Dr. Wembley's Patented Tin-Ear, Athlete's Foot, and Gingivitis Cure

February 2, 2012 9:23 AM

My weekly musicfilter: Help me train my ear.

So I know theory and music history fairly well. I understand the basics of the physics of sound. I can read various forms of musical annotation and attempt to reconstruct them on a piano (although I might fail miserably). What I really lack, though, is an ear. I'm terrible at hearing and recognizing intervals, let alone individual tones. And my internal rhythm is fair-to-middling. Help me develop these. Are there freeware programs or online tutorials that might help? (Remember, I don't need to start from the beginning, just from the part where you want to start recognizing intervals and tones and time signatures automatically.)

posted by outlandishmarxist to media & arts (10 answers total)

Earmaster is what you're looking for. You can do many different things in many different levels.
posted by Melismata at 9:25 AM on February 2, 2012 [1 favorite]

Do you have an iPhone? There's a free app called Music Theory Pro that does intervals and (like most, I imagine), allows you to build up the intervals you want to target (i.e., 4ths and 5ths, but not m7 and m6 until later).
posted by Admiral Haddock at 9:32 AM on February 2, 2012

www.musictheory.net has a bunch of exercises, including Interval Ear Training.
posted by seriousmoonlight at 9:37 AM on February 2, 2012

Seconding the recommendation for Earmaster. It's well worth the price.
posted by tdismukes at 10:02 AM on February 2, 2012

If you have access to a piano, learn to sight sing. It takes a lot of practice, but the payoff in ear training is enormous.

(You don't just sing the tones, btw - you use the whole Do-Re-Me thing -- aka Solfege.)
posted by coolguymichael at 10:27 AM on February 2, 2012

One piece of advice I got at some point during my music education that I found very helpful was to associate each interval with a particular song you know well. The tritone, for example, shows up in the first two notes in the word "Maria" in the West Side Story song. The minor 2nd everyone knows from Jaws. Etc. This would probably work for time signatures as well, although in that case you're probably better off just counting.

The other main piece of advice I can give you is to just stick with it--it'll seem difficult at first, but you will make progress. And once you can learn melodic lines from recordings, practicing your ear becomes much easier and more rewarding.
posted by IjonTichy at 11:08 AM on February 2, 2012

GNU Solfege is a free software alternative. It doesn't look as comprehensive as Earmaster.
posted by and for no one at 11:41 AM on February 2, 2012

Numerical Sight-Singing is an alternative to solfege
posted by bunderful at 12:45 PM on February 2, 2012

The advice I found most helpful was to transcribe nursery rhymes.

"Frère Jacques", "Mary had a little lamb", "Twinkle twinkle little star", ....

It's the sort of thing you may find you can do silently in your head as you ride the bus. Play through a note at a time in your head and try to identify the scale degrees (it helps to have some consistent naming scheme for scale degrees--1, 2, 3,... or do, re, mi,...--just pick one). If you're stuck try to identify the scale and sing up and down it to figure out which scale degree you're on.

Do as many nursery rhymes as you can think of. When you run out, move a little further afield, but stick with tunes you absolutely know.
posted by bfields at 12:49 PM on February 2, 2012

Theta Music Trainer
posted by sleepingcbw at 7:07 PM on February 2, 2012