Lightspeed A game that helps you learn to read music. Project maintained by buzzcola Hosted on GitHub Pages — Theme by mattgraham

Lightspeed is a game that will help you learn sight reading. It shows flashcards with notes, intervals and triads and you earn points by hitting the correct notes on your MIDI keyboard as quickly as possible. At the end of each round you get a point score and an average response time. How high can you score? What's your best response time?

New features in 0.2:

Countdown timer before each round starts, so you have time to get your hands on the keys!

Lots more configuration options, including turning off accidentals, right and left hand practice and adjusting the maximum flashcard time

Automatically checks for updates so you'll know the next time a new version comes out.

What you'll Need to Play

To play Lightspeed you need a computer running Windows. The game features an on-screen keyboard or you can play using a real keyboard with MIDI. This requires some way to plug your MIDI keyboard into your computer. Lots of newer keyboards these days can connect directly to a computer via USB - if yours doesn't, you can use one of these USB to MIDI cables.

Support Lightspeed Development

Lightspeed is free for everyone and the code is open source. If you have fun playing it and you'd like to support the project (or just buy me a beer), donations are welcome.

Learning to Sight Read Music

If you're a music student or teacher, you're familiar with learning to sight read and how tough it is. I found that when I worked on new repertoire I only spent a certain amount of time reading - then the material was memorized and I was working more on articulation and performance. There are sight reading exercise books out there but I wanted something fun that would give me feedback for incorrect notes.

Lightspeed will not help develop your ability to read ahead of your hands, since only one note or note combination is displayed at a time. But it is a hardcore drill on note recognition, shape recognition and keyboard geography (assuming you don't look down), and by incorporating a few rounds every morning into my practice routine I've really improved my sight reading. I hope it helps you too.

Getting Help

Lightspeed is a work in progress and is developed by me in my spare time. If you need help just send me an email at orr.james@gmail.com. If you've got some feedback I'd love to hear from you!

If you're a programmer and you'd like to help out, check out the project on GitHub.