How Much Louder?

Melody: Part 22

It’s time to step into the storm with some loudness decoding challenges. Of course, we’ll be doing these without the aid of any pictures. Only sound shall be your guide!

If you’d like a quick review of loudness, go through the 3 parts listed below:

• Part 19: Aloud and Kicking

• Part 20: Mirroring Symmetry

• Part 21: The Centre of Loudness

Calibrate Your Device’s Volume

Before we begin, let’s calibrate our device volumes. Listen to the following sound:

Set your device volume to a level where you can clearly hear this sound without it being painful or uncomfortable.

We’re doing this to ensure that there are no arbitrary changes to loudness across challenges.

Once you’ve set the volume to a comfortable level, let it stay the same until after the last challenge.

What to Expect

To keep it relatively easy, we’ll restrict our loudness options to just Ve (soft) and Ya (loud).

Just 2 options: Ve or Ya

Level I will use just one pitch with loudness Ya and Ve.

Level II will use two pitches with loudness Ya and Ve.

Level III will use three pitches with loudness Ya and Ve.

All you need to do is decode the loudness of each pitch that you hear. There is no need to decode the pitches themselves.

Each new level introduces an additional pitch for added challenge. You’ll need to ignore changes in pitch and only focus on changes in loudness.

Here’s an example with 4 melodic pitches:

The pitches of this melody are Sa Re Ga Ga, but that’s unimportant. We need to focus only on the loudness and decode this as Ve Ya Ve Ya.

Level I

We’ll use just one pitch (Sa) at loudness Ya and Ve.

Here’s Sa at loudness Ve:

And here’s Sa at loudness Ya:

Here are your Level I challenges:

1. 2 melodic pitches:

2. 3 melodic pitches:

3. 4 melodic pitches:

Level II

We’ll use two pitches (Sa and Re) at loudness Ya and Ve. You’ve already heard both versions of Sa in Level I.

Here’s Re at loudness Ve:

And here’s Re at loudness Ya:

Here are your Level II challenges:

4. 3 melodic pitches:

5. 4 melodic pitches:

6. 5 melodic pitches:

Level III

We’ll use three pitches (Sa, Re and Ga) at loudness Ya and Ve. You’ve already heard both versions of Sa and Re in Level I and II.

Here’s Ga at loudness Ve:

And here’s Ga at loudness Ya:

Here are your Level III challenges:

7. 4 melodic pitches:

8. 5 melodic pitches:

9. 5 melodic pitches at double the tempo:

10. 6 melodic pitches at double the tempo:

What’s Next?

We’ll combine pitch, time and loudness into one representation!

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