Clamor

Clamor is software for musical ear training. It runs on Linux and FreeBSD. It's written to be as platform-independent as possible, so it might be easy to port to Windows or MacOS X, but I haven't tried. As implied by the version number, this is an early prerelease version.

Features:

• The exercises currently available involve hearing intervals, hearing chords, and hearing notes relative to the tonic or the root of a chord.
• Intervals and notes are heard in context: either the tonality is estabished first by playing a cadence, or the note or interval is heard as part of an actual melody.
• The software comes with a synthesizer that uses prerecorded, digitized tones from actual acoustic instruments.

• There's no GUI yet. You use it via the terminal.
• There's no documentation except for what you're reading right now on this web page.
• When relating notes to the tonic or chord root, you type letters based on the traditional solfeg system, e.g., 's' for 'sol.' But for the notes that don't belong to the major scale, you have to use my idiosyncratic solfeg system, in which the chromatic scale goes d g r b m f k s j l p t. It's not yet possible to override this and use a different system.
• I haven't yet spent any time optimizing the synthesis stuff, so it's a little slow. For most of the exercises the delay isn't noticeable, at least on a fast machine, but it does take some time to prepare to play a longer melody, e.g., 5 seconds to prepare a 22-second single-voice piano melody on my 2.6 GHz pentium.

A closely related project is Eyes and Ears, a free book of melodies for sight-singing.

You might also want to check out GNU Solfege, which is another open-source program for ear training.

Download

Installing

First, make sure to install the program "sox" and the Perl modules "Audio::Data", "Audio::Play", and "Clone". Probably you want to do use your distro's mechanisms for installing the Perl modules, but as a last resort, you can do a "make depend", which will try to use CPAN's crufty interface to install the relevant perl modules.

FreeBSD. The ports you need are audio/p5-Audio and devel/p5-Clone. FreeBSD was my original development system, so this should work fine.

Debian. On Debian, you're probably out of luck. Perl's Audio module is not in Debian's packages, and installing it from the CPAN sources just results in crashes.

Download the program and the samples. Log in as root, and do the following:

   # tar -zxvf clamor-0.0.5.tar.gz          (replacing the version number with the real one)
   # tar -zxvf clamor-samples.tar.gz
   # cd clamor-0.0.5                        (replacing the version number with the real one)
   # make install
   # cd ../clamor-samples
   # make install-samples

After all this, you can run the program by typing "clamor" from the command line.

Possible problems:

• You need to have the following installed already: perl, yacc, bison, gcc, sox.
• The "make install-samples" step will fail if you don't have the necessary cpan modules installed yet, i.e., it's important to install all the dependencies first.
• You have to install the samples, or the program won't work.

Legal

Clamor is distributed under the GPL license.

Author

(c) Copyright 1998 Benjamin Crowell. All rights reserved.