FlappyTone origin story

I've been in Taiwan for about 3 years now and have picked up quite a bit of Mandarin on the way. I'm not really studying, just learning by living here (+ my partner happens to teach Mandarin so that helps too).

One thing I always struggled with though were the damn tones! Both in recognising and pronouncing them. My musical abilities being very limited, I just always had a hard time 'visualising' the different vocal pitches.

The other week, on a random typhoon weekend and bored as hell, I got this idea out of the blue: a little game to practice your tones! It's based on the 'Flappy bird' game idea, but you control the bird's vertical movement with your voice. The obstacles are tunnels, shaped in relation to the tone contours on the Chao tonal grid.

If you'd rather just visualise your tones, there's also a 'visualiser' which helps a lot with actually understanding your vocal range and how to get the correct tones out of your vocal chords.

Initially, this was just a weekend project but I had some people try it and people have actually found it very useful for practicing their tones. The game is also supported by a professional online Mandarin teacher, who believes in the educational potential of this.

The next steps are to improve the accuracy, add more words and also tone-pairs and create a analysis algorithm that explains how you can improve certain parts of the tones.

Stay tuned!