Ear Training Practice
tonedear.com
tonedear.com
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.
As someone who hasn't had a piano lesson in about 40 years, I find myself wanting to play with the keys to match the melody. So I hear the initial melody, and then I'm practically hitting keys at random (guessing where I should be on the keyboard) until I find the first note, and then I have to listen over and over again while trying to find the second note. I kind of want to hunt and peck until I'm ready and then get tested to see if I nailed it.
Maybe the answer really is just as simple as a little visual toggle that puts you in a "sandbox" mode where all the sounds still go through, but the game doesn’t respond to them until you untoggle it.
This creates a problem in that it's easy to muddle your way through without learning anything. To prevent this:
Once it gets to the end of the round in this mode, if the user had even 1 wrong note selected in this round, the game will then expect them to play it perfectly once again (like it does now).
This way you get both the hunt and peck exploration and the final "now that you've had your time to get your ears and fingers in order, play it correctly."
Tried safari and Firefox focus
My wish list for this:
1. Even the practice mode has a high bar as it expects me to get the whole thing right in the first shot. It should let me try some before jumping to tell me I got it wrong and automatically playing it again.
2. Show me the first key of the sequence and have me figure only the rest. Why: When I hear the note sequence, I cannot pick the absolute scale, only the intervals. So I practically always get the first key wrong, which then goes to #1 above.
May be there are some settings related to the above. I could not find if there.
I'm going to be implementing number 1 - a "playground" that lets you sort of plink around until you're happy. I've gotten a number of requests for this.
The second request has me a bit confused, so I may be misunderstanding.
Under “Note hints” in the options, there are three different modes for practice. In all of them in Practice Mode, the very first note of the sequence is always shown in standard sheet notation. Then depending on the "Note Hints", you can basically change the exercise from an ear training exercise to a sheet reading exercise.
If you change Mode from Practice to Simon, even though it doesn't show the first note - it's always the root of the signature - e.g. if it says G Major, then the first note of the sequence is always G. I should probably make that more clear.
Does that description line up with what you’re seeing?
Oh, the sheet notation! I can't read that :-), so had completely ignored it.
I would like to see the same notes on the piano roll!, say as labels on the keys "*1", "2", "3", "4" (the same options could control the visibility).
In the meantime you can open the piano roll and set the "Show note labels on key" in the settings so that when it shows the key signature at the top "G Major", you can match it with the corresponding note label.
1. Doesn't work on Firefox because of compatibility. (Web MIDI could not be enabled: DOMException: WebMIDI requires a site permission add-on to activate index-C82-1cwq.js:10:56869 doInitialize https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net/assets/index-C82-1cwq.js... ) . Might be worth detecting browser and telling users straight up before they waste any time.
2. How did you come up with the melodies? Hand crafted? AI? Asking because I plan on building this for Gitori(www.gitori.com) at one point and my original idea was taking snippets from MIDI files of famous classical pieces/jazz solos
Also, TIL about the Simon game. Might buy this for my 6 year old :)
I'm completely new to ear training. Could you give some advice on what a newbie should think while doing this? For example, should I try to sing the thing in solfeges in my head, or it's considered bad practice? And if I do, should I sing the first note as Do?
If you’d like to make things a bit easier, you can go into the options and restrict the key signature. That way you can keep it simple and just practice in a more common keys like one major scale like C major and its relative minor, A minor.
Where I really recommend "singing" out each note is when I'm teaching my students to improvise on the piano since it creates a sort of intentionality about what you’re about to hear and sing.
For example, if they had a chord progression or melodic idea in mind but accidentally played a wrong note, they’ll notice right away because what they’re singing won’t match what they’re playing.
Whereas if you don’t sing or whistle the notes as you play your instrument, you might not notice that you’re drifting off from what you actually intended to play because within the confines of the key signature it might still sound melodically acceptable (if that makes sense).
Side note but I'd love to see a nicely printed stack of physical cards with popular melodic hooks/jingles, the demonstrated intervals, notation, etc.
As someone who had ongoing formal musical training from childhood through university, I can attest that multiple teachers used a similar technique, focusing on finding a group of commonly-heard melodies such that the first intervals encountered in them cover as much of the set as possible.
Haven't tried the game yet, but looking forward to checking it out later to see if I can offer it to some of my friends who want to learn music better!
I like to learn in the context of a song. Here's what a melody sounds like when you start it over the 1 of a chord. Here's a melody when you start it on the 3 over a chord. But, again, in the context of a known song.
I just don't think "non-musical" exercises have ever moved me forward as a musician, if that makes sense.
