Any tips for ear training?

[emmaj]

I have just done my grade 8 for ABRSM and managed to get good marks apart from the aural test which has always left me completely perplexed.  It wasn't for want of practice either - I used loads of the aural test CDs available and did lots of run throughs with my teacher.  I just wonder if I am approaching it in the wrong way - how do I improve my ear?  I should probably sing more but I have always had a bit of a complex about my singing voice and the idea of going to a singing teacher is a bit intimidating.

[nightingale11]

If you absolute pitch start play on a digital piano(not on an acoustic) or just spend about 5 min every day and a cheap digital keyboard and you will eventually get it. (

Write a lot and read a lot music. If you have a notation software (that has midi sounds when you press on the staff) spend some minutes every day copying scores and so on.

Also do music dictation, listen to very easy and small melodies (in small sections) every day for a few minutes and then when you get better you will later include harmonies etc.

Don't get discouraged if you don't see any improvements. absolute e.g is nothing you get gradually(not any noticeable).

It all depends on what kind of ear skill you want to develop.

[emmaj]

Thanks a lot for your reply.  do you have absolute pitch then and was it something you acquired as an adult?  I do worry that I find all this ear training harder now because I didn't do enough playing around on the piano as a child - if I didn't do my lesson pieces I was told not to mess around basically!  thanks for the encouragement - progress does seem slow and I probably am too impatient.

[molto-marcato]

I'm sorry, this may be a silly question but i honestly don't know. Can you really practice a perfect pitch? Is this a skill you can acquire lets say even in your late 20s? Because i always thought this is something you are born with.
Strangely however, i recently found that i can recognize and sing a C and a g-flat when i concentrate. If i could improve this to a perfect pitch, well, that would be great  .

[franzliszt2]

You can practice relative pitch to an extremly highj degree, Like to the point where you can recognise notes, and sing them. But there are people born with the abilty, who will always be better at it. I bet you find that when you think about a Gb, or C, you are relating it to pieces, or sounds or something, more importantly you do have to think about it. o people born with it it is just a natural thing, when people say C, B, F or whatever to perfect pitched people, they just hear it.

For ear training there is a fantastic book by Hindimith. It's called ear training or summit. Gte that. I'm sure someone here will know the exact name, becasue it is very famous. It deals with lots of stuff, like rhythm, dictation and stuff like that. Sing scales, like major minor, AND whole tobe, pentatonic, modes. Also, a really amazing thing to do is to sing scales, but change one note, for example, in c major, add an F#. Its amazing what you hear people do. Thats the best form of training for sight singing.

[nightingale11]

Age doesn't matter. What does matter is consistensy(every day), people give up before even trying. A famous charachter here on the forum, Bernhard aqcuired it in his 40's-50's just by playing/practising on a digital piano. I myself haven't got a digital piano but a cheap keyboard where I spend about 5 minutes every day(have done that for a couple of months now). What you want to do is to practice intelligently. Start small, start within an octave and start working on the keys, one by one, then when you feel more secure close your eyes and just press on a note and guess, what you do not want to do (which I have experienced myself) is to guess wrong, be careful because then you will ingrain the wrong sound. Instead work on the problems you had. When You have been proficient with one octave do 2-3 octaves and so on. This is just the check-off, especially important if you have an acoustic piano(always out of tune and other things..), to get the right sound in. The other aspects of it will be derived from the pieces you learn.

What you should is to associate a key with a good association (from pieces or your own) and then ingrain that association. then you can further increase the associations etc...

Also get a note book and write down every day what you accomplished during this 5min session and what you need to work on.

Then you must have a good reason for wanting to learn perfect pitch.

[franzliszt2]

ok, about associations, my favourite trick...... Play a C, and go, wow thats the first note of the rite of sping (or anyother piece) and they go, urm...hang on, what note is rite of spring, they start hearing it, and then the pause, then they start to isloate the note, and then evetually they get it. Thats not perfect at all.

If you had perfect pitch, you'd soon realise that digital pianos are NOT always in tune. I've played on some, which in the 1st 5 mins of using are flat, and these are expensive ones. It's obviously very slightly out, but noticable enough to bother me and others with perfect pitch.

