Ear Training Practice Exercises

56 pointsposted 3 days ago
by mattbit
(tonedear.com)

34 Comments

vunderba

3 days ago

These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.

So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.

Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.

It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.

https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net

smeej

an hour ago

Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.

vunderba

an hour ago

It already has that feature! :) It’s just not very obvious. If you click the small lock icon near the top, it will snap and to that difficulty so you can practice only sequences with that specific number of notes.

swestwood

12 minutes ago

This is really simple and great!! Thanks for not stuffing it with ads.

Is there a way to make it work a bit better for phones? On mobile Safari, just tapping to enable sound doesn’t seem to work until I reload and tap again.

xlii

6 minutes ago

Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music.

I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer.

Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.

dwringer

24 minutes ago

This site insisted on having write access to my connected MIDI devices, which is a bit concerning as it's not required for what the site actually does.

altho123

8 minutes ago

They're asking for midi device control & reprogram, my guess is that for some of the exercises you can use your own midi keyboard to input the note (dictation etc.)

articlepan

38 minutes ago

This is great! For scale degree after chord progression exercise, I'd love a variation where the chord progression is in a minor key.

mentalgear

an hour ago

I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)

khazhoux

37 minutes ago

You expected one thing but found it was not what you thought. What is the takeaway for us?

potato-peeler

an hour ago

Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.

triplechill

an hour ago

The Android app link doesn't seem to work

functionmouse

2 hours ago

I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?

We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

black_puppydog

44 minutes ago

You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html

Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.

functionmouse

12 minutes ago

In a way, string instrument players already think this way

taco_emoji

an hour ago

There is no "objective" foundation to music.

Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:

     B D  G I K
    A C EF H J LA
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)

Groxx

40 minutes ago

To +1 the "no objective foundation": browse music theory research a bit! There's a ton of caveats and poor-sounding fits and whatnot for literally every approach, and there's endless discussion of it. E.g. have a MinutePhysics take on how the common 12 note western scale falls apart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Hqm0dYKUx4

And that's before even getting into completely alternate approaches, or how strongly harmonics affect perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgXpCK_4gA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ8qZCGg4Bk

(maybe to clarify: there are objective aspects, in that sound is measurable. but there is nothing like a "grand unified theory" that covers all music, nor are roughly any of the popular ones internally consistent - it's far, far too varied for that, and physics often doesn't allow the desired consistency, causing more variety)

functionmouse

an hour ago

In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.

In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.

epiccoleman

29 minutes ago

Do you have much experience reading musical notation?

I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.

Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.

To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.

nostrademons

9 minutes ago

There's also a huge amount of math behind music that is fascinating.

The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.

Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.

The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths

konart

an hour ago

>For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge might be easier for some people.

Haven't heard about CDEFGAE up until I was in my mid 20s trying to learn guitar (after 7 years of music school and musical calsses in regular school)

scottious

an hour ago

I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.

As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.

A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.

The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.

altruios

an hour ago

We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.

For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).

Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p

Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.

bigbuppo

an hour ago

Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?

jbritton

an hour ago

I never had a music class at any point in school in California.

nostrademons

25 minutes ago

It exists in some California schools, but this is one of those things that exists because in some districts the parents setup a 501(c)3 whose only job is to fill the gap left by Prop 13 and Prop 98. My kid's had it every year, but in kinder it was a parent volunteer teaching it and in 1st/2nd the music teacher was entirely funded out of parent donations.

functionmouse

an hour ago

Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.

compiler-guy

an hour ago

Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.

Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.

But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.

It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.

taco_emoji

an hour ago

That doesn't highlight anything except the tautology that music theory isn't taught in general education

khazhoux

35 minutes ago

Sounds like you don’t understand scales if you’re confused about why we have 7 note names.

Also, in your own color analogy: we have a small number of main color names, then a bunch of in betweens.

jwr

an hour ago

I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.

I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)