akousia
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Akousia Is Live

By Remi Erskine

The site is online. 242 pages, 219 of them with something you can press and hear, and no account needed for any of it. This post is the honest version of what is finished, what is not, and what gets added over the coming months.

  • 242 pages
  • 219 playable
  • no account

Where to start

  • Start here
  • Chords
  • Ear training
Play a Cmaj7Cmaj7
C4C5

In short

Akousia is a music theory site where every idea arrives with a sound. Look up the dominant seventh and there is a keyboard on the page playing one. Read about swing and there is a groove you can slow down until you hear where the second eighth note actually lands. Nothing here is explained with a paragraph alone.

It took a long time to get to this point, and it is finally out of the folder and onto the internet.

The feeling

Press first, read second. That order turns out to matter more than anything else on this site.

What is on the site today

  • Fifteen sections of theory. Chords, scales, intervals and rhythm to begin with, then harmony, progressions, melody and the rest, each with its own hub and articles.
  • Eighteen lessons in a row. Start here runs from the very first note to building chords, and the site remembers where you stopped.
  • The Pianolab. 27 chord types on all 12 roots, inversions included, on one keyboard you can click.
  • Ear training that works now. Intervals, chord quality, scales, progressions and inversions, twenty pages of it, no sign up.
  • Four history articles. Jazz, pop, electronic music and the classical periods, each with the harmonic turning points playable.

Why it took this long

Every sound on this site is generated in your browser at the moment you press the button. There are no recordings, no samples and no streaming embeds, which means the piano, the electric piano, the guitar and the drum kit all had to be built before a single example could work.

The writing came first as well. There is an internal reference of 167 articles behind this site, all of it checked against at least five sources per topic, and the pages you read are written from that rather than from a search result.

What changes over the coming months

On the list for the coming months, roughly in the order they get built:

  • The songs section. Chord charts for real songs, with the progression playable and the artist in context. This is the biggest missing piece.
  • The four tools. Metronome, tap tempo, tuner and pitch finder. The first two are close, the other two need microphone access.
  • The Drumlab. The grooves play already, the interface to build your own does not exist yet.
  • Notation on the screen. The reading and rhythm exercises are waiting on a notation renderer, so those pages are text for now.
  • More comparisons. On the dominant seventh page there is a block that puts three neighbouring chords side by side and a block that plays the same chord in four styles. Every chord type is getting both.

What stays the same: no account, no downloads, and all audio made here.

Tell us what is missing

If something on a page is wrong, or explained in a way that only makes sense once you already know it, that is worth an email. Write to hello@akousia.com. Corrections usually go up within the week and the article says what changed.

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