A blessing or a curse? Whatever your attitude on the subject, there’s something truly remarkable about the ability to hear music in your head at any time and in any situation, from dead silence
A blessing or a curse? Whatever your attitude on the subject, there’s something truly remarkable about the ability to hear music in your head at any time and in any situation, from dead silence to noisy cacophony. Equally amazing is the ability to slip into a realm of consciousness wherein the brain translates natural or man-made sounds into rhythmic, melodic, and/or harmonic musical events—bumps in the road, bird songs, washing machines, traffic jams, dueling chainsaws (one of my favorites!), or a text ping perfectly in time and tune with a song or soundscape of the moment. It’s a beautiful thing, and I’m sure I’m not alone, but if you haven’t ever been experienced, it takes time and hard work to develop big ears. Here’s how to get started.
BASIC DIVISION
Melodic ear training begins with interval recognition. To measure physical distance, a foot is divided into 12 inches. Similarly, a musical octave is divided into 12 half-step increments. The half step is the unit of measurement used to define a musical interval, which is the distance between any two notes. Intervals are the building blocks of melody and harmony. A melodic interval measures the distance between two separate notes, while a harmonic interval measures the distance between two notes played simultaneously. Chords contain three or more notes, so there are compound intervals within chords. When one chord moves to another, the root motion is measured in intervals. Because intervals provide a way to measure and communicate relative aural distances within music, any melodic or harmonic structure can be verbally described in terms of its intervallic design.
The object of ear training is to gain the ability to recognize and identify all 12 intervals in your mind’s ear, and to equate them with their physical shapes on