Sound Recognition Starts Between The Ears

By Author: Tim Bridges
Total Articles: 135
Comment this article

Ever heard a song and been unable to place it? Or maybe there was a new acquaintance you recently ran into and you couldn't place their accent, but somehow another friend of yours picked it out immediately. This is by and large due to an inability to detect minor tonal changes that differentiate between different types of music or speaking. The result is cross confusion between the primary candidates the brain has selected as the proper answer, giving a completely different perception of the sound altogether.

Contrary to popular belief, these occurrences have nothing to do with the actual capabilities of the ear to perceive the sounds, as barring those with specific disabilities with such effects, the sounds are largely perceived with perfect clarity. Rather, the mistakes are attributed to the area of the brain devoted to sorting and categorizing sounds. If left untrained and unexposed to a large number of varying methods of speaking or types of music this area is far more prone to confusing and conflating sounds, leading to more misidentifications. Musicians, for example, are far less prone to this confusion due to the ...
... wide variety of tones and notes they are exposed to routinely, allowing them to pick specific sounds or instruments out of a track or a voice out of a crowd far more accurately than the layman.

Those without this proclivity to music are not entirely without hope, however, as a form of 'ear training' is available to help beef up this portion of the brain's functioning, allowing the same level of acute hearing as even the most practiced of musicians. Most of us engage in passive ear training(http://www.EasyEarTraining.com) daily through simple social interactions or even just listening to a crowd of people chatting amongst themselves as the brain strains to pick out identifiable sounds and syllables that make up language. Active training is possible, though, and of course provides much more direct and effective benefits than the relaxed ear training we receive day to day, but there are few places dedicated to properly increasing aural recognition. EasyEarTraining.com is amongst the best sources for tutorials and examples of how to actively train your brain to pick up these subtleties in sound, by and large at no cost. They also provide mobile apps for smartphones to encourage ear training on the go, at any occasion where you'd already pop in your earbuds to keep entertained, like waiting on the bus to assist in that ever elusive goal of pitch perfect perception.

EasyEarTraining.com is a site founded to provide information and tutorials on how to properly train your ears to not only pick up sounds more accurately but also provide your brain with the facilities to more easily learn a new language or simply understand those you already know more clearly, entirely through conventional and musical ear training. All info and tutorials are free and they provide an iPhone app for training on the go to boot!