Hi guys, I have over the past month or so been practising recognising intervals using the song association method (e.g. Happy Birthday for M2) and I'm well on my well to learning all 12 intervals). However, my problem is that I cannot identify 2 intervals in succession! For example if 3 notes are played one after another I can recognise the first one but have great difficult identifying the 2nd one unless the 3 note melody is broken down. I try singing the notes but it doesn't seem to help much (may be because I'm awful at singing). Can anyone give me advice on this?

Thanks

Practise. You're doing the right thing you just have to get better at it!

Cheeze...

Andy, recognizing intervals is important, but it ultimately should only be used to inform you which notes they are in a scale.

For example, if I play C D E G B C, it would be pointless to go, ok, M1, M1, m1, M2... Unless you are transcribing an atonal piece, there is no point in harping on intervals. The way I trained my ear, I started off just picking out sing intervals like you, but quickly got lost hearing REAL playing. HOW THE HECK DO YOU DO THAT?

Well, start practicing transcription in your head. Every time you hear something, start trying to memorize the phrase (or try to sing it!) Then you mentally name them, using solfege. And not just the major scale either. Learn the minor scale solfege, and all the chromatic notes:

Major: Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do

Minor: Do Re Mo Fa Sol La Ti Do

Chromatic: Do Di Re Mo Mi Fa Fi Sol Si La Tal Ti Do

With enough practice, you can hear a phrase (even ones that you make up in your head!) and immediately translate that to scale degrees, which means you can then PLAY ON THE PIANO. That's your ultimate goal anyway; is to be able to play what you hear.

What helps the process is trying to learn the intervals BETWEEN each possible note. Say, Fa to Ti is always a tritone, Me to Sol is a m3. Hearing this contour within a scale helps you identify which degree the notes are in, and that also helps with harmonic identification.

Oh yeah, and don't wait until you are master at ear training to start playing on the piano. Just start playing the white keys, but when you play, be conscious what scale degree you are playing in. Sing solfege in your head as you play!

Good luck!

Hi Othello, thanks for your detailed reply, but I'm slightly confused. I thought only people with perfect pitch would be able to mentally name notes using solfege (because they automatically know what the notes are)?

What do you mean by scale degrees?

Cheers

I guess I can only speak for myself, but some of what I'm reading here seems very artificial and divorced from actual music. That's got to make it a lot harder to learn, sort of like memorizing random vocabulary in a foreign language.

I never studied intervals. I learned songs, mostly by playing along with records, occasionally with the aid of chord charts. By the time I got to college I had been playing in a band for a few years. I signed up for an ear-training course, thinking that it might help me recognize some "jazz" chords. Well, of course I was wrong about the gist of the course. I wasn't a music major and didn't know much about the program.

Even though the other students were probably more accomplished musicians, many of them music majors, they were having trouble doing what I found trivially easy; naming dyad intervals. After the first class I asked the teacher if it was possible to place out of Ear Training I. He gave me the final exam the next day, which was 20 interval identifications. I managed to actually get one wrong (I called a unison an octave).

Ear Training II was a poor fit also. The chord identification was still elementary, and, having not read sheet music in years, I was way behind in the Rhythmic Dictation and Solfege. I dropped out.

The point is that through learning actual music by ear and experimenting with improvisation I had learned what other people found so difficult to learn by studying intervals directly.

It seems to me that comparing a heard interval with "Happy Birthday" or "Here Comes the Bride" is too slow and laborious, even as a first step. You need repetition and experience to work the sound of various note combinations into your unconscious, not an analytical method. Learn to play Happy Birthday in C, by ear, until you know it well enough to try it in another key. Then learn it in G, then F etc. Once you have worked it out a bunch of keys, see if you don't mysteriously hear some of those intervals without any analysis when you try to work out a new song. The learn that one in several keys.

I'm not a teacher, and wasn't a terribly diligent student, so you can take my advice with a grain of salt. But I firmly believe that the further your exercises are removed from actual music, the less likely you are to learn from them. Study "analyzing" intervals and you may be analyzing them forever. Play music from your own head and the intervals will hop along for the ride.

Greg, I'm heartened by your reply. I'm one of those ex-students who studied very mechanically, anxious to get it "right" and who rarely improvised at all. In fact, I say "rarely" only because I can't actually remember doing it, and so might have once or twice and forgot -- more likely though, I never did.

