lpnotes

I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir director identified it and realized I could name all the notes from a random key played on the piano.

Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register.

Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!

I was pondering how to make software engineering feel more fun.

Pre-ordered! I noticed in the marketing photos that there was a keyboard, but it's not included in the pre-order bundle. Is there a recommended keyboard for the Daylight that's wireless?

Yep! There should be a "backspace" key on the right end of the piano keyboard on mobile. I also just updated the mobile CSS today so you should see more of the keyboard at once, which hopefully will make it easier to play.

Thanks for the report!

I've noticed that 1) silent mode and 2) not wearing headphones sometimes causes the muting, but I'm still trying to figure out why exactly some iPhones seem to play fine with headphones and why some iPhones require headphones.

Thanks for your note!

> One feedback is that I would like to be able to play more times a day.

We will consider making the previous days' songs available to play.

> Finally, I personally would like to choose the music genre of the puzzle.

Nice idea! :) Maybe once we have more songs (right now there only 125) and user accounts we can support genre selection.

Thanks again for playing!

Thanks for playing! If you click the "info" icon on the header of the page, you'll get the info box again! We used the same green/yellow/grey colors as the original Wordle game, but didn't realize they might be hard to distinguish for some people.

Indeed! I first heard this on TikTok and couldn't resist putting it into the database of songs.

> Maybe remove the option to replay your own melody before submitting. reply

This is available in "hard" mode!

Thanks for the comment!

You are maybe the fifth person to mention the octaves, haha. At the moment, I'm starting to think something like:

Easy mode: we give you the octave guardrails Normal, hard: you have to select the right octave and the right note; if it's the right note but wrong octave, the tile turns pale green. Also, maybe some new design for the grid so that you can toggle the octave up or down beside the superscript of each tile

No big downside; it will just take some refactoring of the code, and I originally hesitated to have three letters in an input box since two letters (e.g. an A#) already fills up a lot of space.

> Perhaps you could also give the player an easy way to change the octave of a note after inputting the note

I really like this idea, and will have to think about maybe putting a superscript next to each input tile (or something) that lets you toggle up or down to change the octave. Will have to think about the design!

Definitely not cheating; that's exactly how you should play the puzzle! :) It's all about listening and comparing, and listening and comparing again. If you're playing in "normal" or "easy" mode feel free to also make use of that button on the right, which will play your attempt in the row so far so you can compare it to the puzzle before you submit your attempt.

My partner (who finds these puzzles more challenging) does this but still often completes the puzzle in more than one guess because they just want to test out how accurate they were on the first try and make use of the grey/yellow tiles to get closer to the answer, haha.

> On a phone, scroll the keyboard on the x-axis and make it full width of the screen.

Thanks for the feedback!

> leave the keys that have been used colored like in the original wordle game so there is some visual reference of what was previously used/correct/incorrect/misplaced

Oh, this is a good feature call. I'll need to look up how the original wordle deals with multiple of the same letters in the same solution -- e.g. if the puzzle is EEFGGF (the first 6 notes of Hallelujah) and you entered EFEGGE, should "E" display as yellow or green? (On second thought, probably yellow.)

Nice job! :)

Do you mind sharing which browser + iOS version you're using on your iPhone? And is the issue the design or that the music isn't outputting when you try to play?

Nice! I just checked out their game -- yes, very similar.

Would you prefer to play a "super hard" mode with disabled pitch and no backspace (and 8 tiles and only 3 listens), or the option to disable the pitch at any level?

I am regretting the name choice a little, lol. Originally we just called it "musical wordle" but we didn't want to infringe copyright with "wordle", and we liked the alliteration in PPP. And then I spent a few hours making the logo in Canva. That was the main reason! :)

> add a 4th color for correct note, wrong octave.

I really like this idea! Maybe the 4th color will be pale green (aka you're close)

> Another recommendation: make an easy mode in a single octave for practice. Allow progression to more octaves once easy mode is mastered.

This is unfortunately hard to do in the regular daily game cadence because I'd have to limit myself to songs that span only one octave within the first 6 notes, but I can definitely see it as an easy mode feature in "practice" mode. I'm also thinking that ironically, fixing the octave makes it easier for users because it limits the choices, so maybe:

1. easy: the octaves switch for you 2. normal, hard: you have free reign to switch octaves, but right_note && wrong_octave === pale green tile

Thanks for your feedback about the octaves!

There is one question that I haven't entirely figured out how to ask but am curious about -- if we let you adjust the octaves, and if you select the correct note but the wrong octave, would you want the game to highlight the note as "green" (correct) when you submit the attempt? Or would you prefer to have to guess the right octave along with the right note before the answer is accepted?

(Unrelated side note: I am a desktop person, and thus surprised that so many people are playing it on their phones, haha. I'll have to check the google analytics for that.)

Sorry for the confusion here -- you're not the first to ask, but the TLDR is that you can't (right now)!

We do hope to allow octave selection in a future "practice" mode where you're not limited to one puzzle a day, though.

