When I joined SoundGym almost three months ago my aim was to improve my listening skills. More specifically, I want to develop my ability to accurately and reliably judge reproduced sound. Since then I've spent about an hour per day on most days and completed 65 workouts which have earned me an SPI of 165,102. Something is going right and I wouldn't have advanced this way without SoundGym. Still...
Still, in my view, SoundGym is not very good at training. You can train here, but you are left to your own devices. The games and workouts are not about training, they are about measuring. Unfortunately, they measure something that's not very useful. Let me elaborate.
Thesis: SoundGym games are about measurement not training.
The games just measure how good you are at playing them. They don't tell you how to improve. In my case, improvements have come through the sheer number of repetitions, which is probably a sub-optimal strategy.
There is a practice mode for several games, but it is pretty rudimentary. It's not possible to quickly switch between sounds. It's not possible to instantly compare various combinations of settings and sounds.
Also, there is no guidance on how to practice.
Thesis: Games measure peak ability, which is not very useful.
When I just look at my ranking, I could be tempted to pat myself on the back. However, this feeling only holds for the short time until I finish a game with a score much, much lower than my best. Yes, my best performance can be quite good when I can make a sizable number of attempts. But these high scores aren't representative of my listening abilities. My worst performance at a game is as much an indicator of these abilities as is my best performance. The necessary statistics would be a bit more involved and the results would most likely be less flattering (for me).
As SoundGym is not about competition, the really interesting question is not how well someone did something in the past, but how well they can be expected to do something similar in the future.
Thesis: SoundGym should be more like a teacher and less like a juror.
A lot of people around here play an instrument and if you're like me, you didn't learn it on your own, but you took lessons. With lessons there's a teacher who guides you along a learning path of increasing difficulty. A teacher tells you what to do and what not to do. A teacher tells you what to listen for. A teacher knows your strengths and weaknesses and helps you to improve the latter.
SoundGym should emulate what a good teacher does. A few examples of what this might look like
* Always explain what to listen for.
* Pan Man: Restrict pan positions to only two fixed positions. Increase difficulty by increasing positions. At some point switch to the current approach of a narrowing range.
* Dr. Compressor, Distorted Reality: Play sample sounds that demonstrate these features specifically; maybe even cut away other frequencies and instruments.
* Filter games: Start with a small number of fixed frequencies. Compare the same filter type at different frequencies. Compare different types at the same frequency.
I'm looking forward to your comments and hope SoundGym will improve in order to help me improve.