I'm going to buy a piano after years of inactivity because it's finally occurred to me that I should have been playing nice music and liking the sound I made instead of anxiously sweating over doing it "right" versus "wrong."

I also could never really pick out an interval except by feel. It was completely physical for me -- the shape my hand made. A fifth means a certain shape on my hand, not a sound in my ear. (I'm not entirely certain that will ever go away completely; I'm too oriented toward my hands.) But since what I want to do now is work out things I've heard using an orchestral score only as a vague guidelines, maybe I'll get better at it.

Years ago, I took a short-term class called Earobics at the New England Conservatory. One epiphany for me was the notion of ear training. One day, a student asked the instructor (Ran Blake) "so when are we going to learn intervals?" Ran answered, "oh, you mean the specific skill of identifying the interval between two notes?" It was quite a shock to me and my limited background, but Ran had an interesting point. There is a whole lot more to training one's ear than identifying intervals. His course, Earobics, starts at the very beginning.

I don't want to elaborate on the method here, but Ran has a very good paper which describes his method:

http://www.ranblake.com/pdf_files/PrimacyoftheEar.pdf

About the best thing I can add is that it gets easier over time, and like any good musical skill, it disappears if you don't practice. :-)

Guy

Another quick story: my jazz mentor went to Berklee for a few years. He told me that in one of his ear training classes, the instructor would allow anyone to "test out" of the course if they could play Happy Birthday in all keys.

I'm not sure that would be a good idea ... because I could pass it with flying colors and still can't tell intervals. Keys are shapes in space for me, and transforming from one to the other is just like peeling up a piece of graph paper from one surface and laying it down on another. The shapes just change in my head, and I can transpose trivially.

But it's a skill in my hands, and not a skill in my ears.

My jazz teacher has been doing some ear training with me lately. We pick a tune. I listen to the melody in a recording and pick it out on the piano (this takes me quite a while as my ear is not good). I then play it in all keys (very slowly, with lots of mistakes). I then, working with her, try to pick out the chords that go with it, and then try to play the tune, with harmony, in all keys. This is more fun, and seems much more related to tools that actually help your playing, then learning to identify intervals separated from actual music. You need to hear not only melody, but how it works within the harmony.

Wow, everyone has had some great input here. I hope I can contribute further to the discourse:

Andy, when you say perfect pitch being required for using solfege, I have to disagree. I was raised in China, where they taught me in "fixed solfege." Meaning, "Do" is always the middle C. I guess I am "tuned" to middle C. But I can tell you for sure that I do not possess perfect pitch. In fact, let me reassure you that relative pitch is much more useful than perfect pitch in most music practices (IMO).

What is more relevant is relative pitch and "movable solfege." Basically in a movable solfege, any key can be used as the tonic of the scale, instead of always the middle C. So, you can arbitrarily use Db as the "Do" and start the scale there . And by scale degree, I mean that Do is 1st, Re is 2nd, and so on. The reason why insisting on hearing in solfege and scale degree is that, once you "latch on" to the right key, you can tell what the musician is playing WITHIN THE SCALE. Let me explain further:

Say, you just hear a guy play G A B. Without any harmonic support, it could be anything, from being the 1st, 2nd and 3rd degree of G major, to the 5th, 6th and 7th degree of C major. Do you then name it "Do, Re, Mi," or "Sol, La, Ti?" They both sound the same, but by naming them with different solfege or scale degrees, you are identifying with different keys already. Hence, it is important to "listen" in solfege. Because if you only see it in intervals, M1, M1, M1, it tells nothing about the harmonic implication of the notes. On the other hand, if you hear G A B C D, naming it Do Re Mi Fa Sol will suggest a major chord in G, and naming it Sol La Ti Do Re will suggest a dominant 7 chord in C.

Then, how do you actually "listen" in solfege? When I was in college, I had some ear training, and it was done entirely in solfege. In fact, it was more like learning to sight read notes, and being about to intone accurately. So, you see C E G and you can sing a major triad correctly. Well, as we learned to correctly sing all scale degrees and hence all intervals, the reverse starts to happen. When we hear a short passage, we started to slowly APPROXIMATE the notes we hear with solfege in hour head.

