Do I need music theory?

No. What's trained is timbre and production perception, not harmony. An attentive listener with no training scores as well as someone conservatory-taught.

Where does the music come from?

Partly from the Artist Pool catalogue, real music by independent artists, and partly from material produced for the game. There are no generic library loops in the levels that matter.

The early levels of each series play without an account; the later ones — fine discrimination and era — require Pro.

How is this different from Explore?

Explore is the catalogue of sound characters with their definitions and processes; Mix & Match is the exercise that checks whether you can tell them apart by ear. One teaches and the other measures.

Mix & Match: train your ear to name a sound's character

What this game trains

The biggest leap in learning to mix isn't technical, it's vocabulary. While all you can say about a track is that it «sounds off», there's no way to decide what to reach for. As soon as you can say it sounds nasal, or thin, or too wide, the decision becomes obvious: each of those adjectives points at a zone and a tool.

Mix Match gives you sounds and you pair them by character: bright with bright, warm with warm. It's easy to explain and surprisingly hard at first, because it forces you to separate the quality of a sound from what the sound is — to hear that a kick and a vocal can share a character without resembling each other at all.

Two things that pay off while practising: ten-minute sessions rather than long ones, because hearing fatigues and past a certain point your answers get worse within the same session; and the same headphones for a stretch, because what you're building is an internal reference and switching systems daily blurs it.

How to play, step by step

1.Pick a series. Songs pairs musical fragments with each other; Gear pairs the image of an iconic piece of equipment with the sound it makes.
2.Cards turn over and each fragment plays when you touch it. You can replay: this doesn't measure memory, it measures hearing.
3.Match by character, not by instrument. Two things that resemble each other in nothing can share warmth, and that's exactly the association to build.
4.Each correct pair explains what they had in common: the genre, the era, the type of processing or the machine that made it.
5.At the end of the level you see the pairs you missed with their explanation, which is where the real learning is.

What each series includes

S1 · Songs — Genre recognitionFree: You pair fragments by the genre that defines them. The first level opens with Detroit techno, punchy and mechanical at 125–135 BPM, and branches out from there.
S1 · Songs — Artist Pool and fine discriminationFree: The middle levels use real music by independent artists from the catalogue, and the later ones ask you to tell apart ever smaller differences within the same genre.
S1 · Songs — Time MachinePro: The final level pairs by era: what sounds like the 70s, the 90s or now. It's the exercise that forces you to hear production rather than song.
S2 · Gear — Iconic sounds and legendary synthsFree: You pair a machine's image with its sound: an electromechanical organ from 1955, the sound of soul and gospel, and the synths that defined whole genres.

Four things that pay off while practising

Ten-minute sessions, not long ones. Hearing fatigues, and past a certain point your answers get worse within the same session.
The same headphones for a stretch. What you're building is an internal reference, and switching systems daily blurs it.
Name before you match. Say «this one's nasal» or «this one's wide» out loud: matching without naming trains recognition, not vocabulary.
When you miss, replay the two you thought were alike back to back. Direct comparison is what separates two characters that blur in the abstract.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need music theory?: No. What's trained is timbre and production perception, not harmony. An attentive listener with no training scores as well as someone conservatory-taught.
Where does the music come from?: Partly from the Artist Pool catalogue, real music by independent artists, and partly from material produced for the game. There are no generic library loops in the levels that matter.
What's free?: The early levels of each series play without an account; the later ones — fine discrimination and era — require Pro.
How is this different from Explore?: Explore is the catalogue of sound characters with their definitions and processes; Mix & Match is the exercise that checks whether you can tell them apart by ear. One teaches and the other measures.

Where to go next

For the translation of each adjective into actual frequencies, see the frequency ranges guide, where you can also hear each band in isolation. The catalogue of sound characters lives in Explore, and the character each kind of distortion brings is in the saturation guide.