The reason you can't right now is because it gets a little complicated if the user selects the right note but the wrong octave; they'll hear the correct pitch when they play the note, but should we record the wrong octave in the playback, or play the right octave (but potentially cause confusion, because it wasn't exactly the note the user selected?) The easiest thing to do seemed to select the octave for the user, but I'm open to feedback on how to make this less confusing with the maximum fun.

Ah -- can you share which browser you're on? I hadn't heard of any bugs with instrument selection so far (until your comment). Thanks!

> I think the easy mode could be easier - people without perfect pitch need to warm up a bit first

Will think about that, thanks! Maybe immediate visual feedback to give you a hint if you're close to the note, or the first two notes are given instead of just the first note? Otherwise I can't think of other ways to make it more easy, but am open to ideas!

> There should be a hard mode where there are no pitches generated while choosing notes.

I challenge you to the "bird_tweet" instrument in "hard" mode, lol. The bird tweet notes are almost indistinguishable it might as well be silent. It's hard even for me!

@aidos Did you try "hard" mode, out of curiosity? If that's still easy, maybe an "impossible" mode with 3 listens, 8 tiles, and no backspaces is something we can do...

> It seems to adjust octaves for you automatically, but that's not at all clear.

Thanks for mentioning it! I really struggled with this octaves decision, and wrote about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38410228

However, starting to also think that maybe I should just write a note on the page explaining what it's doing, lol.

Thank you for checking out the game and for the feedback! :)

> please let us manually scroll the keyboard

Letting people change octaves instead of letting the game pick the right octave for each note was something I really struggled with, because I think it would make the game a lot harder.

For example, if the right note was "C5" and the user picked "C4", they would hear "C4" when they played the note on the keyboard to input it, but if they clicked the button on the right side to listen back on their guess, should they hear the note in the correct "C5" pitch, or the wrong "C4" pitch?

If we accepted the entry even though it was in the wrong octave, it might be a little confusing since the playback would be different from what they heard when they input the note.

However, if we did not accept the entry because it was the wrong octave, we'd have to refactor to adjust the tiles to show the full octave number (like "C4" or "C5" instead of "C" or "Bb4" and "Bb5" instead of "Bb")... and maybe this would be a good candidate for a harder mode than the current "hard" mode.

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Letting users scroll the keyboard to change octaves is something I definitely want to put into the future "practice" mode, though! Since the feedback will be quicker, it will be easier to tell a user immediately if they chose the right note but the wrong octave.

On mobile, the backspace on the piano keyboard should work!

> I didn’t realize I needed to scroll down to see the keyboard (on mobile)

Oof... we'll have to make sure the piano keyboard is more visible earlier in mobile mode :sweat-smile: I'm glad it worked for you in mobile, though! I've gotten mixed feedback about the notes sometimes not playing in mobile.

> I also wish there was a way to play more than one. Maybe allow me to do the previous days?

That's a great idea! We were originally thinking we needed to add support for user accounts to support this, but actually, it shouldn't be hard to allow people to toggle back to previous days as is. Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks for the question! The octave will shift according to the solution note.

For example, if the solution was:

Bb3 Bb4 Dd5 Db5 C5 Bb4 (the first 6 notes of a "Believer" melody)

... the piano octaves will be [3,4,5,5,4]

In today's puzzle, the first note is in octave 4, and the second note is somewhere in octave 3.

In a VERY early version of the game, we didn't show where the octave positioning was, only 7 white keys, and people got confused because even when they accurately thought that the next note was higher based on the interval, it actually ended up being a "lower" note because it was a lower note on a higher octave scale.

So now we give you the octave positioning.

Thank you for the thoughtful comment, @jrajav!

We originally just thought of the game as "musical wordle" since we didn't want to infringe on the "wordle" name itself in case there were copyright issues, and PPP seemed like nice alliteration, which is how we ended up with the current branding. But I've started to realize that people have expectations when they hear it -- i.e. I've heard someone ask if the game was only for musicians who have perfect pitch, and that was not my intention at all!

Re: intervals -- right now in "easy" mode, we give users the first note, which gives them a start at identifying intervals. But I'm starting to wonder if maybe a given first note should be the default "normal" mode, now. And maybe "easy" mode will give more visual cues, maybe? (Just thinking out loud here.)

> melodies in a key other than C Funny story -- it took me forever to add in support for sharps and flats to the game, which is why the first ~50 songs in the database all had melodies whose first six notes had to be in C major. Luckily this is not the case anymore (we're at Day 111 now).

> If you haven't already it would be good to give Earmaster a try and see how they approach it Thank you for the recommendation! I've checked out a few other online ear training games but not Earmaster yet.

Thanks for checking out the game! "Hard" mode actually used to be only 6 tiles, but some folks complained that it was too easy, so it became 8 tiles

I think we'll definitely have to do more brainstorming to figure out the right features for each difficulty level; I think I saw some ask for an even more difficult mode.