Background
Tete is a free open source ear training software package. Ear training involves learning to recognise how different combinations of notes sound. It is useful for musicians to allow them to differentiate between the different combinations of notes that make up music.
Tete allows you to select intervals, chords, or scales and play examples of the selected sounds in a random order. As each is played it is highlighted in the list. Once you think you can tell what is playing you can test yourself. A series of sounds will be played, again at random, and you attempt to identify what has been played.
You can control how each sound is played back by changing the midi instrument, the octave range allowable, root note, and whether the sounds are played ascending or descending. You can also adjust the length of the notes and the extent to arpeggio the playback.
Why call it Tete?
I live in London, and we British have a terrible habit of dropping random letters from words. It's just 'ow we are, init? So when I mentioned to a friend that I was training my ear with a computer program she asked which ear trainer I was using. I replied, pointing to my screen, "This ear trainer 'ere." It kind of stuck. I'm planning to use any donations made to the project to hire some management consultants to re-brand it one day.
Installation
Prerequisites
Tete is written in Java and requires the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) version 1.5 from Sun's website. It should run on any PC running Microsoft Windows or Linux and should also run on most Macs.
You will also require a midi soundbank file. This does not come as standard with the JRE due to its size, but should be included with the JDK if you have it. It can be downloaded separately. There are a number of versions of the file. The larger the soundbank file is the better quality the playback will be. I personally use the soundbank-delux.gm file which has much better sounding instruments than the default file. To install this file follow the instructions on Sun's site.
The program itself
Installing Tete is simply a matter of un-zipping the distribution file into a directory of your choice. On
Windows you might use C:\Program Files\Tete assuming your installation of Windows is on your
C: drive.
If you have associated jar files with the java runtime you will be able to double click on the tete.jar file in the directory you unzipped the Tete files into.
Alternatively you can right click on the jar file and select Open with...
and navigate to the java.exe in the JRE 1.5 bin directory which defaults to something like
C:\Program Files\Java\jre1.5.0_XX\bin
If none of the above works, you can use the command line: java –jar tete.jar
Technical Stuff
When I decided to write an ear training program Sun had just released version 1.5 of the Java language and I had never written a Swing application. I decided to take the opportunity to kill three birds with one stone, and write Tete using Swing and as many of the new features of JDK 1.5 as I could squeeze in. There's no technical reason why it couldn't have been done using JDK 1.4. That would have meant that more people could run it, but I didn't originally expect to release it to the public. So my apologies to anyone who's inconvenienced, but there you are. It's free, lighten up.
