Experiential harmony school

Quick start

Audio unlocks on your first click anywhere. Then:

1. Find your tonic. On Home, press Hum to find my tonic and hum your easiest note — the site tunes its drone to your voice. (Or pick a tonic by hand in any lab; C, B, or A suit most voices.)
2. Begin the course. Learn opens the guided lessons; the three-minute first lesson samples everything. Lessons are meant to be sung, not read — leave the drone on.
3. Return daily. The Practice page builds a short session for you; the 📈 button in the footer shows what's due.

Sound & the footer

The footer is the site's mixing desk, present on every page:

• Start audio — a manual fallback; normally the first click anywhere unlocks sound.
• Tempo — beats per minute for cadences, sequences, the composer, and arpeggios.
• Sound — the melody instrument. Warm tone, Vocal ahh, and Soft e-piano are synthesized; piano, violin, oboe, French horn and the leads are sampled. Sing-along targets always use the vocal voice regardless.
• Tuning — just ratios, equal temperament, quarter-comma meantone, or Werckmeister III, applied site-wide (see Tuning systems below).
• 🎚 Music — reference pitch (A4), drone timbre (including the plucked tanpura), a separate chord instrument, and the drone / notes mix sliders.
• 📈 Progress — weekly review, spaced-repetition reviews due, and custom phrase drills.
• ⚙ Learning — microphone sensitivity and check, singing octave, and the reset / restore controls.
• ● Record output — records everything the site plays (drone included) and downloads it as an audio file. Press again to stop; auto-stops at three minutes.

The course (Learn)

About forty lessons follow the book's four parts, plus a Part Five on Liebman's chromatic approach and a starred checkpoint closing each part. Every lesson cites its chapter and pages.

• Sing cards — the heart of the course. Drone + target plays the tone to match; Drone only leaves space for your voice; Check my voice starts the live tuner (needle, scrolling pitch history, optional overtone spectrum, and a recordable ten-second take with a pitch trace).
• Rhythm trainers — feel a ratio as a looping cross-rhythm before hearing it as pitch. The tap loop runs until you stop it.
• Comparisons & comma demos — A/B buttons glow as they sound; "together" plays both tones at once so you hear the beating. These always use exact ratios, whatever the tuning switch says.
• Comma pumps — chord journeys tuned purely from chord to chord; compare the first and last tonic to hear the drift.
• Quizzes — the drone sounds, a degree plays, you name it. Questions adapt toward your weak degrees and feed the Practice heatmap.
• Mark as practiced — the checkmark drives your progress lattice, resume point, and part stars. Completed lessons offer review mode, which hides the prose and keeps the practices.
• Sharing — every lesson is a link (#learn/lesson-id), and the 🔗 on each activity copies a link straight to that sound.

Practice Room

• Today's practice — a five-step guided session: sa, the mode du jour, your weakest degree, an ear check drawn from spaced-repetition due reviews, and a journal entry (optionally with an eight-second audio take).
• Your ear on the map — a heatmap of per-degree accuracy built from every quiz and dictation answer.
• Breath-counted sa — the book's eleven-breaths practice with a counter and drone.
• Sight-singing — a sargam phrase appears; the microphone advances you note by note as each locks. Load your own phrases from the 📈 panel.
• Duet — hold an interval against a walking root, or hold sa against a moving voice; the tuner's target moves with the music.
• Melodic dictation — hear four notes, answer by tapping degrees.
• Transposition drill — random tonics: name the degree you hear, or the letter a degree lands on.
• Name it four ways — drill the four naming systems against each other: ratio, sargam, solfege, interval name.
• Comma JND — a blind which-was-pure test that narrows the cents gap as you succeed; thirds, fifths, and sixths each keep a best.
• Loop layer — record eight seconds of your voice, loop it, sing the other voice over yourself.