Going back to the APPROXIMATION process. By being VERY familiar with your solfege, you can immediately associate a solfege name with a sound. You KNOW how a Re Fa La sounds like, and how a Re Fa Ti sounds differently. So when you hear something like, say, D F A, you begin to approximate in your head by trying to repeat what you hear in solfege. You may first guess Re Fa Ti, but the last note sounds off, because of the tritone. Then you adjust the last note. Is it Re Fa Sol? Too low. Re Fa La? Aha! That's it. And that's how to listen in solfege. With more and more practice, and you becoming more and more familiar with both major and minor scale solfeges, as well as the chromatic notes, you can hear a passage and immediately begin to APPROXIMATE in your head. And it will become more accurate over time.

Being able to accurately approximate what you hear with solfege means that you can hit any interval within a scale easily and accurately. What does an upward Re Ti sound like? What does a downward Mi Sol sound like? And how is that different from a downward Mi La? Sing in solfege VERY often in your head. I must say that I sing solfege in my head ALL THE TIME.

Once you are very familiar with your solfege, you really are no longer thinking in interval, but more of sounds.

Sorry about the gargantuan post. I hope I am not too confusing.

edit: revised to be less confusing!

JJO - I think you hit the nail on the head, so to speak.

Identifying intervals is just one small part of what we normally think of as ear training. As Ran Blake, at NEC, pointed out to us -- that's a specific skill, and I took that to mean a specific skill to be studied and practiced. His notion of "ear training" was much more whole than that. "Earobics" (his term) was an exercise to "wake up" that sense, and it is surprisingly effective.

Not that I have a bunch of experience at it, but I know when I was checking out music schools, in the late 70s, a big part of ear training courses was called "melodic dictation". Students would listen to an endless supply of tapes playing in the music library, and would write down what they hear.

In a related matter, a guy once told me that the trick to learning Morse code was to first identify letters, and then start listening for combinations of letters. I would think the same thing would be true for melodic dictation. At first, one would worry about catching note by note interval changes, but after practice (!) I would think one would start to hear combinations of notes, or melodic fragments.

And you wouldn't just be concerned about notes -- you'd be picking out rhythms, and eventually harmony, and maybe articulation. You'd probably start to hear form, too. "Oh, that's a 12-bar blues" and then you start to be able to make intelligent guesses on harmony, and rhythm, at least related to the bar line.

Guy

I'm really starting to think that our entire idea of music pedagogy is completely flawed. I imagine many people would agree (and disagree) with me. It feels as if we're trying to teach people to become brilliant orators by reading each letter individually, and then correcting the lack in the method by forcing them to practice each consonant in conjunction with each other consonant willy nilly -- all instead of simply learning the meaning of the words and reading them.

Sure, the old school method will turn out some great musicians, but I think those same people would have been great musicians in any method. The people who lose out are the ones who are on the border. To be a musician, you have to know notation and be literate in it, but if we're turning out supposed gifted musicians who have to then be sat down and taught to hear a third versus a fifth without seeing the notation, WTF is going on? We're turning out trained machine operators, not musicians!

*sigh*

It's just disheartening, especially when all of the most gifted musicians seem to have both skills down pat, musical literacy and the ability to jam, improvise, and play things by ear. Sure, it's good to be able to play something someone else wrote, but what about what YOU want to write? How about how to get YOUR ideas down? We don't measure gifted writers by how well they can prop "War and Peace" up next to a typewriter and copy it without mistakes.

Aigh, sorry. Bit of a soapbox, there. I'm just feeling my own lack in training and feeling my own impatience because I can't possibly save money fast enough to get the Clavinova I want soon enough to make me happy. I want to start poking on my own with no "right" or "wrong" hovering over me to kill the joy, and no one telling me that working something out and adapting it on my own is merely "playing by ear." The guy who transcribed Haendel's largo for piano was "playing by ear," too -- only he wrote it down. Ear and eye and hand. You use all three, or you're not a musician.

I would like to add one tiny bit more to Othello's advice, with which I completely agree.

To me, the one step that makes everything else in tonic solfa (moveable doh) possible is to first identify the TONIC (ie, "doh"), for once that's established, the identification of all other notes of the scale/solfa names -- regardless of the type of scale -- immediately fall into place.

