Harmony Tutor
Johannes Tinctoris
16th Century Theorist
From Scott Foglesong: HarmonyTutor is a small, simple application that I wrote in order to teach myself the VisualBasic language. It is a sophisticated version of an old HyperCard program I wrote back in the 1980s. It plays chords for you, which you identify by clicking on the onscreen buttons. It will let you hear the 'right' answer versus your answer, and will keep scores for you. In addition to using pre-designed exercises, you can create your own exercises by selecting a group of chords from a list for drilling.
I never quite finished the program; in particular there is no help file. In fact, I thought the entire application had vanished -- it's the only project I ever did in VisualBasic (I write in C++ as a rule) and somehow it didn't get as carefully backed up as did all of my other projects. However, it showed up unexpectedly in a set of Zip disks that I was preparing to dispose of -- fortunately I went through them, and, voilà, there was the Little Lost Program.
You probably won't need much help with it once you've used it a few times — you select an exercise from the menu and then click on buttons to answer the chords. At any time you can give yourself a tonic triad to orient yourself in the key. After you've identified the chord, you can check the 'right' answer against your own answer.
It doesn't do very much, but it does what it does well enough and can be quite useful for those of you wanting very basic drill in hearing chords by function.
Installation Instructions:
- Download HarmonyTutor.exe
- Double-click the file
- Follow the instructions.