A strong inner ear is essential for understanding music composition, so nearly every music school requires students to take ear training lessons.
This skill is essential for music students or anyone who wants to get better at listening, understanding, and performing music.
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Wednesday, September 28th
Ear Training Techniques
Ear training practice is an excellent way for musicians to enhance their listening skills. Dedicating a small amount of time per day can be enough to keep your inner ear strong:
Pitch ear training:
Train your ear to recognize notes by repeatedly playing the same note while singing or humming. Then, associate the sound with the note’s name in your mind. The more clearly you can hear a note in your head, the better you’ll become at identifying pitches.
Scale ear training:
Scales are also crucial for musicians. Each scale contains seven notes per octave, with an eighth note repeating the tonic at the next pitch. Key signature identification of all major scales and minor scales will help you determine which key a piece of music is in and is essential for creating harmonic chord progressions and great melodies.
Interval ear training:
Interval identification is an essential component of ear training. For example, learning all the intervals within an octave can make it easier for you to identify and replicate melodies later. In addition, understanding the distance between pitches enables you to build sets of chords pleasing to the ear.
Chord ear training:
Training your ear to know which type of chord you’re hearing or which notes sound good together can help you produce better-sounding chords in your music and even create specific emotional effects.
Chord progression training:
After learning to recognize the qualities that make up a particular chord progression, you can determine whether a song is in a major or minor key, another valuable component of setting the mood for a musical piece.
Functional ear training:
Hearing a particular pitch within a piece of music and recognizing its role within the tonic can help you better understand why the music is composed the way it is and what mood it elicits. Additionally, once you recognize specific patterns between different kinds of music, it will become easier to identify more music over time.
Melodic dictation:
Sometimes seeing a melody is another way to get your ears to remember it. This ear training exercise involves transcribing or playing music you’ve only heard by the ear and see the notes you’ve just heard. Dictation makes you more adept at visualizing notes, a necessary skill for composing or improvising.