So, for me, the big question then becomes: how does one identify the tonic? I think this is a hard one to answer: having developed over centuries, each genre and style of music utilizes many compositional procedures to establish tonality, so where to begin? Rather than head straight for the compositional procedures, therefore, I usually begin with my students' musical sensibilities and intuition, by playing them very simple, straightforward melodies (folk tunes, nursery rhymes, etc) -- without accompaniment -- and asking them to sing the one note that seems to be the centre of everything, or the note 'to which all other notes seem to gravitate' (especially toward the end of the tune). The vast majority of students 'get it' right away, and almost all others eventually understand without too much difficulty. From there, we go on to more involved melodies, and melodies with accompaniment -- with help and exercise on listening to what the bass is doing - especially at cadences. If the student has the aptitude for it, I later point out the various compositional procedures, of the genre and style in question, that are used to create the tonality.

Generally, once the student has a tune's tonic, he/she can replicate the tune (or, at least, small fragments of it), and use his tonic solfa to quickly identify any of its notes, relative to that tonic -- using any of Othello's great suggestions, or by simply singing the note in question, then the tonic, and then ascending/descending, by step, from the tonic to the note in question.

As well, I always teach sight-singing (using tonic solfa) prior to ear-training, because - quite simply - sight-singing develops the tools one then applies to ear-training. For me, ear-training is the flip-side of sight-singing.


All the best,
Michael Leibson
www.thinkingmusic.ca

There certainly is something wrong with
systems of education. For example,
one-third of all high schoolers in
the US don't graduate. This is a national
disgrace and should be setting off
alarm bells everywhere, but no one
seems to care, which is further evidence
of the problem.

In classical piano the dropout rate is
high, and after yrs. of lessons students
typcially can't play anything on their
own. Just look as the hundreds of
adult restarters on these forums
who took lessons as a child and quit
for yrs. and then had to start from scratch
because they couldn't do anything
at the piano.

There are dozens of experienced
players on the Pianist Forum who
are still doing "foundational" work to
prepare them for concert pianist-level
pieces. Yrs. of lessons has done
nothing to prepare them for advanced-level
works, which they should have been
able to play as teenagers.

Most teachers are classical and so
there are fewer examples from
non-classical instruction, but
I suspect the situation is the
same there. After yrs. of lessons
students typically won't be able
to do anything on their own.

This is a response to J. Cortese in particular:

Cortese, I have to agree with you about the academic fixation on "replicating and performing" verbatim pieces of the classics. It seems that we might be too mired into what are already created. But I don't see your frustration in wanting to be accurate in transcribing and ear training. I do understand what you see as the danger in focusing on the "consonants" instead of the "speech". But my post was mainly addressing OP's question of the mechanics of ear training. And I in no mean suggested that he should stop and count every interval. By suggesting the use of solfege in "hearing the notes" I mainly meant for him to listen more for the overall harmonic structure of the notes. Because solfege by design is an organization of notes, and by naming solfege you are simultaneously organizing what you hear into music coherence.

And even if you "hear" music in solfege doesn't mean that you will never stray away from written music. I play jazz and I do improvise. But I improvise with solfege in my head because it helps me organize my ideas harmonically. Using solfege to transcribe does not mean that I will then wither away in my cloister and not play a note not written by someone else before.

On a side note, if you can write the whole "War and Peace" completely without fault and mistake, you should at least deserve a scrivener merit! I am just saying

I would recommend to courses that work on solfeg movable Do. Practicing intervals in isolation from the context of a tonal centre is only part of the equation. Hearing resolutions and feeling the pull of active tones to resting tones has really improved my ears.

New from Hal Leonard is Ear without Fear vol 1,2,3. Very well laid out for the early beginners.
Advancing more quickly is Mark Harrison's Contemporary Ear training. This is a very thorough course. Vol 1 covers melodic dictation and Vol 2 works on harmonic movement. Worth the bucks you need to spend on the CD's that go with the book.

My frustration with concentrating on what's already created is that if you do that, you never learn the creative process itself. It's important to be able to connect with the work that's gone before; if you have no past, you can't move with any sense of purpose toward a future. But all of that work was at one time in the present. It was all created by someone sitting down, screwing around in their own head, poking at a key here and there, and playing something that only existed in their head "by ear," in a way. It's not just the mummification of the past that's a problem, although that is one. It's that we can't create anything new if we don't teach these methods that are traditionally looked down on of messing around, poking without a clear idea of where you are, and improvising.

