiple pairs of notes to produce the same intervals. But since every interval is defined by a set number of semitones, I can write into the program to count the semitones instead of actually looking at the difference between the notes. Otherwise this portion of the program would work the same way as the pitch-training part.
The code on this page (http://www.arduino.cc/en/Tutorial/PlayMelody) will be incredibly useful to my project, as it maps out how to connect the Piezo speaker as well as some instruction on how to program frequencies and notes into the code itself. If I had to use buttons instead of a keyboard, I would need to do something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9fEFKVZ3SQ
