games feedback was Re: [Denemo-devel] Problem getting MIDI games working

[Richard Shann]

I have avoided the spurious warnings - they came from the libxml
library. The Aural Training Major Minor game is working, with the
spurious note I mentioned.

Some ideas for how the feedback of Major-Minor could be improved: at the
moment when you guess major or minor right another chord is sounded
while the previous chord is drawn, which gives the illusion that what is
being drawn is being played.
Instead while the chord is being drawn it should be played nicely
arpeggiated so that the user can absorb the fact that he was right or
wrong and what the notes it holds were. Then some visual cue that
another chord is coming should be drawn, and then after a tiny delay to
allow that to be communicated the new chord is sounded.

The playing of the chord "nicely arpeggiated" raises the idea of being
able to play back notes from a movement that is not the one visible on
the screen. This would avoid having to write scheme to control the
timing of all the notes. Another quite nice possibility would be:
      * the notes of the chord are inserted in the score as, say, eighth
        notes ending with a quarter note and then the whole chord at
        half note duration, 
      * these notes are then selected,
      * then playback selection is invoked
      *  wait for playback to finish.

Thus the user gets to hear and see what he has just identified/failed.

The cue (that another chord is being presented) could be an animated set
of notes (place a note, wait, delete it, cursor up, place a note, wait,
delete, ... with calls to refresh the display for real - ie run main
loop) - the chord could be sounded over this display.

This sort of animation could also enliven simple games like name the
note - the notes rush up and down the range and then stop on one to be
named. It makes it much easier to understand what is going on - for the
youngest learners the animation can be extended a little which raises
the expectation that you are about to get a go at naming a note - a
little melody that reaches a pop! when the animation finishes would help
too.

Just some thoughts spilling out - I am really excited about the
potential of this stuff

Richard



On Thu, 2009-10-15 at 10:52 +0100, Richard Shann wrote:
> I could not get the MIDI games working:
> 
> On doing the More Commands and loading "Major or Minor"
> I got
>  
> 
> About to load
> from /usr/local/share/denemo/actions/menus/MainMenu/Educational/Aural
> Training/init.scm
> I/O warning : failed to load external entity
> "/home/rshann/.denemo/actions/menus/MainMenu/EditMenu/Transpose/SetTransposeIntervalFromNote"
> About to load
> from 
> /usr/local/share/denemo/actions/menus/MainMenu/EditMenu/Transpose/init.scm
> 
> 
> and the game did not work - just unbound variable error.
> 
> I went to the edit menu and execute the SetTransposeIntervalFromNote
> command. Then the game worked.
> 
> However, I deleted my .denemo and started again. Once I had set playback
> immediately and Start Jack on startup
> then doing more commands got me a working game. (Though in Major and
> Minor the chords after the first have a spurious extra note, you have to
> Replay to hear the chord properly).
> 
> Now I cannot repeat the unbound variable error thing..., deleting
> my .denemo and re-doing the More Commands...
> 
> 
> One definite bug here is that the I/O warning is not helpful - it is
> trying several places to get things, the local ones fail but that is ok,
> there should be no warning.
> 
> 
> There are probably other bugs when starting from a clean machine...
> Can we set start jack client at startup and playback immediately as
> defaults?
> 
> Richard
> 
> 
> 
> 
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