Ear Training Practice

These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.

So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.

Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.

It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.

https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net

Tip: you don't have to recognize sounds in order to compose music.

I have aphantasia and can't memorize sounds or recall them. For decades I thought I'm deaf (Ockham say hi). But I picked up piano, play for 3 years, can't discern C from G if my life depended on it but my friends tell me I'm pretty decent composer.

Writing this so people don't get disappointed about themselves just because they can't pick ear skills.

Excellently built, no nonsense site. Refreshing to see a site that just loads instantly without spinners. The exercises are also well thought out.

This is a great domain for vibe-coding your own apps. I put together a combined music notation / ear trainer app as a single HTML app: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/titzer/Rif...

I've been working on a voice trainer that uses DSP to analyze a signal and do real-time pitch tracking: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/titzer/Rif...

The latter I've been using to suck just a tiny bit less at singing.

Very cool! Many people don't know this, but all kids can learn perfect pitch before age ~5-6. So if you have kids, use the perfect pitch trainer function :)

For a more complete training program, shameless plug for an app I built / ported for that purpose: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bsharp.app

I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.

If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.

I wrote a guide on how to do this: https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript...

Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.

I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.

The Show HN 11 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10117072 34 comments

I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)

I appreciate the extremely low fuss interface, but I'm always a little disappointed by chord progression ear training that just plays triads one after another with no thought for voice leading. Generating a nice voice leading for an arbitrary chord progression is a little tricky to do automatically but far from impossible, and might be a fun exercise either for you or your favorite LLM.

There's this wonderful android app called perfect ear:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...

It has interactive exercises and singing practice

Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.

It looks a little basic but it's actually pretty cool.

This site insisted on having write access to my connected MIDI devices, which is a bit concerning as it's not required for what the site actually does.

This is great! For scale degree after chord progression exercise, I'd love a variation where the chord progression is in a minor key.

The Android app link doesn't seem to work

Very useful, thank you for building it and sharing it.

This looks really good!

I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?

We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.

I’ve always been curious if blindly plucking guitar strings could map the pitches in your mind. So you would eventually play any melody by ear just as easily as whistling it.

I'm quite disappointed this wasn't about ear waggling.