The Importance of Ear Training

Ear training, otherwise known as aural training or ear listening, is the process of honing and enhancing an individual's capacity to recognize, identify, and comprehend pitch, intervals, chords, rhythms, and melodies. This skill is crucial for developing musicianship, regardless of the instrument or musical genre. By developing these listening abilities, musicians can attain a more profound level of comprehension and connection with the music they create or perform.

The Benefits of Ear Training
Let’s take a look at the benefits ear training can provide: 

• Ear training is crucial for musicians as it enables them to understand melodic and harmonic interval relationships, compose original music, transcribe music from recordings, and improvise effectively – particularly when dealing with jazz harmony. This allows  them to make well-informed musical decisions for any given work.
• This skill grants students the ability to cultivate relative pitch.This allows them to comprehend the connections between different intervals within the musical context.
• Ear training plays a significant role in helping musicians play in tune with others, along with the confidence to improvise.
• Beyond its primary applications, ear training provides another advantage when memorizing music. Singers and instrumentalists can listen to a piece and internalize its structure, melodies, and harmonies, thus facilitating their learning process.
• Aside from musicians, ear training plays a crucial role for conductors as well. This skill equips them to collaborate seamlessly with musical ensembles, providing necessary corrections and encouraging attentive listening among the performers. In doing so, conductors are able to foster more meaningful and expressive performances.

How to Develop Your Inner Ear
It takes a great deal of patience to develop your inner ear. Here are some key points shared by Christopher Sutton and MasterClass about what ear training involves, such as pitch recognition,including interval identification, chord progressions, rhythmic dictation, harmonic dictation, and sight-reading. Learn how to develop this skill by following these steps::

1. Create a gradual study process: Begin with basic exercises and gradually increase the difficulty level. You can learn to distinguish between high and low pitches and recognize specific notes in isolation and their relationships to one another, enabling you to reproduce and recognize different levels of melodies. We recommend, identifying individual pitches, then moving on to intervals, chords, arpeggios and melodies. To start with interval recognition, follow these steps:
   ▪️ Begin by practicing the seven musical notes. 
   ▪️ Then, study basic intervals, such as perfect fourths and major thirds.
   ▪️ Gradually add more complex intervals and focus on hearing the differences between them, for instance, minor thirds, minor sixth and seventh. 
   ▪️ When you feel confident, you can study chord inversions and extensions, such as seventh chords, which are valuable for understanding melodies and harmonies.
   ▪️ Use online ear training apps that play interval exercises for recognition, such as Ear Master.Learn more about it in the next section!
   
   
2. Sing everything! Singing helps internalize the pitches and makes the ear training process more effective. Use any solfeggio method, such as “Essentials of Sight Singing: a Modern Method of Solfeggio” Nicola Aloysius Montani, to have a study plan and be able to sing or read out loud exercises that include scales, intervals, arpeggios and melodies. Otherwise, you can sing any melody you are studying with your instrument. The solfeggio method can help you to develop sight reading, which is reading and performing music at first sight without prior rehearsal or practice.   
   
   
3. Active Listening and Musical Dictation: When practicing, actively listen to the sounds and focus on the pitches and intervals. Train your ears to discern different musical elements and pay attention to details. Here are some methods for enhancing your active listening skills:   
   ▪️ Use familiar melodies to distinguish the intervals by singing them slowly or playing them on an instrument. 
   ▪️ Practice rhythm dictation, a valuable exercise for developing rhythmic perception and notation skills. This helps musicians recognize and distinguish different rhythmic patterns, subdivisions, and durations, which help perfectly reproduce rhythms and stay in time while playing music.
   ▪️ Developing harmonic and melodic dictation skills will teach you to listen to a melody and note it by writing it down or playing it on your instrument. This skill lets you transcribe music, play melodies by ear and analyze and transcribe complex chord progressions or melodies.
   ▪️ You can use some of the apps below to start the dictation journey. 
   ​
   
4. Always use reference notes! Compare your vocals by using a keyboard, as it tunes perfectly while you sing the same note. If you don’t have one, use a keyboard app such as Music Keyboard, or make sure your instrument is in tune and compare your vocal sounds with the reference note.
   
   
5. Musical Analysis: Take the time to analyze the structure, chords, and melodies of the music you listen to. This helps you connect the theoretical knowledge to the practical application of ear training. Many apps can help you explore the musical analysis world; check out our list below! You can check out programs like EarMaster, Theta Music Trainer, and Tenuto. You can also check out textbooks by Joe Elliott and Carl Humphries, Berklee Press, and Ron Gorow.
   
   
6. Embrace Musical Variety: Expose yourself to different genres and styles of music. Musical variety helps you become familiar with various sounds and musical nuances.

You can effectively improve your ear skills by considering these aspects and incorporating them into your ear training practice. Keep practicing! If you want to learn more about ear training, schedule a free consultation with us today!

Karen Rodriguez

Writer
Music & Language Learning Center