Did you enjoy playing the game Memory as a child? You can now play the game with music instead of pictures!

Click here to start playing TuneTwins!

Researchers from the Music Cognition Group are currently working on a series of musical versions of Memory. It’s called TuneTwins . It was developed to help answer some important scientific questions about what we are listening for when we hear music.

In the game, your goal is to find the 8 matching pairs of popular television theme songs on a board consisting of 16 musical fragments. Some boards of the game are easy: in these you will have to listen for identical pairs. Some boards are more difficult: in these you will have to listen for similar pairs, with one of the pair being somewhat distorted (we removed the pitch information from the original).

Below is an example of identical pairs (on an easy board):

If you flip over two new, previously unheard cards and they happen to be a match, that’s a lucky match worth 10 points! Even better, if you can remember a card you heard before on a later turn , you’ll be rewarded with 20 points! Each time you find a match, these cards will be  removed from the board.

What if you don’t find a match? If you flip over two cards you’ve never heard of before and they don’t match, you earn no points. However, if you’ve heard either of them before, you’ll lose 10 points. Cards that don’t match stay on the board.

Clearing a board means you’ve finished a game: congratulations! Your goal is to earn as many points as possible.

This will become quite challenging when you have to listen to distorted music to find the pair. Below is an example of a similar matching pair. One of them is a bit degraded:

As you can hear, the degraded version sounds similar to the original, but is not identical: the pair is made up of the original and its degraded counterpart. 

The Amsterdam Music Lab hopes you can enjoy this game. Each game would only take a few minutes and you can play as many times as you would like. Listen carefully, as the less mistake you make, the more points you’ll get. Feel free to share it with your friends and family and see who can get the highest score. The more you play, the more you contribute to science!

TuneTwins can be found at: https://app.amsterdammusiclab.nl/tunetwins