About EarQuiz

Hi! My name is Gdaliy Garmiza (aka GdaliySax). I’m a professional live and studio musician with a university degree and some years of practical and educational experience in audio production and engineering behind my back. Though never being or aiming to become an IT specialist, I have enjoyed coding for myself since my childhood. This is my first open source experience. I really appreciate the idea of taking some great free things, developed by other people, making something valuable of them, and giving it out to the world for free in exchange. And another exceptional thing about an open source project is that anyone can contribute to it in different ways: spreading a word about it, making donations, testing it, proposing new features or writing own code.

Why technical ear training and what the hell is it?

Standard ear training for musicians involves guessing pitches, intervals, chords, rhythms, transcribing melodies, chord progressions, etc., and there are many courses, services and applications for doing this. But technical ear training covers another dimension and different set of listening skills which are all about hearing differences in sound.

I don’t know who is the pioneer of it, but I hadn’t heard anything of these practices before I found David Moulton’s Golden Ears Audio Ear Training CD series back in 2007, when I used to be an educator, and I started my path after graduating from the university. And I thought it was such a pity I hadn’t been taught like that! So, I decided to explore this method together with my students: guessing equalization, applied to pink noise and music records, different types of audio effects and processing, etc. But the ideas were in the air. And I was not the only one who began using this approach. One or two years later, technical ear training became a part of the educational standard in audio industry in my country. And, honestly, I’m convinced that developing these skills is a must not only for audio professionals, but for any contemporary musicians and artists who deal with sound recording or amplification.

Currently, this is my 100% enthusiast project, and I have no idea how big it will grow. So far, it consists of one software product EarQuiz Frequencies for Windows, macOS and Linux platforms. This is an application for ear training on equalization. Really knowing frequency ranges and being able to identify which of them are boosted or cut is definitely one of the most important skills. David Moulton dedicated the half of his paid course to exercises on recognizing frequencies, by the way! There are some similar applications on the market, but I don’t know any of them that provides the same amount of features, audio quality and flexibility for free!

I got inspired by…

not only David Moulton and his game-changing course, but also by other great things:

• Python with its power, simplicity and big community that lets non-technical people like me bring their ideas to life without the need to hire professional coders;
• Pedalboard by Spotify’s Audio Intelligence Lab, which is an excellent and well-supported Python library for working with audio;
• PyQt6 which is a powerful toolset for developing beautiful and convenient graphical user interfaces in Python.

I hope, many hours and months of development were not in vain, and you would find this project useful!

Yours faithfully,
Gdaliy Garmiza.