review: Trope Trainer
Mar. 23rd, 2004 11:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI recently bought Trope Trainer (Kinnor Software Inc) to help me learn torah portions. I'm learning my first one with it now. It's great!
Background: I'm a competent sight-reader (of regular music notation) and I have pretty good relative pitch, but I'm far from perfect. I have many of the common trope symbols memorized (but not all of their context-dependent variations), but learning a portion (even a mini-portion like we do in our minyan) is a slow process for me. First off, every time I encounter an uncommon symbol I have to stop and look it up, and then I have to figure out how to integrate it (transitions in and out), and sometimes in the process my pitch will shift and then the memorized notes won't be right, and, well, I'm just not very good or fast yet.
Enter Trope Trainer. Not only does it have playback (in a zillion different trope systems, by the way, not just the one we use), but it shows you the musical notation for whatever word you have highlighted. It also (optionally) highlights the phrases in the text, making it easier to learn. There are two independent toggles -- this highlighting and the presence/absence of vowels and trope symbols. (They're absent in the torah scroll, so you eventually want to practice that way.) So you can actually get unpointed text with phrase marks as an intermediate step. I haven't used that yet, but it could be handy.
The playback can be fine-tuned for both pitch and speed. At first I thought I only got four options for pitch (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone); then I noticed that I could tweak by half-step from any one of those starting points. Speed is on a 1-10 scale; I'm using 5 to learn and probably wouldn't actually lein (read for real) much faster than about 7.
During playback, you can choose a single word, a trope phrase, a verse, or the entire portion to hear. (The cursor follows along in the text, which is what you'd expect.) I wish they provided an option to highlight some contiguous words and just play that, but they don't -- so you have to let it play and then just stop it when it gets to the point you want. (Some trope phrases are long enough that I'd like to be able to break them down, but not all the way down to single words.) There also seems to be a bug with phrase highlighting: there are adjacent phrases, all white background (no highlighting), so it looks like you've got one big phrase when it's really two. I don't know what's up with that. Looks like I can tweak the colors, so maybe I can work around that.
While I'm picking nits, during playback I would like to see not just the musical notation for the active word but also for the words before and after (to see transitions). I think there'd be room to do that in the UI, and it seems incongruous that you can see adjacent words but not the corresponding music.
The software gives running translations, which is handy. I don't know what they're using as their source and haven't gone looking for the controversial ones yet. It also tells you the names of the highlighted trope symbols, so maybe one day I will learn their real names instead of things like "little magnifying glass", "diamond", and "left arch - right arch". :-)
The software can jump to any torah portion and any aliya within that. It knows about weekday versus Shabbat divisions, and it knows how to handle doubled portions. It has a calendar built in too, so you can just enter a date. The version I bought also has the holiday portions; you can get it with megillot too (the five special readings for Purim, Pesach, Shavuot, Tisha b'Av, and Sukkot), but I didn't. It's available as an upgrade, so if I later regret that it won't be that expensive to correct.
There are other features (like a tutorial) that I haven't explored; I'm just covering the things I've actually used here. But even if it didn't have any other features I'd be satisfied. This is making my life much easier. I think those who do not already read music, and those who are used to learning from tapes, will benefit even more.
List price is (I think) $99. (I got it at a discount; I don't know how often such specials come around.)
Background: I'm a competent sight-reader (of regular music notation) and I have pretty good relative pitch, but I'm far from perfect. I have many of the common trope symbols memorized (but not all of their context-dependent variations), but learning a portion (even a mini-portion like we do in our minyan) is a slow process for me. First off, every time I encounter an uncommon symbol I have to stop and look it up, and then I have to figure out how to integrate it (transitions in and out), and sometimes in the process my pitch will shift and then the memorized notes won't be right, and, well, I'm just not very good or fast yet.
Enter Trope Trainer. Not only does it have playback (in a zillion different trope systems, by the way, not just the one we use), but it shows you the musical notation for whatever word you have highlighted. It also (optionally) highlights the phrases in the text, making it easier to learn. There are two independent toggles -- this highlighting and the presence/absence of vowels and trope symbols. (They're absent in the torah scroll, so you eventually want to practice that way.) So you can actually get unpointed text with phrase marks as an intermediate step. I haven't used that yet, but it could be handy.
The playback can be fine-tuned for both pitch and speed. At first I thought I only got four options for pitch (soprano, alto, tenor, baritone); then I noticed that I could tweak by half-step from any one of those starting points. Speed is on a 1-10 scale; I'm using 5 to learn and probably wouldn't actually lein (read for real) much faster than about 7.
During playback, you can choose a single word, a trope phrase, a verse, or the entire portion to hear. (The cursor follows along in the text, which is what you'd expect.) I wish they provided an option to highlight some contiguous words and just play that, but they don't -- so you have to let it play and then just stop it when it gets to the point you want. (Some trope phrases are long enough that I'd like to be able to break them down, but not all the way down to single words.) There also seems to be a bug with phrase highlighting: there are adjacent phrases, all white background (no highlighting), so it looks like you've got one big phrase when it's really two. I don't know what's up with that. Looks like I can tweak the colors, so maybe I can work around that.
While I'm picking nits, during playback I would like to see not just the musical notation for the active word but also for the words before and after (to see transitions). I think there'd be room to do that in the UI, and it seems incongruous that you can see adjacent words but not the corresponding music.
The software gives running translations, which is handy. I don't know what they're using as their source and haven't gone looking for the controversial ones yet. It also tells you the names of the highlighted trope symbols, so maybe one day I will learn their real names instead of things like "little magnifying glass", "diamond", and "left arch - right arch". :-)
The software can jump to any torah portion and any aliya within that. It knows about weekday versus Shabbat divisions, and it knows how to handle doubled portions. It has a calendar built in too, so you can just enter a date. The version I bought also has the holiday portions; you can get it with megillot too (the five special readings for Purim, Pesach, Shavuot, Tisha b'Av, and Sukkot), but I didn't. It's available as an upgrade, so if I later regret that it won't be that expensive to correct.
There are other features (like a tutorial) that I haven't explored; I'm just covering the things I've actually used here. But even if it didn't have any other features I'd be satisfied. This is making my life much easier. I think those who do not already read music, and those who are used to learning from tapes, will benefit even more.
List price is (I think) $99. (I got it at a discount; I don't know how often such specials come around.)
Re: assent
Date: 2004-03-24 07:43 pm (UTC)