Musical U

09/06/2026

The only acceptable response, really. 😤

09/06/2026

08/06/2026

Nowhere to hide 😭

08/06/2026

Every time you listen to music, you may be missing a massive opportunity to practise Ear Training without even trying.

See, Ear Training and Active Listening are companion skills.

Either can be done independently, but both benefit hugely from the other.

If you are doing Ear Training exercises, that's going to give you some powerful skills to add specific detail to the questions and answers you use in Active Listening. And if you practice Active Listening, it's going to give you extra and interesting opportunities to actually apply all the new skills you've developed with Ear Training.

So for example, with only Active Listening and no Ear Training you might describe a melody simply as "It's an ascending pattern of notes with a long-short-short, long-short-short rhythm". With some Ear Training that could become "It's a do-re-mi melody, so if we're in C Major that's the notes C, D and E, and that rhythm pattern of quarter note with two eighth notes is played twice". Or for Chord Progressions with no Ear Training under your belt you would still be able to practice Active Listening and say "It sounds like that classic 50s "rock and roll" progression in the chorus"---whereas with Ear Training you could say something like "The chorus is a I-IV-V-IV progression". And so on.

This means you don't need to feel obliged to do Ear Training, and you don't need to worry if you haven't already developed those kinds of skills. They are a wonderful optional addition to your Active Listening practice.

If you are doing Ear Training then since Active Listening is something you can do each and every time you hear a piece of music, it's an amazing way to fit in a huge amount of additional useful Ear Training practice in a very practical, applied way.

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This is an excerpt from Chapter 5: Active Listening in the Musicality book.

06/06/2026

That right-hand graph is *suspiciously* accurate...

05/06/2026

We'll just be over here with our relative pitch, thanks 👍

05/06/2026

Traditional ear training has a lot to answer for...

The traditional Ear Training method looks something like this:

1. Pick something you want to learn to recognise, for example Intervals, Solfa (i.e. notes of the scale), or Chord Progressions.

2. Limit yourself to a subset of the "types" of that thing, for example Major Thirds and Minor Thirds in interval recognition.

3. Do some kind of exercise, drill or quiz where you hear an example of that thing, try to name what it was, find out if you got it right or wrong.

4. Repeat step 3 until you master it (or go insane).

I'm only half joking with that last point! In reality most musicians get bored or frustrated, and simply give up. But remember that common definition of insanity: "doing the same thing again and again, and expecting a different result."

For the first few years at Easy Ear Training our focus was on improving this process. Looking back, it feels like a clear case of "putting lipstick on a pig".

It was helpful to gamify the exercises with an interactive mobile app. We were able to break things down in a useful way, help the student to track their progress, provide a clear progression, with a bit of flexibility to reduce the risk of getting entirely stuck at any point.

But the overall process was still a "brute force" one. And, most crucially, I found for myself and our students that it was actually entirely possible to ace every Ear Training quiz - and yet have little or nothing to show for it in your actual musical life.

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This is an excerpt from Chapter 7: Ear Training in the Musicality book.