The labs

• Diagram Atlas — every non-notation figure from both books as a playable model. Pick an entry, press Play diagram (path numbers light in order), Invert path reverses it, or send it to a lattice lab or the composer.
• Staff + Lattice — read book examples in four voices while their tones light on the lattice.
• Melodic / Harmonic / Triadic lattices — click to play; arrow keys walk the map (Ctrl skips two; Shift on the triadic lattice selects minor). The status strip shows each tone's ratio and your path's drift from equal temperament. Extras: a pedal-tone hold on any degree, saved and shareable journeys, the piano strip showing what temperament folds together, and (melodic lab) Track my voice — your sung pitch as a live dot on the map. Wheel-zoom and drag to pan; double-click resets.
• Modes — church and mixed modes as lattice selections, plus the 5×5 tetrachord matrix: every mode is a lower tetrachord plus an upper one.
• Cadences — cadence models stepping across the triadic lattice with animated voice-leading lines; common tones get hold-rings.
• Chromatic Jazz — Liebman's devices: superimposition, side-slipping, anchors, with a tension slider.
• Voicing Lattice — plant a voicing structure (tertian, quartal, "So What", cluster…) on any root; play it parallel or conformed to a tetrachord mode; chain voicings into a looping sequence. Member tones light on the map.
• Tuned Keyboard — keys sustain while held (mouse, the A–; computer row, or MIDI in) and sound in the active tuning; MIDI out sends tuned notes with pitch bends to hardware.
• Analysis — phrases moving across the lattice on a timeline, the folding-plane animation of the comma pump, a key-chain builder with drift readout, and the 3-D septimal corner.
• Composer — a 16/32-step sketch. Click a cell to fill it from the selected Atlas diagram; Shift-click cycles its length; Alt-click makes a rest; swing delays off-beats. Save sketches to a library, share them as links, or export MIDI with just-intonation pitch bends.
• ⛶ Performance mode — on the instrument labs: fullscreen, chrome-free, for live playing.

Tuning systems

• Just ratios — every tone tuned by exact whole-number ratios from the tonic; pure, locked, position-dependent. The course's home base.
• Equal tempered — the modern piano: twelve identical semitones, every fifth 2¢ narrow, every major third 14¢ wide.
• Quarter-comma meantone — the Renaissance compromise: pure major thirds, gently narrowed fifths, and one unusable wolf fifth.
• Werckmeister III — a Bach-era well-temperament: all keys usable, each with its own color.

The switch retunes the keyboard, lattice chord playback, mode matrix, and course material. Comparisons, comma demos, and the sing-tuner's targets always use exact ratios — the gaps are the lesson.

Microphone features

All microphone audio is analyzed locally in your browser — never recorded or uploaded (your own journal takes and loop-layer recordings stay on your device). Octave doesn't matter: sing any register and the tuner folds it.

• Run Mic check (⚙ Learning) once: hum for three seconds and it reports your level and how well pitch locks, with advice.
• Microphone sensitivity sets the gate: High for a quiet voice, Low for a noisy room.
• Singing octave sets where targets sound (around C3, C4, or C5) — match it to your voice.
• No microphone? Every exercise also works by ear against the drone.

Progress & data

Everything is stored in your browser (localStorage): lesson checkmarks, quiz statistics, spaced-repetition schedule, journal, settings, saved journeys and sketches.

• Export / Import progress (Learn sidebar) moves it between browsers as a JSON file.
• Reset lesson progress (⚙ Learning) stashes an automatic backup first; Restore last backup undoes it. Reset user experience only replays the welcome and lab tours.
• The site is an installable PWA and works offline after the first visit.

Keyboard & mouse controls

• A S D F G H J K L ; (with W E T Y U O P for the black keys) — play the piano row anywhere; in the Tuned Keyboard lab, keys sustain until released.
• Arrow keys — walk the lattice in the lattice labs (diagonals work); Ctrl+arrow skips two; Shift selects minor on the triadic lattice.
• Mouse wheel / drag / double-click — zoom, pan, and reset the lattice maps.
• Shift-click / Alt-click — in the composer: cycle a cell's length / clear it to a rest.
• Esc — closes the search overlay and confirmation dialogs; leaving fullscreen exits performance mode.

Troubleshooting

• No sound? Click anywhere once (browsers require a gesture), check the footer says audio is ready, and check the Tuning/Sound selects. The Notes & chords slider in 🎚 Music may be low.
• Tuner won't hear me? Run Mic check; allow microphone access in the browser's site permissions; raise sensitivity; sing longer, steadier notes.
• Drone too loud / quiet? The Drone level slider in 🎚 Music; each play button balances against it.
• MIDI not appearing? Press Enable MIDI in/out in the Tuned Keyboard lab and allow the permission; for MIDI out, set your synth's pitch-bend range to ±2 semitones.
• Something looks broken? Reload — your progress is saved. A ⚠ notice in the footer means an error was caught; reloading clears it.