What is Ear Training?
Hello there! We consume music as sounds and vibrations (generally through the ears, but Beethoven might have a word to say on that), and process it in our wonderful and intuitive brains.
As humans, we spend our lives communicating through sound and movement, and our minds are unbelievably masterful at recognising patterns in this communication, at learning to repeat what we hear, feel, and see, and crucially at learning to associate different emotions, contexts and feelings with these different patterns.
Ear training essentially uses these highly developed skills - skills we generally all have a great deal of proficiency in at incredibly young ages - to recognise and understand the patterns in music, and to move around in the world of music as fluently as we communicate with each other in our day to day lives. When we understand and can repeat these patterns as a language, we can make music that connects to ourselves and others emotionally, and can understand what is going on in the music we love ourselves, allowing us to recreate, change, develop and / or expand on it without needing sheet music.
I really believe ear training is the most intuitive way to learn music - show a toddler (or an adult tbf) a rhythm in sheet notation and they might be able to figure it out, but clap the same rhythm to them and ask them to repeat it and you’ll get a much higher rate of success, because they already have these skills.
Hello! This is me :) There are many people with vastly more developed listening skills than myself, but generally it’s an area which is deeply underdeveloped, and brutally under-utilized in music lessons, particularly traditional piano. I made these resources as ways to help students I teach, but also hope they may help others!
Who Can Do Ear Training?
Literally anyone and everyone, at any age or ability. Ear training covers a wide range of skills, from relative pitch - a skill almost everyone can develop - to rhythm skills which are almost entirely separate from pitch related skills. Ear training is perhaps a misleading term, as we can feel aspects of music such as rhythm through our bodies, allowing people who have poor, or no hearing, to develop listening (feeling?!) skills which we might often consider as ear training.
Why Do Ear Training?
Ear training gives us a practical and emotional connection to music. We don’t like a particular chord progression because it looks nice on paper, we like how it makes us feel. Ear training allows us to combine our knowledge of theory with the emotional side of music, and makes us more rounded musicians than if we were to learn theory on its own. Ear training is to music what painting on a real canvas is to art, perhaps after reading what colours go together nicely in a book. We all have our personal preferences, and we can’t discover these purely from text. Further, combining ear training strengthens our understanding of theory as we begin to understand how different aspects of music theory are related in ways we might not be able to appreciate purely from studying theory in books. Attacking learning from several angles gives us new perspectives, and when multiple perspectives align, we grow and solidify our understanding.
What Is Relative Pitch?
Relative pitch is the skill of determining the relationship between two distinct pitches, ie if you are played the note ‘C’ and then another note at random, with good relative pitch skills you can identify the second random note without being told it’s pitch class (it’s name, ie the note ‘F’). This is the fundamental skill used in figuring out melodies from memory, deciphering chord progressions, transcribing the notes to an intricate solo - honestly it’s probably the most useful musical skill you can have. It’s also the same skill we use when we sing along to our favourite songs. You probably already have reasonable relative pitch, but might not have the skills to relate it to music theory in a way that makes it phenomenally useful.
Relative pitch can be developed by almost everyone. There is scientific suggestion that a very small percentage (<5%) of the population cannot tell that two different notes are different pitches - this may be you, but it probably isn’t. If it is, do not fret, you can still learn to play melodies in other ways, and rhythm listening skills are a separate skill entirely.
The Importance Of Rhythm
There are two main components to music; the sounds - that is their pitch, and quality / timbre - and when in time they are played - the rhythm.
Rhythm is probably the earliest form of music that came from outside the voice - think drums. Percussion is more accessible because it’s technically easier to achieve from anything around you than something with a specific pitch or a specifically desirable sound. Importantly that’s not to say rhythm (or drummers!) are akin to ‘caveman hit thing, thing makes sound’ 😅 - rhythm can be unbelievably complex - check out Indian Sol and Tala music if you want your mind absolutely blown!
Rhythm is something we use in our daily lives, in every form of communication. It’s in the way we say words to convey certain specific meanings, and the way we might move our bodies or hands to convey emotion. It’s in the way we dance. In a more bohemian sense, it defines the cycles of day and night, the cycles of our bodies, and of life and death 😅 All this is to say we’re exposed to rhythm all the time, constantly, and so have an innate ability to recognise rhythm in the world around us.
