If you’re struggling with music theory, or want to force yourself to recall what you’ve already learned, have a look at the Better Ears Beginner app in the App Store. It’s a very decent looking app for both keyboard and guitar players that will help you recognize intervals, scales, chords and chord progressions, pitch, tempo, key signatures and music reading. The app’s Preferences section offers many options to fine-tune each exercise, and the app offers both MIDI In and Out.

Now this looks interesting as much as it looks daunting. Hummingbird is an attempt to make the traditional form of music notation “easier to learn, faster to read, and simpler for even the trickiest music”. By removing the need to count lines, making bass and treble clefs the same, have notes display their actual lengths and making accidentals appear every time they occur, this new form of music notation should be more inviting, according to its creators.

Over the past 2 years, the people at Hooktheory have been painstakingly building up a database of pop songs taken from the Billboard Hot 100 and analyzing them one at a time. At the moment their database of songs has over 1300 entries of verses, choruses, etcetera. The entries contain raw information about the chords and melody, while omitting information about the arrangement and instrumentation. According to their database, these are the most popular keys in pop music, and the most used chords within a key.

There has been a lot of buzz surrounding Khan Academy lately. Khan Academy is a not-for-profit organization, with the backing of Gates and Google, with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education to anyone anywhere, completely free of charge.

For what it’s worth (and I do think it’s worth a ton), here’s the full transcript to Vi Hart‘s Youtube video “The Science and Mathematics of Sound, Frequency, and Pitch” that I posted a couple of days ago. There’s just too much valuable information in this video, playing it only once would not do it justice.

To start learning basic Music Theory for free, or improve your current knowledge, give Wolfram Alpha a try instead of Google. Consider Wolfram Alpha a scientific knowledge engine that can compute whatever can be computed about anything. It accepts free-form input, and presents results without the clutter that search engines sometimes spit out. Wolfram Alpha is a long-term project, you can expect its capabilities to grow in the years to come. Imagine the questions you can ask it in 5 or 10 years… Just be sure to keep the URL to this database somewhere in the back of your head.