About the close eyes and press note, thats bad, because you 1st of all know if it's a black note or white note. You have a general idea of where it is, and it's on the piano, which of course you will recognise all the notes of becasue it's relative pitch and you play it everyday. The only test I can say do on a piano, is to get someine to transpose the electric piano, play a piece you know well, and ask you to name the key it's in after the first 3 seconds at most.

Don't try to aquire perfect pitch, it's a total waste of time, you could spend that 5 minute session dictating tv themes, and seeing where you went wrong, and doing other aural skills and your pitch would get to an equal standard of someone with perfect picth.

Perfect picth is misunderstood by thousands of people, and look at who they are... people who have crap aural skills, and are crap musicians. My aural teacher doesn't have perfect pitch, and he's a hell of a lot better than me at aural! Loads of top musicians don't have it, but they have spectacular ears, and sit back and say..."I don't have perfect pitch, I wasn't born with it" And they accept that.

[nightingale11]

Perfect picth is misunderstood by thousands of people, and look at who they are...

Well congratulations you are one of them.

ok, about associations, my favourite trick...... Play a C, and go, wow thats the first note of the rite of sping (or anyother piece) and they go, urm...hang on, what note is rite of spring, they start hearing it, and then the pause, then they start to isloate the note, and then evetually they get it. Thats not perfect at all.

You have maybe never heard that our brain consists of two parts one that is consious(very small) and one that is sub-consious(maybe unlimited). To get something into the subconsious you have to do is to do it regulary. How come we can play pieces? well because of practising it has come into our subconsious. How come bad habits arise e.g because we do a bad things consitently and then we have to practice right to get rid of it. What you need to have inborn to accquire perfect pitch is the ability to recognise frequencies and that is inborn in all of us.

Don't try to aquire perfect pitch, it's a total waste of time, you could spend that 5 minute session dictating tv themes, and seeing where you went wrong, and doing other aural skills and your pitch would get to an equal standard of someone with perfect picth.

You also do dictation, reading, writing and all these kind of things. Absolute pitch is an optional skill to acquire but it's not essential. Relative pitch is a must. 
I know you want to feel more special about having perfect pitch and I am sorry to tell you that absolute pitch is a 100% learned skill as with most things in life. The key is consistensy (maybe for 2-3 years it depends) to achieve profiency in life.

and here something very true:

"A person who persists in believing what is not true or disbelieving what is true can waste a lifetime of effort on something that is without hope of success".

(E. Jayne)

[emmaj]

Thanks for all the ideas you have given me a lot to work on!  Keeping a notebook would certainly make me organised.

I would love relative pitch but I do wonder if absolute pitch would be a hindrance - I play the trumpet aswell and am not sure whether people with absolute pitch find it difficult to play a transposing instrument - any other ear training is much needed for my intonation though!

I take on board about acoustic pianos, but I am so used to my beloved acoustic i can't bear to play a digital keyboard.

[franzliszt2]

Well congratulations you are one of them.

Thanks   

You have maybe never heard that our brain consists of two parts one that is consious(very small) and one that is sub-consious(maybe unlimited). To get something into the subconsious you have to do is to do it regulary. How come we can play pieces? well because of practising it has come into our subconsious. How come bad habits arise e.g because we do a bad things consitently and then we have to practice right to get rid of it. What you need to have inborn to accquire perfect pitch is the ability to recognise frequencies and that is inborn in all of us.

The brain is a total mystery to even the greatest scientists. How do some people have photographoc memory? They dodn't practice that, and I can't imagine what it is like to have it.

You also do dictation, reading, writing and all these kind of things. Absolute pitch is an optional skill to acquire but it's not essential. Relative pitch is a must. 

Absolute pitch is not optional, it's there or it isn't. Why doesn't everyone have it? Thats my big question, as it is clearly a massive advantage. You'd think most people would love to have it. I don't know what it's like not to have it, so I don't know what it;s like to be you. Relative pitch has never been an issue with me, I hear 2 notes, I don't have to worry about the interval, I know what the notes are. My theory nakes it possible to identify the interval.

