How to Train Your Ear: 7 Ear Training Techniques

Ear training is a music theory field of study where musicians use only their hearing to identify pitches, melodies, chords, intervals, rhythms, and various other basic elements of music. With ear training, you can connect notes and other musical elements just by hearing them.

Ear training can benefit a musician’s performance. Honing your aural skills through ear training is important because it improves your relative pitch, which is the ability to replicate a note’s sound or identify it based on where it is in relation to another note (whereas perfect pitch is the ability to identify a sound without a reference note).

This is a skill that helps you analyze and decipher what you’re hearing, allowing you to better understand the relationship between musical elements. When you practice ear training, you can improve your rhythm, tune your instruments more accurately, play better with other musicians, and strengthen your improvisation and sight-singing skills.

Ear training practice is an effective way for musicians to improve listening skills. Just dedicating a small amount of time to these skills per day can be enough to keep your inner ear strong:

1. 1. Pitch ear training: Train your ear to recognize notes by playing the same note over and over while singing or humming it, and associating the sound with its name in your mind. The more clearly you can hear a note in your head, the better you’ll become at identifying pitches.
2. 2. Scale ear training: Scales are another component of music that are crucial for every musician to understand. Each scale contains seven notes per octave, with an eighth note repeating the tonic at the next pitch. Key signature identification of all major scales and minor scales will help you determine which key a piece of music is in, and is essential for creating harmonic chord progressions and great melodies.
3. 3. Interval ear training: Interval identification is an important component of ear training. Learning all the intervals within an octave can make it easier for you to identify and replicate melodies later on. Know the intervals forwards and backward to train your ear to easily pick up on them. Interval training improves your ear’s ability to identify the space between two pitches, so you can quickly figure out things like which notes span an octave, or which are compound intervals (larger than an octave). A firm understanding of the distance between pitches enables you to build sets of chords that are pleasing to the ear.
4. 4. Chord ear training: Three or more notes played at a time form a chord. Training your ear to know which type of chord you’re hearing or which notes sound good together can help you produce better sounding chords in your music, and even create certain emotional effects. For example, major chords are more associated with positive feelings, where minor chords are often used in music to present negative emotions. Listen to different chords and try to identify whether they are major, minor, diminished, or augmented.
5. 5. Chord progression training: After learning how to recognize the chord qualities that make up a particular chord progression, you can determine whether a song is in a major key or minor key, which is another helpful component of setting the mood for a musical piece.
6. 6. Functional ear training: Hearing a particular pitch within a piece of music and recognizing its role within the tonic (the keynote or starting note within any major or minor scale) can help you better understand why the music is composed the way it is and what mood it elicits. Once you start to recognize certain patterns between different kinds of music, the easier it will become to identify in more music over time.
7. 7. Melodic dictation: Sometimes seeing a melody is another way to get your ears to remember it. This ear training exercise involves transcribing or playing back music you’ve only heard by ear, and seeing the notes you’ve just heard. Dictation makes you more adept at visualizing notes, which is a necessary skill for composing or improvising.

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