The Importance of Ear Training for Musicians

Ear training is important for hearing and identifying chords, scales, and other musical elements that are essential for compositional and improvisational skills. It’s no wonder that music colleges, universities and conservatories offer ear training courses as part of their programs. Whether you’re a self-taught musician in progress or simply want to enrich your knowledge, in this article you will find the fundamentals of effective ear training.

5 Reasons Why You Should Train Your Ear

First let’s find out why you need to start this journey and whether it is worth your effort.

You Enhance Your Musical Intuition

With a well-trained ear to music you are able to intuitively understand what’s happening in a piece of music. You can easily recognize patterns and anticipate chord changes, which makes your improvisations and even collaborations with other musicians easier and more creative.

Your Pitch Accuracy Improves

Ear training helps both singers and instrumentalists fine-tune their sense of pitch. It means you learn to immediately hear when you’re off-key and quickly fix the problem. This skill is vital for solo and ensemble performances.

Learning and Transcription Get Faster

Perfectly trained ears make the process of identifying melodies, harmonies, and rhythms less time-consuming. You decode sheet music and replicate a phrase with less effort, which allows you to learn new songs faster and accurately.

You Improve Your Sight-Reading Skill

Ear training helps you feel various aspects of music theory, not just see on paper. When you internalize intervals and chord functions, you get better at sight-reading and understanding written music.

You Become More Independent in Music

A well-trained ear provides you with more freedom as you don’t need to fully rely on sheet music or tutorials. You just pick up a song by listening, harmonize with others, and play it with your brass or rock band with minimal preparation.

Things You Should Know For Effective Ear Training

No matter if you are a pianist, saxophonist or guitarist, you need some basic skills first before moving further and reaching the top skills as the final point. This means you can’t develop advanced skills unless you have solid and relevant basic skills. Unfortunately, many musicians neglect it and then immediately face frustration. Your progress is a pyramid and there are things you should do first to reach the next level.
Two important basic skills, which you need to have, are pitch matching and singing a scale. Pitch matching is your ability to hear a note and match it with your voice. Once you’ve developed this ability, you will be able to create a mental representation of the tonality. Another important ability is recognizing a tonic of any given melody, chord progression or musical piece. Unless you develop your ability for pitch matching and recognizing a tonic, you can’t move to intervals.
Approach music from a tonal perspective. Master tonalities — start with simple tasks like recognizing major or minor keys without any modulations and complications before moving to more complicated tasks, non-diatonic chords, key shifts, and other things.
Ear training process consists of several steps. The first is listening to the sound. The next one is paying attention to the feeling it evokes. The third one is identifying the music theory concept behind it, and that last one is to create an instrumental pattern. What’s more, you should be able to work the same in reverse, starting with a music theory concept, realizing the feeling it involves, and being able to reproduce the sound in your head.

How to Practice Ear Training

Here are a few methods that you can use to improve ear training and hear music differently:

Use interval recognition apps or software to train your ear to recognize different intervals and chords. You should learn to recognize both harmonic intervals when notes are played simultaneously and melodic intervals when they are played separately one after another.
Transcribe short music phrases or solos by ear and try to reproduce them with your instrument.
Sing scales as it helps to internalize pitch relationships more effectively.
Practice call and response games with your friends when one is playing short musical phrases and the other is reproducing them after hearing.
Listen to your favourite songs and analyze them by identifying chord progressions, intervals, scales, and tonics.

Traditional Ear Training and Alternatives

Some musicians find themselves in a situation when even after practicing intervals as part of traditional ear training technique for decades they haven’t made any significant progress. Even if being consistent in practicing, chords and intervals remain a big challenge. At this step many doubt their talent, while they just need to select a way of learning ear training that works for them better. The point is that the sense of notes and chords is generated not by intervals as you may think.

The tonality is responsible for the feeling. That’s why emotions vary with the same intervals depending on the key. The musical sensation depends on notes and chords within the key structure.

Gravitational field effect. A traditional ear training focuses too much on isolated intervals, while some alternative methods offer paying attention more to the key gravitational field effect. Great musicians of the past intuitively used this method of recognising the sound of notes and chords within a specific key. This method is especially effective for beginners and intermediate-level players. Every song, which you listen to, features a specific key, which forms a kind of gravitational field, where all notes are gravitating towards a center which is a stable tonic note. The position of these notes create diverse sensations such as happiness, sadness, tension, and more. This leads us to the conclusion that the emotional quality of the notes isn’t limited to intervals but it depends on the key.

Changeable dynamic. Every time we hear any musical phrase, our brain automatically fits it into a gravitational field. For instance, when we hear only C and E without additional musical context, we automatically place them as the first and the third degree of a major key. However, this field is dynamic and changes according to additional notes. By adding additional notes we can get a different dynamic and new stable notes.

This concept leads us to the conclusion that recognizing random intervals is not only about the distance between notes but the ability to reframe the gravitational field moving between various keys in your head. Unless you can recognize simple tonal melodies and chord progressions without any instrument involved but solely by your ear, it’s definitely too early to move to intervals.

Conclusion

Ear training is an important step in your learning process as it helps you hear the music not as a single whole but as its particular elements. Music consists of many blocks and your ability to recognize them provides you with a better understanding of what you hear. The more you sharpen your listening skills, the more confident and creative you'll become as a musician, regardless of what style and instrument you’re playing.

You can also grab some tips from our article on The Basics of Music Theory Every Musician Should Know. Don’t miss your chance to buy high-quality musical instrument accessories and upgrades at affordable prices.

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