Smarten your musical ear

GNU Solfege is a music program, but not in the traditional way of music editors and mixers: this app teaches you music theory.

Well, at least that’s the impression you get from reading the developer’s description. However, after testing the program, you can easily tell that you need to have already some basic – if not intermediate – music knowledge if you want to make the most of GNU Solfege.

The program includes a series of tests and quizzes to evaluate your music skills, mostly based on the recognition of notes, scales, chords and the like. There are also some dictation exercises, but these must be done on a piece of paper, which doesn’t make much sense to me.

In general terms, I was a bit disappointed when testing GNU Solfege. It may be useful for music students to test their skills, but I expected a software tool to help me take my first steps in music – something that GNU Solfege is certainly not.

In spite of requiring some theoretical background, GNU Solfege may still be a good tool to put your musical skills to test.

Solfege is free music education software. Use it to train your rhythm, interval, scale and chord skills. Let your computer and Solfege smarten your ears!

Take a look at what the program features:

• Recognize melodic and harmonic intervals
• Compare interval sizes
• Sing the intervals the computer asks for
• Identify chords
• Sing chords
• Scales
• Dictation
• Remembering rhythmic patterns