Ear training

Most people who say "I have a bad ear" can tell instantly when a friend sings a wrong note in "Happy Birthday". That's not a bad ear. It's an ear that compares beautifully and hasn't been taught the names yet. This guide starts from what you can already do and builds the names on top.

Here are two notes. Right now they're the same note.

Move the second note up by 1, then 2, then 3, playing each a few times. Don't read the readout yet. Just ask yourself two things each time: did it go up or down, and is this jump bigger or smaller than the last one? Which will be easier to learn first, the names of all twelve sizes, or recognising three of them really well?

Compare first, name second

Ear training is practising how to hear musical relationships and turn them into something you can use: notes in a sequencer, chords on a guitar, a melody you can sing back. The skills underneath it are comparisons, and you already do them:

• Direction. Did it go up, down or stay?
• Size. Was that a small step or a leap? Bigger or smaller than the last one?
• Time. Did that note come early, late, or on the beat?

Names come later, and they stick best when they're attached to something you can already hear. Three intervals you recognise reliably will help you more than twelve names you're guessing at.

Build your reference shelf

The fastest way to recognise an interval is to link it to the opening of a tune you know well. When you hear a leap, sing through your shelf until one fits. Pitch and intervals lists the common ones from a semitone to a fifth. Here are the rest of the octave:

Semitones	Name	Opens like
6	Tritone	"The Simpsons" theme, or "Maria" from West Side Story
9	Major sixth	"My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean"
10	Minor seventh	The original Star Trek theme
12	Octave	"Somewhere Over the Rainbow"

Replace any of these with songs you know better. A reference only works if you can sing it instantly without thinking. Many musicians build a personal shelf from the music they grew up with, and theirs is better than any list.

Hearing notes together is a different skill

Play the two notes one after the other and you're tracking a melody. Play them at once and you're hearing a sound: two notes blending into a colour. A fifth together sounds open and hollow; a semitone together rubs; a major third sounds sweet. Many people find one easier than the other, and that's fine. They're related skills, not the same one. Practise both, and notice which one you're doing.

Hide the answer

The readout in the lab tells you the interval name as soon as you move a note, and the keyboard shows you where it landed. That's useful for checking, and fatal for testing. To test yourself:

• Close your eyes before pressing play, and sing the answer before you look.
• Ask a friend to move the note while you look away, choosing from a small set like "a fourth or a fifth", and to repeat the same choice sometimes so you can't guess from the pattern.
• Name it first, then check. Write your guess down. Then look.

Guided practice with your eyes open is still useful. Just don't count it as a test.

Rhythm before pitch

When you want to write down a melody you've heard, start with its rhythm. Tap the starts of the notes against a steady beat. Notice where the long notes and the gaps are.

Many traditions teach rhythm by speaking it. In South Indian Carnatic music, konnakol is the art of reciting rhythms in syllables ("ta ka di mi, ta ka jo nu"), and students learn complex patterns with their voices long before they play them. Tabla players learn bols, spoken names for each stroke. Saying a rhythm out loud is a remarkably fast way to get it into your body. Try it: say "ta ta taa taaa" for short, short, long, longer, then tap it, then hum C, D, G, E on it.

Pitch has its equivalents: in Hindustani music students sing sargam (Sa, Re, Ga...) against a drone, and in many Western classrooms students sing movable-do solfège, sometimes with Kodály hand signs. Both train you to hear every note as a relationship to home.

Transcribe four notes

Transcription means turning something you hear into notes you can see and edit. Start tiny. Hum a four-note phrase you made up, or take the first four notes of a song you love.

1. Tap the rhythm and write it down: short, short, long, longer.
2. Find the first note on a keyboard by humming and matching.
3. For each next note, decide the direction, then the size. Write your guess.
4. Play your version back. Compare. Fix one thing at a time.

You're not trying to get it right first time. You're making a guess, hearing it, and correcting it, which is exactly how composing works too.

Make your mistakes specific

"My ear is bad" has no next step. "The rhythm was right, but I put the last note an octave too high" does. Octave errors are the most common of all, because a note and its octave sound so alike. Pitch-tracking software makes the same mistake for the same reason.

Same idea, different place: an audio-to-MIDI converter is guessing notes from imperfect cues, just like you, and it often lands in the wrong octave. Watching its mistakes is a good way to understand your own. See Audio to MIDI.

Where practice gets harder

Very low notes blur together. Bright sounds make upper harmonics jump out, so you might sing back a harmonic instead of the note. Fast phrases overload your memory. When something feels impossible, remove one difficulty: slow it down, move it to the middle of the keyboard, or use a plain sound.

And perfect pitch (naming a note with no reference) is a different and rarer ability. You don't need it for any of this. Relative pitch, hearing how notes relate, is what lets musicians play by ear, and it's trainable.

Make it yours

Make up a four-note phrase, or pick the first four notes of a favourite song. Write the rhythm first, then the pitches, using the steps above. Check it against the original, fix one thing at a time, and keep both your first guess and your final version.

The difference between them is your practice log. Next week, do it again with a new phrase and see which kind of mistake has gone away.

Quick check

1. You can hear that a leap goes up, but you can't name it. Have you learned nothing? You've done the first half. Direction is real information. Compare its size with your reference shelf, sing through until one fits, and the name follows.
2. Your transcription has the right notes, but the last one arrives too early. What do you change? Only the timing of that note. Leave the pitches alone. Fixing one dimension at a time tells you which part of your hearing needs work.
3. You practise with the keyboard view open and always get the answer. Is that a test? No, it's guided practice, which is still useful. The keyboard and the readout give the answer away. Close your eyes, or have someone else choose, to find out what you can really hear.

Next steps

• Go deeper: Tuning systems. Every interval you've practised here is the piano's version. What happens when a music tunes them differently on purpose?
• Use it: Chord and key recognition. When software names a chord, hearing the bass and the third is how you check its answer.
• Sideways: Listening and comparing. Blind tests for sound, not just notes.