Ultimately, what's needed is both. I don't think what you're saying is wrong or anything at all -- it's extremely valuable, but I do think that the whole topic itself indicates that there's a serious problem with musical pedagogy when it comes to classical music.

It's important to be able to improvise, and it's also important to be able to formalize what you've done. It's just that if, as Greg said, kids are getting to a very advanced state without EVER being able to even HEAR and tell apart intervals on their own, it's a sign that something's gone awry somewhere earlier on.



Totally -- there's nothing wrong and everything right with knowing a way to formalize and grammaticize improvisation, especially your own. But no gifted musician should have years and years of training behind them, get accepted into a music program, and never have confronted this before. Such people have all had musical training for years, some since they were in single digits. Why has this idea of just sitting down and poking out a favorite ditty never been introduced to them before, to the point where they can be at an extremely advanced state technically and completely incapable of hearing what's actually going on? Are there really so few classical piano teachers who will, instead of working through yet ANOTHER damned Clementi sonatina, tell a young student, "This week we're going to try something different. I've chosen the following song by (insert popular singer or performer here). I'd like you to pick out and write down the melody for me here, and come back next week with a left hand for it."

You know, Cortese, what you said is very true. It reminds me that before the self entombment of the western classical tradition, improvisation was well and alive. One only needs to know that Mozart was famous at piano competitions of his time, not for who can "perform" a piece better, but for improvisation. Sounds familiar?

The whole notion of how many music students performing technically arcane pieces without as much as intuitively knowing what is musically going on can be likened as such: imagine that a hundred years from now, students all over are performing Art Tatum's Tiger Rag as written, without being about to improvise at all.

Truly, something is wrong.

edit: Found a really cool link talking about improvisation in classical music: link

That's a great link, thanks! Sadly, the attitude of that first idiot teacher mentioned is all too common, and what if Montero had been turned off too thoroughly, or had other family obligations crop up in her first unhappy marriage that kept her from returning to the piano?

What started out as a relatively simple request for advice by a novice ends up as well, I don't know LOL! I'm quite confused as to what to do now.. (sorry!)

Welcome to PW. :-) No matter where you think a conversation is headed, it will go in seventeen different directions ... simultaneously.

Sorry Andy... Sometimes we just like to hear ourselves talk...

Ok, in short, my suggestion is:

1. First learn your solfege. Sing "Do Re Mi.." and get to know both major and minor scales. Make up little songs in your head, or write them down in solfege. Then try to sing them ACCURATELY.

2. Learn to sing all the leaps accurately. Can you do "Do Mi," "Do Sol," "Do La," "Re Fa," "Re La," "Re Ti," etc. Do it for all intervals and all directions. If you have trouble hitting them accurately, do it stepwise. If you can't hit "Re Ti" accurately, sing "Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti", until you have both notes in your head accurately, then try again without steps.

3. This might take you a few weeks, but never stop practicing.

4. Start to listen to a short phrase of music. Maybe a 3 note phrase. Then try to see if you can transcribe it in solfege. Do it in your head or write it down, then sing it back to confirm. REPEAT. Until you can listen to a long phrase and can get most of the notes right.

5. DO THIS ALL THE TIME, FOR AS LONG AS YOU LIVE.

6. Somewhere along the line, you start playing what you hear in your head on piano. And you will start to develop MUSCLE MEMORY associated with solfege. You will begin to know by heart how the SHAPE of three half steps on a piano will sound like a minor third, etc. But this process will become so instantaneous that essentially you will notice that it's your fingers doing the thinking... That's the stage you want to be at ultimately.

Good Luck!

A lot of sense being talked here! I started at the age of 5 , 3 hours a day until 18 years old, concert pianist or mathematician, went for the latter after a major memory lapse at a major competition and found that my memory wasn't good enough (and my hands were too small - an octave maximum!).

Anyway, the rambling will now get to the point. I had a great teacher, but could not play a note without having music in front of me. People would say, play something for us but I couldn't play anything! Now after early retirement and playing once or twice a year for the past 40 years or so I decided to play jazz improvisation by ear (used to play in a dance band - about a dozen of us, piano, bass, drums, loads or saxes and trumpets and a singer). I found this very difficult and could not sing along with the notes I played or play the notes that I wanted to, even in a one line melody.

