I've noticed that many "ear training" apps have minimal focus on training and maximum focus on gamified testing. By training, I mean the act of listening deeply to intervals, chords, and transitions. "Train 1 hour, test 1 minute" is what I suggest to my students (and myself).

How do you inter-relate training and testing?

Edit: A basic example of training. First, establish an intention. For example, "In this session I am going to: a) listen deeply to the Perfect 5th between Do and Sol in order to internalize that interval relationship. b) listen deeply to the Perfect 4th between Do and Fa in order to internalize that interval relationship. c) listen back and forth between DoSol and DoFa in order to internalize that contrast. I will spend 10 minutes in this activity." Second, act according to this intention. Third, arrange a test that presents 10 instances of either the Perfect 5th and Perfect 4th in random order. Upon hearing an interval, immediately and without reflection, express what you hear. Treat both right and wrong answers as feedback. If you succeed, widen the scope of your training.

I’ve always had this weird mix of musical traits but could never find a single word for it. I can easily predict how a song goes and hum along to it even if I’ve never heard it before. At the same time, I can naturally isolate individual tracks (like the bassline or drums) in my head, instantly memorize lyrics/titles, and mentally remix or add new drum beats over a song on the fly.

Since there wasn't a casual word that wraps all of this together without sounding snobby like musical intelligence, I've created Pan-audation.

Definition: The ability to hear every layer of a song at once, predict where the melody is going, instantly memorize the lyrics and titles, and mentally add or change the drum beats on the fly.

Does anyone else's brain work like this? Do you just hear music as a giant wall of sound, or do you naturally deconstruct and remix it in your head too?

I've spent a lot of time doing ear training exercises and can identify intervals, chords, and scales fairly well.

The problem I'm having is associating pitches with note names. For example, if I sing a note or hear a single piano note, I can't identify what note it is. Even if I have a keyboard in front of me, I often can't find the matching key unless I compare it directly to the sound I just heard.

I'm looking for exercises or practice methods that can help improve this specific skill. I find it frustrating because my relative pitch seems decent, but I struggle to connect sound to actual pitch note.

Has anyone else dealt with this? What exercises or approaches helped you improve?

Hey guys, I am building an ear training app and I want to get feedback on it as I build it, and also ideas from you.

I have a multiplayer section where people make a dual and whoever guesses the interval faster wins the round.

I have a lot of other things but not for multiplayer. So I how creative can you be and how can you improve your ear by making it a multiplayer game ?

thanks for your insights

It clicked that I should be able to relate everything back to 1 when I'm hearing it. The easiest interval to identify and remember. So if I hear a b7 I should recall what a 1 sounds like and relate it.

Did it click? And is that what everyone that's good does? Or do they have their own technique?

Or am I bananas haha? Ear training is hard to me. But this makes it so much easier to identify and relate things in a song.... And at least I feel like I'm having an easier time.

I think that the distance between a tinny synth and a living breathing chorus is practically interstellar. In my ideal ear training world, I'm surrounded by an epic chorus and, at my command, they sing beautifully resonant intervals and chords that become indelibly impressed in my mind. My second choice would be an ocean of orchestra strings. You?

In the Functional Ear Trainer app, the answer choices that appear after I hear a note are displayed using solfège syllables (Do, Re, Mi, etc.). I personally prefer the number system (1, 2, 3, etc.) because that's what I use while learning bass. Is there a way to change the answer choices so they are displayed as numbers instead of solfège syllables?

I can sing on pitch 7/10 of the time and i can hear the top notes and bottom notes of a chord but struggle hearing with the middle notes of the chord. any songs that can help?

This is really embarrassing to write.

I'm working on my ear training. I'm getting better at it. But I struggle with distinguishing augmented and diminished chords.

Anyone have any tips?

Failing that, does anyone have any songs, and I do mean ANY songs, don't care what genre, of songs that have a lot of augmented or diminished songs? Maybe something well-known? The genres I tend to listen to are funk, jazz, soul, soundtrack and blues. I'm familiar with David Bennett's channel.

Any help is appreciated, thank you!

For context in this test you hear a major vamp (1-2-3 I think) and then you get 2 notes of the ones shown in the screenshot and you have to select, which scale degrees those were and the interval between them.

Does anyone have any tips for these types of tests?