Another trick I like to do is take a popular song, rip out the melody, and keep the chord progression. Then I’ll usually scaffold a nice accompaniment using Band-in-a-Box so the student has something looping in the background while they try to piece out the original melody themselves on their respective instrument.
That can sometimes give them more guidance, since it locks them into a specific key signature and helps them feel the flow and explore the space.
Is there a way to make it work a bit better for phones? On mobile Safari, just tapping to enable sound doesn’t seem to work until I reload and tap again.
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.
I have (visual) aphantasia. But am better able to remember / hear notes and timbres in my head than images. Never really tried composing and for the number of years I took piano lessons I’m pretty crap at it (lessons don’t matter if you don’t practice in between).
But sounds stick with me more than visuals. So interesting that it’s all on a spectrum with these various facets.
That's also the reason why I can compose at all. The analogy would be like: I don't know how pink color is named, but I can say it's pretty.
And on the output: I don't know what colors I used, but the image is pretty.
Only my music teacher tried to play and I knew it didn't work well. It's a peculiar thing.
What I ended up learning is that if you want to learn to play by ear, learn to sing, don't bother with exercises like this, at least not until you've gotten some singing practice in.
When singing, you have to hear the intervals in your head before you sing them, so developing that ability to generate the intervals in your head will help you to recognize them later on.
With some practice you can even get a decent idea what note a given sound is by humming it - it's far from precise, but at least you can tell e.g. E from G.
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.
My wish list for UX / features:
For the Note Quiz, it was not immediately obvious to me what I need to do - i.e., pick from one of the four what were answer choices. Consider adding some instructions for newbies like me.
I got 90% right for the Note quiz. On Key Quiz, I won't even get 20%. :-) Either way, it would help to have a "Teach" mode also, not just Quiz/evaluate mode. This may show me two keys/chords/sequences side-by-side along with the answers (and prioritizing the cases that I tend to get wrong). I could then hear those repeatedly at will to learn to distinguish.
For the pitch tracking, I wish for a view that is not centered on a waveform but on the instrument. My goal is to improve my voice to sing the right notes/sequence, not the entire time history of it. So a long/moving waveform is less helpful.
A simple view for notes training could be a horizontal piano roll (seeing it like a piano in the front of me) showing a red mark on the piano roll itself for the note / frequency I am singing.
For note sequences and transitions, the same view could show (vertical) waveforms like you have in the Note Quiz (three notes lasting for some three seconds) comparing the desired vs. the actual.
Thanks!
PS: Are you planning to add some FOSS license?
I pushed an Apache 2.0 license. Feel free to clone the GitHub repo and throw Claude at it. It might surprise you how well it can add features to a single file HTML; it can work out basically how the entire thing works without needing to read any docs. So by all means, vibe code a fork :)
I have been wishing to make an app like this for years. I have Sing-and-See, Ear Master, etc., but none seems to get the UX right (for me).
Will play around with vibe-coding when there's opportunity. Thanks for adding the license!
https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/titzer/Rif...
It has the horizontal keyboard, highlighting of played notes, and MIDI input. tested with WebMIDI on Firefox and it was a little squirrely but got it to work.
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
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.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...
It has interactive exercises and singing practice
There is also a similar site on https://musictheory.net - I wonder if the functionality is the same
-- edit --
This one has this nice chord progression excercise.
Every other time I try to launch a test. Someone's bad at asynchronous programming.
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
B D G I K
A C EF H J LA
And that's before even getting into completely alternate approaches, or how strongly harmonics affect perception: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAgXpCK_4gA or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ8qZCGg4Bk
(maybe to clarify: there are objective aspects, in that sound is measurable. but there is nothing like a "grand unified theory" that covers all music, nor are roughly any of the popular ones internally consistent - it's far, far too varied for that, and physics often doesn't allow the desired consistency, causing more variety)
Well, there is a number of "objective" factors which play a significant role. For example, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl6ZcY9ag
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.
I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.
Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.
To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.
The first-approximation engineer realization about music (which I suspect the GP is going off of) is "okay, there are 12 notes in the chromatic scale, each octave doubles frequency, therefore the frequency ratio between two adjacent notes is the 12th root of 2 and we should just have 12 names for the notes". This is what's called an "equal-tempered scale"; the gap between each note is the same ratio, and you have a simple geometric progression upwards.
Except we don't actually have an equal-tempered scale. If you try to play on an equal-tempered scale, it'll sound subtly "off", and certain chords will result in "beats" (pulsing) where the frequency ratios are off just enough to cause an unpleasant modulation in loudness.
