Identify tone

Screenshot of the program.

This is a combined tone memory and interval exercise. Some people believe this kind of exercise can give you perfect pitch (absolute pitch), but I don't believe so.

The basics are: the program play a tone and you must identify it by comparing it with the last tone played for you.

To get you started the program will play one tone and display its name on the status bar. You identify the tones by clicking on the piano keyboard or using the keyboard shortcuts that are the letters written on each key.

Right click on the piano keyboard to hear a note without actually guessing it. (Some will call that cheating....)

Manual configuration

You can configure the idbyname exercise as you like if you select Idtone from the "Configure yourself" submenu of the Practise menu.

There are several ways you can use this exercise. Personally, I have not used this exercise very much, and the sections below are only suggestions.

Note by note

Start with only the notes c-d-e at weight 1. When your score is at least 96% correct, you add the tone f and continue. The menu "Practise->Idenify tone", has exercises that will add one and one tone until you practise with all 12 tones.

Heavy A

'Heavy A' describes another way to practise. It require that you select 'Expert mode' on the 'Practise' page of the preferences window. (We hope to get rid of 'Expert mode' before we release Solfege 3.2).

Configure with the tone a at weight 11 (or higher) and the rest of the tones at weight 1. This way the program will play the tone a very often, so you will remember the tone, and then you use a as a reference tone to identify the other tones. When you have practised a while, you can reduce the weight of a to make the exercise harder.

Config

On the top of the config page you tell the program how important the different tones are. If you for example give the tone a 11 points and the rest 1 point each, then (11+11*1)/11*100 = 50% of the random tones will be an a.

Below that you select what octaves the random tones can be from.

Then you can select if Solfege should give you a new question automatically when you have solved the old.

In the frame below you can set some pretty self explaining options about what happens if you answer wrong.

The keyboard shortcuts can be configured from $HOME/.solfegerc.