Ear training can provide a much faster and more intuitive way to improve and develop your internal sense of rhythm in connection to music. Listening to, and repeating, rhythms is a far faster and more friendly way of learning than reading rhythms from a book. Rhythm can be written in many ways, the most common is sheet music notation, but it requires an understanding of the form of sheet music, the duration of the different notes, the knowledge of time signatures and bars etc. All of this can be discovered through listening to music and drumming along. To hearing and repeating patterns. A child might know a piece of music is in 4/4 without actually ‘knowing’ what 4/4 is theoretically. They might be able to easily repeat a rhythm they hear you clap, without knowing it has a dotted minim in the middle. This isn’t to say that theory knowledge isn’t important, but approaching rhythm from an ear training POV, and later bringing in the theory knowledge is - in my experience - a way of learning rhythm that leaves you with a deeper personal sense, and ‘feel’, of rhythm than trying to tackle it from notation.
People will often say they can ‘feel’ the music - and that has more to do with our innate sense of rhythm than feeling it from a book.
Importantly! Any improvement in your rhythm ability on a drum can be directly moved onto any other instrument. More on this below, but if you discover a beat just playing a drum in your own time, you can play that same beat on whatever other instrument you want - split it up between different notes on a piano, strum it on a guitar etc. The possibilities here are genuinely endless.
What Is Perfect / Absolute Pitch And Do I Need It?
Perfect or Absolute Pitch is widely considered a genetic skill, or a skill learned at a very young age, whereby a person can identify a pitch without any reference. Ie they can tell a car horn beeps at a ‘C#’, or a microwave at a ‘B’. Someone with good relative pitch could also do this, but they would require a reference (known) pitch first to work from. It’s generally understood that this skill cannot be acquired as an adult if you do not already have it. Rick Beato has some interesting videos on this should you be interested.
Many of the finest composers and musicians of all time - Mozart and Beethoven, Bach, Oscar Peterson, Hiromi, Jacob Collier - have had or have perfect pitch. It’s kind of like a cheat code skill and is undeniably useful for musicians.
Do you need it? No. John Williams, probably the finest film composer of the 20th and 21st centuries (so far), doesn’t have perfect pitch and has written some of the most beautiful music ever.
So What About Sheet Music?
Most music lessons, particularly classical or traditional piano lessons, focus very heavily on sheet music and avoid listening skills until later on in their progression schedules. Personally I think this is a huge missed opportunity and risks leaving musicians with possibly the most important skillset missing from their capabilities. That being said, there is absolutely an important place for sheet music. Knowing how to sight read opens so many doors to new and exciting pieces, particularly those that might not have easily accessible recordings, however it shouldn’t - again in my opinion, opinions will vary! - be such a singular focus that it’s at the detriment of other equally if not more valuable skills.
Your individual stance on this will probably also depend on the type of music you personally want to learn, and the type of musician you personally would like to be. It will also depend on how you feel you personally work and learn best - for yourself the structure of sheet music might be a really good grounding factor in your education. I do fear that a reliance on sheet music has a significant potential to leave an emotional element of performance stunted, however again opinions and your mileage may vary, so it’s good practice to seek advice and to not be afraid to update and change the way you approach learning music as you progress, be that leaning more, or less, heavily on sheet music.
Where Should I Begin?
This website is a collection of ear training games, quizzes, tests and tools to help you develop your musical ear. Please use them in whatever way helps - each has a particular purpose and focus, so should help with a rounded skillset.
Outside of this some of the most useful things you can do are:
1. Listening purposefully to music. Follow individual instruments, hear where they go, and see if you can predict what comes next. Listen to the quality of the chords, or the sound overall, does it feel or sound Minor or Major? Listen to the bass guitar, it’s usually the root note of the chords, can you hear this, or hear when it isn’t? Count the beats. What time signature is it in? How many bars in the chorus? The verse?
2. Transcribe music. Figure out what key it’s in, what chords are being used and try and figure out melody lines, or solo lines. You can listen to tracks on YouTube and slow the speed in the settings to listen to individual notes in solos for longer!
3. Drum along to music! You can use anything as a drum. Play on the whole beats, come up with new and interesting beats.
4. Drum on your own. Play a simple beat, maybe in 4/4 - can you then split a single beat into two, or play three beats in the space of one (now you’ve discovered triplets!). Can you split the rhythm between your hands, maybe play beats 1 and 3 on the left and 2 and 4 on the right. Can you divide 1 beat into 2, then those 2 again into 4? Can you fit 4 triplets (12 beats) into a single bar? Can you come up with 2 bar phrases, 3 bar and 4 bar phrases? Everything you learn here can be directly moved from a drum to any other instrument. This was written earlier, but a rhythm could be split across multiple notes, or between hands on a piano, or could be strummed on a guitar, or those triplet patterns you’ve discovered could be played on the cello part of your quartet arrangement.
5. Anything that involves making sound. It’s good to practice in a structured way, however sometimes just messing around subconsciously brings about discovery. We can’t always be fully switched on and attentive so take the pressure off and just make noise. You might stumble across something cool.