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Ear Training Practice

tonedear.com

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Re: Ear Training Practice

#31

Post by swestwood »

vunderba wrote: post #2

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 r…

This is really simple and great!! Thanks for not stuffing it with ads.

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.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#32

Post by nostrademons »

epiccoleman wrote: post #27
functionmouse wrote: post #3

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.

Do you have much experience reading musical notation? 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…

There's also a huge amount of math behind music that is fascinating.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths

Re: Ear Training Practice

#33

Post by LearnYouALisp »

functionmouse wrote: post #6
bigbuppo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?

Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.

Have you written any pieces?

Re: Ear Training Practice

#34

Post by altho123 »

dwringer wrote: post #29

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.

They're asking for midi device control & reprogram, my guess is that for some of the exercises you can use your own midi keyboard to input the note (dictation etc.)

Re: Ear Training Practice

#35

Post by xlii »

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.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#36

Post by dwringer »

altho123 wrote: post #34
dwringer wrote: post #29

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.

They're asking for midi device control & reprogram, my guess is that for some of the exercises you can use your own midi keyboard to input the note (dictation etc.)

I figured the same, but I did not encounter such exercises, and regardless having the ability to send sysex to my MIDI devices is not required for such a thing.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#37

Post by fl4regun »

xlii wrote: post #35

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.

can you tell if a piano is out of tune? I'm curious since I don't know anyone with aphantasia. Can you tell if someone is playing your composition correctly?

Re: Ear Training Practice

#38

Post by fl4regun »

mentalgear wrote: post #18

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?)

"ear training" is the term we use as musicians to refer to the skill this website is dedicated to. It is a fundamental skill of music.

Re: Ear Training Practice

#39

Post by fl4regun »

functionmouse wrote: post #3

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.

None of this is objective. The construction of our scale is subjective, other countries use different scales. Even with this same scale, there are multiple different tuning systems. There is micro-tonal music. Musical keys are arbitrary too. We teach the way we do because it is a culmination of musical history, our particular western musical history, and it's own arbitrary decisions that western musicians have made over the past hundreds, even thousands of years. If you like, there is also solfege, which replaces letter names with just sounds, "do re mi" etc, Also what makes you think colours are objective? Different languages have words for a single colour that map onto multiple other words in other countries, does not seem very objective to me, unless you are talking about notating colours as hex or RGB number values, or wavelengths (which we don't do in natural language)

Re: Ear Training Practice

#40

Post by klaff »

functionmouse wrote: post #3

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.

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

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!

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