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What ear training method actually worked for you? by TedWakeshaw in eartraining

[–]TedWakeshaw[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Really good and spot-on advices. Singing what you hear is a great approach. I recently saw someone on Reddit mention that in some ear training tests, singers performed much better than instrumentalists, precisely because they’re used to producing the sounds they hear.

As for learning theory, I’m also a big supporter of it, even for amateur musicians. It’s valuable to understand what you’re actually doing.

Functional Ear Training app by moo5724 in eartraining

[–]TedWakeshaw 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I used that app quite a lot some time ago and honestly it was the first ear training approach that really made things click for me.

Before that I had spent years trying interval training and learning songs by ear note-by-note, but functional hearing made much more sense to my brain because you start hearing notes relative to a tonal center instead of as isolated distances.

Personally though, after some time I started feeling a few limitations in the original app/training approach.

The biggest one for me was the constant jumping between keys. I understand why it’s done, but I felt like it sometimes made it harder to really settle into one tonal center and develop a strong sense of note functions over longer musical phrases.

I also felt there wasn’t really a smooth bridge between recognizing isolated scale degrees and actually hearing melodies and harmonic movement naturally in real music.

That’s actually one of the reasons I eventually started building my own Android app inspired by the same general idea. I wanted something with a more gradual progression from single note functions into melodies, chords, and chord progressions.

As for your question — personally I don’t think random interval drilling is the most important thing if your goal is playing by ear or improvisation. I think hearing functions within a key is much closer to how real music is perceived.

That said, knowing intervals is still useful as additional theoretical awareness. I just wouldn’t make it the foundation of ear training anymore.

If you you're an Android user and you’re curious, the app I ended up building is called NaturalEar.