Melody Steps

A tune is drawn as a row of bars: each bar is one note, and each note is one step away from the one before it — up two, up one, the same, down one, down two. Read the shape, hide it, and play it back on five keys. Get it right and the next run is one step longer, from three steps up to seven. What you are graded on is the shape, never the pitch: if you have the ups and downs in the right order you are exactly right, wherever you would have started. There is no sound anywhere in it, so a muted phone plays the same game as a loud one.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is focused.
2. Read the contour. The bars are the notes, left to right, and under each one is the step that got there: ↑↑ up two, ↑ up one, = the same, ↓ down one, ↓↓ down two. The first bar is marked start — it is what the first step is measured against, not part of the answer.
3. Look at the Shapes count in the status row. It is how many separate blocks the run really has: up, up, up counts as one thing, not three. That number is what the run is worth holding as.
4. Hide the contour with Enter, or with the button under the keys, which reads Hide the contour while it is up. Nothing disappears until you do this, so take as long as you like.
5. Play the steps back in order. Left and right arrows (or up and down) choose one of the five keys, Enter plays the chosen one, and the bars redraw as you go. Or tap the keys directly — they wake up the moment the contour is hidden.
6. Take a step back with Z or Esc if you slip, or with the same button, which now reads Take back the last step. It costs nothing.
7. The round ends on your last step — the moment you have played as many as were shown. The answer comes straight up: the correct contour, with a tick on every step you matched and a cross on every one you did not, and the step you actually played written under it. Press anything, or the Next round button, to move on.
8. Keep going. Every run you play back adds a step. Get one wrong and the same length comes back as a completely new run; the third wrong round ends it and reports your longest.

How do people remember a tune?

By its shape, not its notes. What sticks is the contour — the pattern of ups and downs between one note and the next — which is why you can hum a song in the wrong key, at the wrong speed, and still be recognisably right, and why a tune you would swear you know is almost impossible to name a single actual note of. The finding is old and well replicated: asked to recognise a short melody a few seconds later, people do it from the up-down pattern and are largely indifferent to the exact intervals, which is the strongest clue that contour is what got stored. This game strips the tune down to nothing but that: no pitches, no key, no rhythm, just the run of steps. And it grades you the way memory actually works — get the shape right and you are right, wherever you started from.

Why does it show me how many "shapes" the run has?

Because that is the honest size of what you are holding. A run of five steps that are all up one is one thing to remember — "five up" — while five steps that keep changing direction is five. A game that drew freely and flashed for a fixed time would let you clear a long smooth ramp and call it a span you never had. So every run here is checked before it is used: the generator counts the blocks of identical consecutive steps and throws a draw away if there are too few for its length. That same count sets how long the contour stays up, which is why a jagged run is shown for longer than a smooth one — it genuinely is more to take in.

Do I need sound, or any musical training?

Neither. Nothing in the puzzle is carried by audio: the contour is drawn, the steps are arrows, the verdict is a tick or a cross, and the game plays identically with the volume at zero, on a device with no speaker, or for a player who is deaf. You do not need to read music or name an interval either — "up a bit, up a lot, back down" is the entire vocabulary, and the five keys say it in words as well as arrows.

Is it timed?

There is no clock anywhere in this game. The reveal is counted in moves, not seconds — the board only advances when you do something — so reading slowly costs you nothing, and the same session plays identically on a five-year-old phone and a new laptop. The contour stays up until you hide it yourself.

Does it matter which order I play the steps in?

Yes, and this is the one place order counts. A melody is a sequence: the same steps rearranged is a different tune, so the game compares your run to the shown one position by position rather than as a set. That is deliberately unlike a set-recall game such as Recall Grid, where order is noise. If you are unsure of a step, play your best guess and carry on — the answer screen shows you exactly which positions moved and what should have been there.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. No currency, no purchases, no lives to refill with a payment, nothing to win and nothing to lose but the length of the run you reached.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both, fully. Every key is a button with a spoken label, and while the contour is up it is read out step by step — "5 steps in 3 shapes: up one, up one, down two, same, up two" — in the same chunked form the game is teaching, so it is playable without seeing the bars at all. Nothing is signalled by colour alone: each bar states its step as an arrow, a right step adds a tick, a wrong one adds a cross and prints what you played underneath, and a step you have not reached yet is a dashed empty slot.

Nine bar heights, five possible steps, five lengths from three steps up to seven, and three wrong rounds. Seven is the ceiling on purpose: past that, a run stops measuring memory and starts measuring how patiently you can rehearse, and the board would need to be taller than a phone screen to draw it. Every run is drawn from the day's seed and then verified to fit the board before it is used — every bar of it, not just the last one — so you are never asked to play back a shape part of which was drawn off the top, and the daily contour is the same contour for everyone. This is a memory game, not a diagnostic or a musical aptitude test: a bad run means you were tired or distracted far more often than it means anything else.

Sequence Echo is the same "play it back" idea with pads instead of pitches, if you would rather train plain order. Recall Grid drops the order entirely and asks only which cells lit up, which is the other half of the same skill. Echo Tiles hides short rhythms behind tiles and asks you to pair them, and Number Span is the classic digits version. Beat Keep swaps memory for timing.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.