Tell me about sight singing/ear training software.

December 16, 2008 1:24 PM

Tell me about sight singing/ear training software.

A friend wants to take up singing in a choir again after a long time away. She's worried about the sight singing part of the audition — she knows how to read music, and used to be quite good at it, but her skills are rusty and her schedule is too unpredictable to take regular lessons. We'd like to get her some software that would help her practice: ideally something that's specifically good for practicing sight singing, but barring that some general-purpose ear training software.

We've found lots of options online, but we don't know what's good. Anyone out there with experience with this sort of program who can tell us what's worth getting and what's worth avoiding?

Anonymized for xmas.

posted by anonymous to Media & Arts (6 answers total)

I had to use Auralia this semester as part of a music theory course, and it's pretty cumbersome. The instrument "voices" were all pretty awful, so that made a lot of things tough, most particularly melodic dictation sorts of tasks. Intervals and such were easier, but still not great. Overall, I'd imagine there must be something better out there.
posted by Rallon at 2:11 PM on December 16, 2008

The first year that I taught my musicianship class the students used MacGAMUT as an out-of-class practice tool. I only checked it out briefly but it seemed fine. I found the interface clunky but it's good if you don't have anyone around to hit notes on the piano for you. I've never seen any other E-T software so I can't compare it with anything and way back when I did ear-training we did it the old-school way.
posted by ob at 2:57 PM on December 16, 2008

University of Missouri - Columbia requires (or used to) its freshman music theory classes to purchase MacGAMUT for use with their classes, and required a certain amount of hours on it a week or month...

It was designed in part by one of the profs there too - IIRC. It was a good, but yes, clunky program. I still have my disk somewhere.

There is a lot of info on it here.
posted by Kimothy at 4:38 PM on December 16, 2008

Earmaster Pro has always been my favorite.
posted by Melismata at 5:21 PM on December 16, 2008

I use the trial version of the Ultimate Guitar Ear Trainer. If your friend can play the guitar, this is pretty good, but it is no help whatsoever unless she plays the guitar!!
posted by OlivesAndTurkishCoffee at 8:10 PM on December 16, 2008

There's also Practica Musica. It's supposed to have a mode where you can sing into your computer's mic. I've owned a few versions of Practica Musica, and I like it, but I don't seem to love it enough to actually use it a whole lot.
posted by kristi at 11:14 PM on December 16, 2008