Play What? Ear Training For Musicians?

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

Imagine this: a hub that serves as a catalyst for music education and collaboration between experts, enthusiasts and novices interested in music training in general, and ear training specifically. Play WHAT? Yes, the creator and founder of the Easy Ear Training website has done just that and much more.

Particularly for the novice musician who wants to revitalise his/her music, to hear and appreciate exactly what is being played, or to transfer the great sounds from one's head to a listener's ears, music ear training should be your first step. What is ear training? Quite simply, it is the process of training your ears (and your brain) to better recognise and identify what you're hearing in a musical piece. Once learned, it becomes an incredibly useful technique that will enhance the way you experience and understand music and sound.

HOW DOES EAR TRAINING WORK?

Ear training involves training your brain to improve the way you hear music and sound. It enables you to distinguish, classify, and label what you're hearing in the music you listen ...
... to. If you sing, play an instrument, or work in a job where you must be attuned to the nuances of music and sound quality, it's likely you're using the ear training technique already. While your hearing proficiency will certainly improve as you practise and hone your musical skills, it is likely a slow, passive process for you. Music ear training allows you to take active steps to improve your skills; hence, your progress can be much quicker.

For example, we humans naturally learn to distinguish between male and female voices during our childhood development. We are surrounded by these voices and learn to distinguish them by seeing the person who is speaking. But if you're an English-speaker learning Italian, and want to be able to distinguish accents from different regions, it takes a much more active effort to recognise the differences. You'll need to find examples and techniques that will help you. And the quickest way to make progress in this effort will be to focus on learning how to distinguish between the different regional accents.

GET A TUNE-UP FOR YOUR EARS AND YOUR MUSIC

Worried about your sense of rhythm? Do you practice active listening? Looking for cutting-edge methods for honing your craft? By using the music ear training, you will learn how to teach your brain to reliably pick apart what your ear is physically hearing, and turn it into the music concepts that are meaningful to you.

As you train and learn, you will develop the ability to hear more complex concepts and with much greater reliability. You might start off just hearing that a series of notes are piano notes, but after training, you could report that it was an ascending harmonic minor scale with first inversion i-iv-v-i chords underneath. You've probably heard great musicians or audio pros do this kind of thing - Don't you want to acquire and develop this ability?

HEAR MORE, HEAR BETTER

As a musician or an audio professional, you certainly would want to heighten your skill and ability to hear more and better. By choosing to actively improve your skills through music ear training, your progress will be much faster, enabling you to unlock talents you never thought you had.

Easy Ear Training is dedicated to helping emerging music artists realize their full musical potential. Their website, and products such as RelativePitch and the Step and a Half iPhone app, serve as a community and resource for musicians and audio professionals who aspire to use modern technology to revolutionise the process of improving their skills and optimising their musical abilities to create the music we and they love, into the next century. For more information please visit www.EasyEarTraining.com.