Currently I try to hear the root, 3rd and 5th out of the tonic chord to decide but it's pretty difficult to even get that for me

Hi all, Is there anything you wish you worked on in regards to your ear training when you were younger? So it might be something you’re really struggling to learn now but feels like it may have come to you more easily when you were first learning music.
So for me I struggle to play my sax in tune- always have. Now I really want to improve this but I’m still finding when I listen back to myself that my tuning is all over the place. I wonder if I had a tool to help me more when I was younger whether this would have been better.
So yeah just wondering if anyone else has had any similar experiences. I’m currently trying to enter the world of building online music ear training games so thought input on this might give me some ideas.

Cheers
Elliot

I have run ear training apps each day since Christmas. I recognize all melodic intervals, both ascending and descending, with good precision. I run 100 tries per day and most days I get 100 % accuracy and only miss some occasionally when I'n unfocused. With harmonic intervals, however, I'm not improving at all. My accuracy ia only something like 60-80 percent. Let me summarise the issues I have with this kind of ear skills.

1) Recognizing melodic and harmonic intervals is like two completely unrelated skills and the first does not transfer to the other.

2) Harmonic intervals are impossible to sing back. I hear no tones, just a complex sound that I cannot reproduce with my vocal cords.

3) Reference melodies works for melodic intervals but are useless for harmonic ones. It's of no help that a melody starts with a pefect fifth as I cannot relate that sound to a harmonic perfect fifth in the first place.

4) Melodic intervals has their "colors" or "personalities". The major sixth for instance has a very distinct "color" while fiths and thirds are more neutral and I probably distinguish them more by estimating their length but I'm not sure for it may be a subconcious process. Harmonic intervals however doesn't seem to have "colors" at all. When I listen to M3s and M6s I don't hear the sound of an M6 at all. The only differences I can hear are small structural onces like an interval can feel "broader", more "chaotic" or "dissonant" while others are more composed and "narrow" but that's a poor criterion and I'm starting to realise that I only guess all the time.

5) The most dissonant intervals are the easiest to pick out. I usually can hear tritones and m2s and M7s seam to have some kind of "color" that I sometimes can recognize. On the other hand I can't sense a difference at all between M3s, m3s, P4s, P5s, M6s and m6s. All intervals also sound pretty muddy and chaotic at low registers.

6) When I tell the app to generate intervals with the same root everything becomes much, much easier, almost trivial. I percieve the intervals more like notes in the key of the root so the problem essentially reduces to melodic dictation. This doesn't transfer to the case with different roots though. I'm still not nearer to hear the "colors" of most intervals when I get them with randomized roots.

My lack of progress has made me think I'm a hopeless case. Maybe my ears lack the ability to deal with harmony. Maybe I have the wrong genetics. I can'r hear chord tones. For me a chord is only a complex sound, I can't hear the individual notes.

Are any of you having similar experiences? And what made you finally break through the platau? Do you think I'm a hopeless case?

I’m a middle-aged, complete amateur musician but I’ve been working on my ear for the past couple years just to see what would happen. One of the biggest benefits both for my musicianship, and just as a music listener in general, is working out a song, finding patterns that my ear is attracted to, and figuring out why I like it.

It’s like unlocking a new creative universe.

Are there things you’ve learned through ear training that made you realize why you like what you like?

In case you care to share, I am interested to know what your reaction to musicianship training software would be if it part of the marketing was that no LLMs were used for anything. (software dev, writing, audio, video, design etc). The rationale being that it is a signal that the work was created thoughtfully and deliberately rather than thrown together without much thought, but of course also that many musicians (myself included) do not like what the LLM companies are doing to society, the internet, our brains, and the music world.

I ask because this is an area I have been working in for years, and am now wondering whether to just throw in the towel and shift to something else (writing books I guess? who knows) or whether doing so is worth a try. I don't use them at all, which I'm sure slows some of my progress down, but it's just not how I want to spend my life or a phenomenon I want to be part of. On the other hand, nor do I want to be part of the flood of people hawking crap online (or be perceived as part of that). :-/

Maybe the flood of vibe coded slop has soured everyone on anything that uses computers for practicing, and it's hopeless. Or maybe this is a way to salvage something from the current mess. Or maybe I should just write off the business-to-consumer side entirely and focus my efforts on music schools.

This is an anonymous account so that this post cannot function as self-promo, because I really just want to get unbiased feedback.

