Hearing inversions?

[nolan]

Hello guys,

I am having trouble identifying inversions in a piece of music I am trying to transcribe. Usually it is just a matter of hearing the bass of the chord. The recording I have uses a lot of pedal and the overtones created have caused me trouble in hearing that note. I hate having to "guess" the inversion and hope it is right. I like writing accurate transcriptions. Any advice or suggestions?

Thanks,
Nolan

[franzliszt2]

Try working out the progression of chords first, and write each chord down on the page like C major, G major etc...

Then start listening to the bass note, and if you have the progression mapped out, it should be a lot easier as you can combine aural and theory, which makes life a lot easier.

As for the overtones, listen for the very bottom note, as the overtones always go up in pitch, the problem I find with over tones is that they can make it quite tricky to get the middle voices. One really intersting tring to do is get a group of people together who are good at transcribing and play them a bach chorale. You can gurantee that they will all gte the notes, but some will mix up tenor and alto, it's all because of overtones and how different people percieve them.

[mdshimazu]

That advice is good. Here's some more specific advise.

If it's non-modulating you have a few ways to discover the inversion which mostly deals with other skills. If you have a very good concentration and scale degrees built up you can literally know the key and just listen to the bass and figure out the notes, then you just fix the inversions to make the bass notes match. Another option is to use your transcribing abilities to listen in on the bass and just hear the movement by intervals. The last option is to listen to the chord first, major, minor, dim, etc. Then just work on each individual chord just hearing out the inversion.

This is all assuming that you have worked on other areas of relative pitch though. If you haven't I suggest you go to other topics in ear training, and then coming back.

Now for the cheater's method. There is a program called Transcribe! and obviously it helps you transcribe, look into it, it's what I use when trying to transcribe full fledged songs (like I'm working on Hamelin's Nokia Hesitation Waltz).

[jonslaughter]

Try doing some exercises. I to find it very hard to hear inversions but you will notice that there are very subtle differences and you should be able to heard them after much practice. To me, the first inversion of a major chord almost has this minor tinge to it. I guess you might say its more subdued than the root position chord. The second inversion sounds more dominant and unstable. You realize its the tonic chord but something doesn't seem right and if you got the first inversions down then obviously by elimination it must be the second inversion unless you are dealing with a 7th chord. But 7th chords are pretty easy to distinguish from triads and so it shouldn't be any harder. 

Each inversion has a "quality" to it that can be hard but takes time and practice.  You must learn to hear the harmonic sound and not just individual voices(which is ok but then your not hearing harmony but polyphony). i.e., don't try to construct the chord from its individual pieces but hear the chord as a whole. It can be quite hard at times but with practice it will get easier.   

What you could try and do is listen to many pieces that you have an analysis for(or better yet, analyze them yourself if you can) and then "read" along with what you hear so you know what you are hearing.  You will eventually start to see those subtle differences.

Its a similar idea to hearing the quality of a chord as being maj, min, dim, etc...  You just "know". Some people struggle with this though and a friend of mine says he cannot tell the difference.  Practice, practice, practice and it should become easier and easier. 

Maybe a simple exercise is to play/record a chord and its inversions sequentially and just listen to it over and over.  Listen to it so much that you loose the order in which the inversions occur(but do them sequentially so you know the that the second comes after the first and the root after the second).  By doing this hopefully you will be able to hear the differences(maybe put a small rest between the chords because sometimes its hard to hear an inversion of a chord that is repeated like I - I6) and will eventually loose track but it should be easy to figure out.   You could then do it randomly, through in different chords and then do simple progressions, etc...

[keyofc]

jonslaught,

I like your suggestion a lot!  In fact, it reminds me of something I was going to do for my students, but forgot about doing. (recording the chords)

Thanks!