Sight-reading exercises: a melody that reads like something written,
not a run of random notes.
The melody is built the way a simple tune is: a chord for every bar from
a four-bar phrase pattern, chord tones on the strong beats and steps
between them, leaps that turn back by step, a contour that does not run
in one direction for long, the tonic at the start and the end, a
leading note or supertonic just before the end. The rhythm of each bar
comes from a vocabulary for the time signature, opened up by the
difficulty — quarters and halves first, then eighths, dotted notes and
rests, then sixteenths and syncopation — with the bar that closes a
phrase settling on a longer note. Asked for chords, it puts a three-note
chord under the tune where it sits on the bar's chord — on the first beat
of each bar, on the strong beats, or on every note long enough, as the
difficulty rises — in close position with the tune on top, so what is
played can be heard note by note. Everything is drawn from a seeded
random source, so an exercise can be made again from its seed — and every
exercise has a code, its settings and seed in sixteen characters, that
makes it again anywhere.
Sight-reading exercises: a melody that reads like something written, not a run of random notes.
The melody is built the way a simple tune is: a chord for every bar from a four-bar phrase pattern, chord tones on the strong beats and steps between them, leaps that turn back by step, a contour that does not run in one direction for long, the tonic at the start and the end, a leading note or supertonic just before the end. The rhythm of each bar comes from a vocabulary for the time signature, opened up by the difficulty — quarters and halves first, then eighths, dotted notes and rests, then sixteenths and syncopation — with the bar that closes a phrase settling on a longer note. Asked for chords, it puts a three-note chord under the tune where it sits on the bar's chord — on the first beat of each bar, on the strong beats, or on every note long enough, as the difficulty rises — in close position with the tune on top, so what is played can be heard note by note. Everything is drawn from a seeded random source, so an exercise can be made again from its seed — and every exercise has a code, its settings and seed in sixteen characters, that makes it again anywhere.