The modern diatonic scale is based on the circle-of-5ths [1], where the fundamental ratio is the 5th at 3/2 the frequency. It works like this because now chords are an even multiple of frequencies, while you would get an irrational number with the equal-tempered scale. Going up from the root (C), the next 5th up is G at a ratio of 3/2. Then you go up to D (9/4); when you reduce this to lowest terms because you've ascended a full octave, it gives a ratio of 9/8, which is one whole tone above. Next 5th up is A (27/16), which is the ratio in frequencies of a 6th. And then you get E (81 / 32 = 81/64), a major 3rd. And so on. The frequency ratios of the diatonic scale come from repeatedly reducing powers of 3/2 to lowest terms after dividing out the octave.
On a side note, both Wikipedia entries reinforce my original point that the mathematics of this is fascinating.
>That's why symphony orchestra players will often have a different flute, clarinet, or oboe for different tunings. Not sure what you are referring to here? Clarinets don't come in different "tunings" unless you mean different keys - like Eb or Bb clarinet, but those aren't there for intonation, they play in different ranges of pitch than one another.
Edit: in addition, you don't HAVE to equally temper a guitar. You can choose just intonation. The problem is that you can only have just intonation on a single KEY for that instrument. So if you tune justly to C major, a key like B major, will sound horrendous!
Wikipedia has an entry for well tempered as well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well_temperament
There's a lot to hate about musical score, but the A-G notes and sharps and flats aren't all that bad once you realize that everything is based on the 7 note diatonic scale. In C major, it's just the names of the letters with no sharps or flats. On the piano, C major is just the white keys, which will get you pretty far--tons of songs are in C major. You have to remember B-C and E-F are the short intervals, and memorize the 2-2-1-2-2-2-1 semitone pattern, but after that, a lot follows. Then minor is just starting a different note in this pattern, as are all the other modes. There are other scales too, but this one main pattern is going to cover 98% of all music you run across.
There's a huge amount of stuff that gets unlocked when you just give up fighting the standard and instead learn to go with it. Music is a language, and the way we write it down is maybe a little suboptimal, but then again, the "optimal" way to write it down has a maximum on how much better it could possibly be.
I do have a beef with the notation for rhythm, because as it is, the standard musical notation is just a shorthand form for fitting more music horizontally. For computer-based music, I find it a lot easier to follow a display where horizontal length is proportional to time. We've got infinite screen space, so no need to compress anymore.
He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.
Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.
Do you mean trying to teach all children perfect pitch even though society has no expectation of that? Unlike knowing at least your primary colors which is expected of everyone. I suspect that could be unnecessarily stressful for many.
Or do you mean as some kind of metaphor or analogy? If the latter, I think it would be quite confusing as there are aspects of vision and hearing that are quite different. Pitch classes have no analog in vision that I can think of. Color vision is roughly 3 dimensional but sound is not. The aspects of timbre don't map to color.
I think that understanding music theory does require work. It emerges from physics and physiology and a very long history including a bunch of culturally specific things. Did your ancestors make music with long skinny strings or pipes with nice integer-ish overtones? Here are some tuning systems for you (among them the set of C-D-E-F-G-A-B you mentioned). Did they use bells or gongs with decidedly non-integer ratio overtones? Here's a set of different systems for you!
Anyway, if you have a mapping/analog/metaphor you think is useful between music or sound and color I would be interested to hear it / see it!
The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".
My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.
Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun
American teachers were horrified by this idea when I was a kid. But the Suzuki method has been successful, and I think it has raised the level of playing overall. Many famous musicians self-identify a "Suzuki kids." On the other hand, many of them admit to not being the strongest readers, but reading takes practice. You can also pick up repertoire by following the sheet music while listening to a recording. Like many skills, it fades if it isn't used. I'm fortunate to be a fluent sight-reader, but not a virtuoso.
In my view the notation is what it is. Changing it would be hard. "Standard" notation creates a kind of symbiosis between composers and players. If a composer uses a nonstandard notation, nobody will play their stuff. And the standardization is why musicians can learn the skill of reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge might be easier for some people.
Haven't heard about CDEFGAE up until I was in my mid 20s trying to learn guitar (after 7 years of music school and musical calsses in regular school)
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.
For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).
Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p
Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.
You can tell that this wasn't equally tempered because composers talked about the "color" of each key, a concept that doesn't make sense unless the keys sound different.
Also, in your own color analogy: we have a small number of main color names, then a bunch of in betweens.
Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.
But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.
It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.
I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)