Early during my studies at McGill, Néstor Napolés Lopéz and I were granted a CIRMMT Student Project Award for our ear-training video game, Do-Re-Myth, a project we have continued to work on since. The intention behind the project is to make practicing musicianship skills more engaging through gamification. My motivation for this project came from my own difficulties with musicianship exercises as a student with learning differences studying for an undergraduate degree in composition. Though this project has very little to do with what both Néstor and I work on as our main research work, we’ve kept advancing this game’s design little by little through the years, with different collaborators joining us along the way.
Two important collaborators advising our project at the start were CIRMMT members Peter Schubert, who teaches musicianship skills at McGill, and Isabelle Cossette, who is a researcher in music education. Both have many other fascinating research interests, but this was their intersection with our work. With none of us belonging to the same labs, the project was truly a cross disciplinary collaboration between people who would likely not have met if not for places like CIRMMT.
Here is a quick video demo of the state of the game as of Fall of 2021, explaining some of its features:
If you’re interested in playing the game, working on its development, or adapting it to your needs, the installers and open-source code for the project are hosted here: https://github.com/musicianship-game/ear-training
This project evolved from a previous prototype I made during my master’s degree, called Pitch Dark.
We presented our project during the COBS 2020 symposium. An online version of the presentation can be found here: https://www.ccob-cobs.org/ear-training-gamification-software
Edit: On November 26, 2021, Néstor and I presented our work on this project as invited speakers to Natalie Doonan‘s research group at Université de Montréal.