As for saying I like to feel special at all, I don't feel special at all. Why would I feel special? Most people I know have very fine ears and can get away without having it. People like you are the ones who make people feel special. You fire all this knowledge, and theory at us, and you don't have a clue about the actual practical use of perfect pitch, becasue if you did I wouldn't be having this debate with you. You use the word guess in your other post, and the word association. Well you have clearly just held your hands up there, and screamed I don't know what perfect pitch is. It's nothing to do with that. One other question for your assocition theory, can you tell if a piece is in Gg minor, or F# major? Or C# minor and Db minor? I'm betting 1 million euro's you can't. How do you know when things are in what key? If you have a presto piece of music, with your association, there is no time to catch all the notes and start associating them is there? Each key has a unique flavour to it, and people with perfect picth can name keys based on the feeling alone.

As for the trumpet, perfect pitch would not interfere that much, it would take some getting used to though, beacuse we hear it as it's written, and hearing it out of key would be confusing, but you'd adjust easily enough. Lots of conductors have perfct pitch, and they have to read from scores full of different transposing instruments.

Perfect pitch is a hinderence, you meet people like nightengale11 and feel like your smasing your head against a brick wall. People always insist upon telling you about it, and blah blah blah, it's no big deal really, but people make it one.

[overscore]

Just pick out twelve memorable snatches of melody you've never heard before: each one beginning with a different note. Play them every day until you've memorised them, and then you've got the twelve notes you need. Every time you hear a single note it will trigger the associated melody in your head.

Listening to single notes is not very effective, because the brain stores patterns in memory and not bits of information like a computer. A melody is easy to remember though, and as long as you never transpose it you'll always hear it in the right key in your head.

[alwaystheangel]

Perfect pitch is a hinderence, you meet people like nightengale11 and feel like your smasing your head against a brick wall. People always insist upon telling you about it, and blah blah blah, it's no big deal really, but people make it one.

My theory prof is a composer and has abosolute pitch.  Instead of learning about chord progressions one day, we debated what exactly perfect/absolute and relative pitch are and whether a musician really needs perfect pitch to acheive a high level in aural skills.

He told us that Ralvative pitch is what everyone has.  That's our ability to tell twinkle twinkle little star is a P5 and that My Bonnie is a M6.

Perfect pitch is tha ability to sing and determine what a note is without a knwon note to compare it to.

Absolute pitch is the ability to to say "that's an A 440" so they can evendetermine the Hz level of a note.

My prof falls into the last category. It's insane. But continueing:

He did not know he had absolute pitch until he was 18 years old and had been musically trained for many years.  And still, He feels that is doesn't really matter.  There are some people with an amazing sense of pitch that only have relavtive pitch but have it trained to a high degree.  And I think that's where it really matters. Besides, Perfect pitch can be hinderance.  I mean I'm sure it's super handy to have when trying to find the tuning note in orchestra but beyond that.  It can't be pleasant:  Every instrument is out of tune on certain notes and they may try to adjust so that the note sounds right in their ear making them completely out of tune with the rest of the orchestra.  Making them appear to be worse intrumentalists,

At Uni,  My aural skills class consists of singin in solfa (Do Re Mi)  and transcribing  pieces.  The transcriptions begin with very short, simple one not melodies and progress from there.  Solfa can be insane at times (I despise it) but it is good for us, just like scales.

Maybe try working on transcriptions.  They are really helpful.  And just to note:  I had a huge singing complex too.  But since I've had aural skills three times a week (at 8 am.  and I live an hour away, driving quickly.  Belech)  My voice has improved drastically.  Your voice can improve too with a bit of practice and a vocal coach may be something to invest int.  They can really help.  And their job IS to improve our voices not, to laugh at them.  So try to get over that sensitivity and GET A VOCAL COACH!

[lenkaolenka]

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On the video is a young student, but we have more advanced levels

[lenkaolenka]

And one more link
https://doremifasoft.stores.yahoo.net/sochandeartr.html