Ear Training Practice

Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.

Nice!

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.

This is amazing! A couple things:

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 :)

First of all, thank you for making it free!

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?

> 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.

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 remember in jazz class the instructor had a stack of jingles that showcased particular "weird" intervals. The only one I really remember now is the "Alway Coca Cola" jingle and a M6, but this was a _long_ time ago.

I think this is smart. I have never done ear training apps because I just don't like to learn music that way - it doesn't "stick" for me.

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.

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.

This is quite a nice idea and works well, but I think I would rather spend the time listening to and imitating real Miles Davis solos etc.

This is very fun!

First I’ve heard of aphantasia applied to sound / music. Though I have on a number of occasions thought about the concept.

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.

I've been doing these exercises regularly for years and haven't made much progress ;). I still perform music regularly and get positive feedback. I do hope that some day I'll get to where these exercises seem easy - I haven't made much progress, but I do make a tiny bit at a time.

the inverse is true as well-- I can produce or identify any note with zero reference and imagine entire melodies and harmonies and yet am still probably mediocre at best at composing.

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?

This.

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.

Very nice!

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?

Amazing, I just used the ear training one to hum a tune and then find the notes to play it

Nice job. There's also a relatively well-known app called "TE Tuner" which I've used when helping my students become familiar with fretless instruments (such as the violin) specifically because it lets you visualize the sound you're playing at the cents level. I've found it can be quite helpful at the early stages of learning.

You expected one thing but found it was not what you thought. What is the takeaway for us?

"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.

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.)

Thank you, any feedback is appreciated.

You "wrote" a guide, yet it's in "generated_courses"? Interesting

There is no "objective" foundation to music.

Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:

     B D  G I K
    A C EF H J LA

Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)

You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html

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.

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 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.

If you want an excellent explanation of why proposals for new notation systems like you’re suggesting have been developed (and failed) Tantacrul has made an excellent video describing the history and tradeoffs that lead us to our current system:

https://youtu.be/Eq3bUFgEcb4

He’s product lead at MuseGroup developing notation software and his expertise lies at the intersection of music composition, UX design, and programming.

We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.

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.

>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!

I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?

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

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)

You think music— essentially expressing ideas and emotion through sound— isn’t approachable enough to children because the notation lacks a solid foundation in math? I very much disagree. In fact, I think teaching children to experiment more with musicality well before they’re introduced to things like notation and formal theory would do far more to pique their interest. I happily played guitar for a decade before I learned to read music.

>For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C.

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)

I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.

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.

We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.

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.

Sounds like you don’t understand scales if you’re confused about why we have 7 note names.

Also, in your own color analogy: we have a small number of main color names, then a bunch of in betweens.

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

I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.

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 :-)