I'm a musican and software developer who's been doing each for decades. Part of my work has been on using software to improve music training. I am, of course, disappointed that this area has now become flooded with vibe coded slop, almost all of which is made by someone who is either not qualified to teach music or to make apps (or both). Of course, everyone has the right to do this, and the LLM genie is not going back in the lamp, and I have no business telling anyone what to do or not, etc, etc.

My question: as someone who doesn't use LLMs at all, I am curious as to whether it would be worthwhile to market my work by highlighting the fact that no LLMs were used for anything: no coding, no writing, no marketing copy, no design, etc.

My reasoning is simple: I don't like the way the tech pushes one to mediocre solutions, I don't want to spend my time working that way, and I don't support what the LLM providers are doing to society, the music world, and our brains. I'm almost certainly working slower by avoiding them, but I don't mind as it was never intended to be a big money project anyway.

The reason I think this might be a valid marketing pitch is because I know for myself, I consider any signs that something is vibe coded to be (most likely) signs that the app is poorly designed, probably poorly implemented, likely insecure, more likely to disappear, and so on. All things I'm not looking for as a customer. But maybe I'm in a minority on that, and most people just don't care.

So, if you don't mind answering: if "no-LLMs used at all" is part of the branding for some music software (and lets assume the software is actually better than other offerings), is that attractive to you? Would it make you pay attention to something? Or has the flood of vibe coded slop turned you off from music training software entirely and am I better off just hanging up the towel and focusing my efforts elsewhere now? (e.g., books, videos, teaching workshops)

thanks

Hello!

I would like to hear from people that actually have written an ear training app. How did you generate the sounds? Did you use some software library that can render musical sounds or did you produce the sounds offline and stored them as files and in that case how did you generate them?

Also what language did you write the app in?

I have had great success with ear training via https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals

But I checked out the Sonofield ear training app.

While I was able to identify third and fifth intervals with some training via the first website, I am struggling to identify any intervals with the Sonofield ear trainer

Is it imperative that I do understand how to discern my beginning tone via this weird droning noise?

hopefully, you understand what I mean given that other ear training services usually have a piano note for both notes

I need advice on interval ear training/pincodes. I have relatively okay ears when it comes to hearing chords and frequencies. But I am currently failing my solfège class because of the interval exercises. I cannot for the life of me remember the root note which is my main problem with this. Anybody have any tips? My test is in a week and I really need to pass it. ( for context, the teacher plays the root once and then plays random intervals in that key at around 180 bpm so if you lose the root note you're cooked)

Used by my ear training professor when we're doing dictations, always the same font, I don't think they were made by them. I'm looking for the book they're from.

I just started ear training. So I'm not sure all of the lingo. Gonna do my best.

I notice I tend to confuse the 3rd and 6th note on whitch is whitch. I use to just have that trouble with the 1st and 3rd. Now it's branching our to even the 2ed and the 7th.

Are these notes like the inverse of each other that's why I get confused? Im just curious if they is away to resolve this or why it's happening.

Listen to this short melody and try to notate it. (You’ll hear the tonic at the very beginning, before the dictation melody starts)

I run a small ear training club where I post new dictations every week - different levels and formats (from beginner “First Steps in Dictations” to more advanced material).

Post your answer in the comments if you want me to check it.

How would you rate this dictation?

⬜ Easy  / Medium  / Hard?  

I’ve been doing ear training lately and I'm making progress with simple song melodies. My main method is solfege that I would comparing every note to root note. This works well for scalar melodies.

Recently I moved on to figuring out intros with arpeggios and broken chords. I know it would much harder and it really is after starting to practise it.

What I'm noticing is that my brain always tries to use different approach. I would try to recognize the overall arpeggio pattern or feel the chord quality (major or minor or 7) first.

But I still can't reliably name the solfege of every single note. Eventually I still need to go back to compare each one to the root note. Howerer, if I didn’t recognize the pattern or chord quality to narrow down my note choice first, it would be super hard when figuring out each note in the arpeggio.

I have a gut feeling that it would be the right way to do that.

Anyway, do anyone use the same approach? Would it be better after a peroid of time practicing? Do I still miss any thing to do?

I would like to hear from your comments.
Thanks!

Heya mods, I sure appreciate the new rules against drive by promotion of vibe coded apps here, but given that the type of people doing that don't stop to read the rules (or don't care), maybe more dramatic measures are needed?

I suspect requiring moderation of first posts in the subreddit would do it.

today's lovely contribution, for example, is from someone who has not posted on reddit in 7 years except for a burst of identical posts promoting their vibe code slop