Knowing these letters and words gives you a whole new auditory world to experience, and with in come essential skills for any musician.Įar training also counts for a significant portion of the RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music) exam. Intervals are like the letters and words that need to be understood before you can truly start reading. Many beginning and experienced musicians have asked this question, but intervals are just the basic stuff that needs to be understood. The second chord is one of my favourite moments of Jacob Collier’s Moon River, check it out! If I play it starting on a different note but keeping all the distances between notes the same, you’d still recognize it as the melody. For example, going back to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, what note we start on doesn’t matter. Most of ear training revolves around the distances between notes, rather than the notes themselves (incidentally those with perfect pitch can recognize notes, but most of us can’t). To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. I guess ear training is really a misnomer, since ear training is really about getting better at interpreting what we hear.

Ear training is all about training the ability to listen to music with more attention, detail and granularity. I said earlier that ear training is a skill only musicians have and train - that’s nonsense! The term ear training might be foreign, but we all have the ability! Ok, but what even is ear training?Įar training is exactly what it seems, except not at all:). In doing so, personally, I have found an entirely new appreciation for this eternal human fascination.Īll because of a little thing called ear training. In fact, some of us become so fascinated with it that we decide to study it further. From our very first months as a fetus all the way to the sunset of our lives, homo sapiens have a fascination with music that transcends just entertainment. Music is all around us, so it’s no coincidence that something we’re exposed to so often is so ingrained in our heads. Using that, you can accurately replicate those same audio signals!.Using that, you drew (or envisioned) a rough sketch of how the melody “looks”.You had an understanding of how the melody would continue.Using the auditory information you received, you instantly recognized the melody as a popular nursery rhyme.Accurately interpreted which signal was the most important - the melody.Listened to audio with many different signals and immediately recognized it as music.This might seem trivial, but step back for a second. In fact, you could probably do a similar task for way more complicated melodies.

Music intervalas ear practice