The solution was at hand though. As a kid of 3 or 4 I used to have a little xylophone and played along to music on the radio. I could do that, so I thought why not do the ssame for the piano.

Ever the one for a challenge. So I went along to www.spotify.com and typed in Oscar Peterson - 1840 titles came up and their player gives excellent quality and it's free, but they pay royalties to the artists! So, what dod I do?
[1] first of all I picked a track and played it through my headphones so that I could hardly hear my keyboard at all - I found out the key and then just concentrated on playing something, vaguely in the right key, but only concentrating on the rythm of the improvised melody line. I played roughly the rythm he did, but lord knows what notes I was playing - I couldn't hear them so I didn't care! Where he played a note, so did I in the same rythm. After an hour (never repeating a track) I found patterns of rythm kept coming up time and time again and I was putting in triplets and double time amd all sorts because I wasn't bothered about the notes I was playing, just tried to keep them vaguely in the right key.

[2] then I decided that emphasis is what gets you immersed into the music so I started, still just the right hand, doing runs and putting small chords in and then returning to a run and mixing them up just like good old Oscar. Again, I was trying to match him note for note rythm-wise but not hearing or bothering about which notes, just vaguely the right key! I then put in emphasis as he did - still mostly wrong notes. I felt really great.

[3] then I decided that it was about time that I heard what I was playing (I was about an hour or so into this first session. I moved the headphones slightly from one ear so that I could just hear what I was playing. Concentrating on what I had already been concentrating on I tried to keep in key - if he changed key in mid piece then I was stuffed but that wasn't what I was trying to master, yet. Everything was coming from within, but suggested by Oscar's playing - and gradually it made more and more sense and sounded fair, then a bit better than fair, then, hey, I like this.

Well, guys, that was day one and I'm raring to put Oscar on again for a second session. I'm loving this - and no music score!!!

Hope this helps someone else to throw away the shackles without having to resort to anything technical - in fact just pure feel - first rythm, then emphasis, then making it a bit more like music with some right notes! If you can already play the piano you have the 'note skills', you just need freedom.

Cheers

Doclands

hey, I thought I'd write on my own experiences with ear training. I learned piano the classical way, and my teacher did little to no ear training for me. When I got to university I started to learn jazz on my own. Recently I've been working hard to play only by ear, and doing exercises to help.

Here are my observations so far:

Perfect pitch is not necessary, and possibly overrated. I have no sense of perfect pitch at all, play me a single note and I am completely lost.

Relative pitch is important. This by far is what musicians need to work on. You will hear songs and melodies in major/minor keys, when they are switching and modulating to another key.

SING everything, this will internalize what you hear.

I found some really great advice on a jazz forum that relates to ear training.

Here's the link: http://forums.allaboutjazz.com/showthread.php?t=39034&page=2

Scroll down and read the 2 posts by Ed Bryne, entitled "Solfeggio" and CHAPTER 3

EAR TRAINING/TRANSCRIPTION.


Also, this article is very helpful, saying to think in key centre, training your ear to recognize how to go back to the Tonic, or "Do"

http://www.miles.be/art_telesco.html

There's a free piece of software called "Functional Ear Trainer" its great. Just Google and download.

Hey Phil, I'm using this ear trainer: http://www.trainear.com/, its great! It has a song mode so you can virtually practise playing melodies by ear. I guess I'll carry on learning all the 12 intervals and then learn solvege, thanks guys.

I cannot save for a Clavinova fast enough. God knows what's going to happen to Def Leppard's "Photograph" when it gets here. *shakes head at self*

But after reading that "Primacy of the Ear" paper, I've decided that the commentator in that British TV special on the male falsetto that I heard was right, rock is as much ethnic music as any other world music, even if it is the music of the white-ethnic working class. It doesn't only have to be jazz ...

What an earth are you talking about LOL!

Hi Andy, What is really being referred to here is "relative pitch" - as opposed to "perfect pitch." You can, in fact, be aware of which scale degree you are on - perfect pitch is not necessary. I lvoe talking about this subject. I am curious about your original question regarding being able to recognize the first interval and not the second. Can you elaborate?