Have you ever been impressed with someone’s ability to hear a song once and instantly be able to play it? A proportion of musicians who have that ability have what we call perfect pitch: the ability to instantly recognise the name of a note based on its pitch. This ability is developed early in childhood and cannot be developed later. The rest of the musicians who can play music by ear have relative pitch. They may not be able to tell you the name of a note based on its pitch, but give them a point of reference, and they will be able to tell you anything. Relative pitch, unlike perfect pitch, can be trained, and can also be more powerful than perfect pitch.
Aside from being able to play songs by ear, why would we want to spend our time training our ears? As mentioned in the Sight-reading chapter, audiation is a core sub-skill of sight-reading. Improving our ears will help with our ability to read ahead and mentally prepare for the music we are about to play. Having a good ear also means that we don’t need to rely on sheet music to learn. This is especially useful if we want to venture away from classical music into pop, jazz, and blues genres. It means that whatever we listen to, we can learn. It removes any barriers to learning. Hearing music and being able to play it also applies to music we hear in our head – music that we are composing, or improvising. If we have a well trained ear, we can translate any musical idea from our mind to our hands immediately, without having to think. If you think about it more, you will be able to find more benefits of having good ears beyond what I mentioned above, but hopefully that won’t be needed because you are already convinced.
What to hear
Having a well-trained ear means we are able to recognise the following:
- pitches, melodies
- chords, chord voicings
- chord progressions
- rhythms
Having this list at hand makes it easy for us to target areas of practise that need work. Anything we could want to improve should fall under one of those categories.
How to train
The first step to developing your ears is to build awareness. Hopefully the foundation is already present from following the lessons from the Musicality chapter. I won’t go into any more detail here.
Audiation
Before we are able to connect the sound of music to its theoretical meaning, we have to be able to hear it in our mind’s ear. Beyond the basic foundational training of being able to listen to music, we now need to be able to produce it in our head.
Audiation is best practised with the piano in front of you, it will allow you to ingrain the full sound in your head. Unfortunately I do not remember the name of this exercise, I did not come up with it, but it is a great exercise to work on audiation.
Play a note at the piano, and let it fill your mind. Hear it resonating inside your head. Hear the fundamental frequency and all of the overtones that make up its unique spectral profile. Do the same for different notes.
Once this is easy, play two notes simultaneously, mentally separate them and follow the same steps as above.
Add more and more notes. As you do so, you may want to check that you are correct, or you may need some nudging to be able to separate the notes. It is fine to play the note separately to give you some help.
When learning a piece, there are also plenty of opportunities to work on audiation, here are some examples:
- play one hand while hearing the other
- play chords with missing notes, and hear the missing notes
- leave gaps when playing, and fill them in your mind
The ability to imagine music in your head will make the ear training much easier. I would recommend spending a lot of time on this; it will be a worthwhile investment.
Imitation game
A game I used to play with my students and they loved consisted of me defining a set of notes we would use, and playing a little melody with those notes. Without looking, they had to repeat the melody I played. To make it more complicated, I would make the phrase longer, or add more notes to the set. It worked really well because knowing the set of notes means that the student can learn to hear to relationship between them (high, low, distance) and not get bogged down on the notes themselves.
If you have a friend to play this with, it can be incredibly fun trying to push and outdo each other. Otherwise if you are by yourself, you can play a variation of it where you pick the set of notes, and write the order of the melody using numbers. Your task then, is to hear the numbers in your head, and check if you are correct by playing it. You could also skip writing the numbers and just hear a melody in your head using the set of notes, and try to play it on the piano.
Functional ear training
Most music that we listen to, and learn is functional. The term functional means that chords and notes have a particular function that they play in the context of the music. For example, in the key of C, C has the function of the tonic. When we play C, it means we are home, we have landed. G, on the other hand has the function of the dominant, usually it will take us back to C. The most common chord progression in all of music is the V-I, in C: G-C. Functional ear training means we learn notes and chords in the context of a key, where the function of those notes and chords is what differentiates them.
Below are a few apps and websites to train:
- Functional Ear Trainer phone app (iOS, Android)
- Website (also contains more ear training resources beyond functional ear training)
- Computer software
Chords
The imitation game and functional ear training are great for hearing notes and chords in context. I wanted to also mention the importance of learning to recognise chord qualities (major, minor, diminished, etc.) and extensions outside of a functional context.
You should be able to recognise whether triads and seventh chords, and eventually be able to identify their inversion. Aside from the obvious suggestion to practise using an app (I particularly love this one), there is one more exercise (more of an extension of the audiation exercise) that I wanted to show.
Play a chord. In your mind, highlight one of the chord tones. You should be able to do this for different inversions and by removing the note from the chord. Also try playing only the triad, and audiating different extensions.
Being able to identify the details about a chord will be useful to supplement the functional ear training. Functional ear training will tell you that the chord is a IV, and this training will tell you it is a major 7 chord with a #11 and a 13.
Transcription
Exercises like the ones above are good for specifically developing certain aspects of our ear, but eventually, we want to put our good ear to use by transcribing music. I talk about transcription in more depth in the Creativity chapter.
Ultimately, transcription is what will keep developing your ear indefinitely. You may master the exercises above, but transcription knows no limits. You can transcribe a saxophone solo? Great, what about a jazz trio? What about an entire orchestra? You get to decide what you want to improve and you get to transcribe music for that purpose.
