Ear training excercises site - looking for advice from teachers

[garyp]

I was suffering of undeveloped ear and instead of doing some excercises ended up creating this
https://pitchimprover.com/
Many people training their ear found it useful, but I'd like to hear some more expert opinions/suggestions.

[faulty_damper]

Most people do not have an undeveloped ear unless they have a mental retardation that affects auditory processing.  The issue that people who struggle with melodies do have is that they are listening to something foreign and their auditory processes do not register the pitches in the same way as the language(s) they are capable of hearing and speaking.  A very simple way of demonstrating this is to listen to a foreign language and trying to repeat the sounds verbatim.  Most of the foreign sounds will not register as readily as the common tones.  Now listen to a language you can understand and speak and the process is simple and easy.  This same process happens in music.  If you grew up only listening to pop standards, then the music is familiar and easy to repeat.  And if you were to listen to European classical music, it is entirely different and foreign and it is likely that it is not comprehensible; it may sound like noise.

As for the strategy you devised, listening and playing back the melody on the keyboard, it assumes that the issue is with playing back.  I have difficulty with this because I do not associate tones to specific keys; I did not learn perfect pitch associated with the keyboard.  However, I can very easily sing the pitches.

But back to the topic of undeveloped ear... the beginning step is saturation, the exposure of the musical language that one wishes to learn and understand.  It requires listening to a vast amount of European classical music, preferably from a single era/style (e.g. Classical) because each style uses different tone combinations which are sufficiently different from each other.  The reason for the saturation is to expose the auditory processing to the sounds that need to be distinguished.  It requires many hours of active listening.

The second step is engagement.  Engagement means to imitate the sounds either vocally or with an instrument.  This process creates the sound within you, thereby making an association with the external sounds and a mechanism for creating those sounds. 

These two steps, exposure and engagement, overlap.  The moment you hear something new, you imitate the sounds.

[mike_lang]

Most people do not have an undeveloped ear unless they have a mental retardation that affects auditory processing. 

What a strange way to say that we all have the ability to develop our aural comprehension of tonal groupings . . . I think?

[mike_lang]

I was suffering of undeveloped ear and instead of doing some excercises ended up creating this
https://pitchimprover.com/
Many people training their ear found it useful, but I'd like to hear some more expert opinions/suggestions.

In my opinion, it is a better use of time to integrate ear training with the repertoire you are currently studying.  Here are a couple of practice techniques that I use regularly (these are also aids to memorization, as are almost all practice techniques):

-Transposition: When you transpose a piece that you know into a foreign key, it forces you to hear the intervallic relationships (harmonic & melodic) between tones in a different, more vivid way.

-Play and sing: Play a piece that you know well, singing various lines/strata/melodies/voices from the texture as you play.  This can be done on "la," solfège (fixed or moveable), or numbers.

If this needs further clarification, please let me know.  Hope it's useful to you!

Cheers,
Mike

[garyp]

Thank you for the thoughtful responses.
By "undeveloped ear" I meant exactly that I can not currently register the pitches precisely as I hear them, probably should have used some other term for it.

faulty_damper, it is interesting that you suggest to concentrate on some one style of music, probably that would make me learn the characteristic vocabluary of that style and become good at recognizing elements of it. But it seems also that with this method, when I hear something foreign, I will hardly be able to reproduce it, isn't it so? I thought that it is possible to train the ear in a more versatile manner, so as to be able to play by ear e.g. blues as well as classics without training separately.

Mike,
For the transposition, I do practice this kind of thing, e.g. take a phrase and play it in all 12 keys.
I'd say it is useful, makes me think in terms of numbers and relations between them.
On the other hand, it might not be necessary if playing in one key, for example I have a friend who can play by ear practically any pop song, but only in E minor (or G major). He is totally helpless at transposing, I was very surprised when figured that out, his hands go far in front of his head when playing, directly connected to voice/ears.

As for singing when playing, I know it is useful, thanks for encouraging to do it more, I sometimes neglect it because dont like singing much. Also, it is hard to do with sax which I am playing lately, probably should sing the lines in separate from playing.

In general you made me think that it is good to train more not with synthetic musical material (as in case of the excercises on my site), but real pieces, probably broadening my repertoire would help, thanks.

[faulty_damper]

By choosing one musical style, you not only learn the melodic, motivic, accompaniment parts of the music but most important, the musical meaning. The motives that are prevalent in baroque and classical styles convey different meanings compared to the melodies of the romantic styles.  Understanding the meaning of one style does not necessarily transfer to understanding a different style, analogous to understanding one dialect of Chinese but not any other; they are sufficiently different.

Your goal appears to be able to hear anything and reproduce it.  It isn't an easily accomplished tasked with the strategy you devised because our minds process information in chunks.  The way you set up the multiple interval listening and keyboard performance playback is fine for chunking.  However, the random note intervals do not make any musical sense = no meaning; it will easily be forgotten.

Assuming that the melodies, etc. makes sense, the mind will process it using information that you already know and understand the new information according to previously held understanding.  When you hear jazz, you will understand it and process the information much more efficiently if you have listened extensively to jazz.  But if you were to listen to classical, and you have not listened much to classical, then the music may not make sense and you will ignore the music.  An anology: You can read these words fine in English but if this were written in German, you would recognize all of the letters but not understand what it means.

Learning something new requires that the new information be related to something you already know.  If you don't know a lot, it's not likely new information can form a relationship with your limited knowledge.  This is the reason it is necessary to listen to a lot of music because it can provide a vast amount of knowledge that new knowledge can then attach to.

In general you made me think that it is good to train more not with synthetic musical material (as in case of the excercises on my site), but real pieces, probably broadening my repertoire would help, thanks

Intervalic hearing is what your site is testing.  The ability to hear intervals is necessary but most people can do that with some training.  Specifically, you want to label/denote/specify those intervals which is the keyboard playback part.  If this is the goal, to be able to identify intervals by keyboard playback, then it's an acceptable goal and it's a way to do that.