The Music and Neuroimaging Laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess and Harvard Medical School studies how music is perceived and processed by the brain. They’re investigating the use of music and music stimuli as therapudic and educational tools to aid in recovery from brain injury.

As part of his work there, Jake Mandell created a simple online test to screen for tonedeafness.  It’s a pretty good tool to measure overall pitch perception ability. Essentially, you hear 36 pairs of tone sequences. For each, you have to decide whether they are the same or different. When you’re done, it gives you immediate feedback. I scored a 78%.

With two children starting to take music theory, we’re finding that standard notebook paper doesn’t have nearly enough lines on it. Blank Sheet Music solves that problem. This free online tool lets you set all of the parameters for your sheet music, and then generates a page that you can print.

For example, I can start by choosing three staves per set. I drag and drop clefs onto each stave (no clef, treble, bass, alto, tenor, percussion, or one of several tabs). I select how many staves per sheet (1-7 in this example). I can choose to insert bar lines and brackets if I want them. When I select print, it generates the page I’ve selected and sends it to my printer.

While the tool doesn’t let you put notes on the paper, it is a quick, easy way to generate custom staff paper in just a couple minutes.