Jazz ear training that listens
Mankunku plays a phrase. You play it back on your instrument. The app listens through the microphone and scores your pitch and rhythm in real time — call and response, the way the music has always been learned.
Free and open source. Runs in your browser — nothing to install, just a microphone and your horn.
How it works
The app plays a jazz phrase in the day’s key — a real line, generated for your level, not a random interval quiz.
You answer on your own instrument. Concert, B♭, or E♭ — notation and playback are transposed for your horn.
The microphone hears your take; pitch tracking at 60 frames a second and onset detection catch every note, and your pitch and rhythm are scored in real time.
Two sides of the record
The app plays, you answer. A new key and scale every day, difficulty that adapts as your ear sharpens, and a score for every phrase — pitch and rhythm, note by note.
Begin first sessionTake the lines in your book through all twelve keys over a live rhythm section — walking bass, comping, drums — with tempo that climbs as you master each key.
See how it worksBeyond the drills
Melodic devices — enclosures, triad pairs — drilled for fluency in every key, not exact reproduction.
Build a songbook by hand or import from iReal Pro, Band-in-a-Box, MuseScore, or a PDF chart — then practice your vocabulary over the changes of a real form.
Browse licks and tunes shared by other players, and adopt the ones worth stealing — every jazz musician's oldest tradition.
A reference for every scale the app practices, organized by family with the scale degrees of each.
Under the hood
What Mankunku is, what it does for your ears, and how to start.
What the app rewards, what it forgives, and why the score lands where it does.
What the microphone hears, why the room matters, and what to expect from pitch detection.
A new key + scale every day. Why it rotates, and how new tonalities unlock.
The name
Mankunku is named for Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi (1943–2009), the South African tenor saxophonist whose 1968 album Yakhal' Inkomo — "the cry of the bull" — became a landmark of Cape jazz. The name is a reminder of what the practice is for: not the metronome, not the score, but the cry.