I’ve always admired those people who can wiggle their ears, especially those who can move the left and right ones independently… no… wait… not that kind of ear training Mark!
Of course, what we really are interested is musical ear training—the ability to hear a series of notes, a rhythm, or a chord pattern and understand it sufficiently to play it back , or sing it. Once some basic skills in this area are gained then playing, singing and learning songs becomes much easier.
Even those who are not musically trained are part-way there with their musical ear training without knowing it. Most people know hundreds, if not thousands, of songs already—at least in their head. Think of the rhythm and melody of all the songs you can sing in your head—there’s your starting point.
Let’s look at rhythm. I often do a set of strumming exercises on guitar with my students. First up we strum 8th notes, down and up, on any chord, counting “1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and”.
Strumming down on the numbers and up on the “ands”. We then start to leave out various strums to make new strumming patterns, for example, leaving out the strum of “and” after 2 and the strum of “and” after 4. Students usually concentrate really hard to count the beats and strums until I tell them it’s the same rhythm at the start of Jingle Bells. Now it’s not so tricky. In other words, they already knew the rhythm—they just didn’t know they knew it.
What about melody? The gap between any two notes in a melody is called a musical interval and their names are based on where they fall in a major scale in relation to the root (tonic) note. Most people can sing many, many songs—at least in their head. Here’s a few examples of common intervals:
The first two notes of Amazing Grace are a fourth.
Twinkle , twinkle little star is a perfect fifth.
Major seventh—First two notes of the chorus of Take on Me by Aha
Octave—Somewhere over the rainbow
By comparing what we are learning to what we already know we can train our ears to hear things in a different, and more efficient way.
Get those ears wiggling.
Cheers! Mark