This site is a collection of online ear training/aural skills exercises and drills. Click the links at the left to get started! They are based on my experience teaching more than 40 sections of college level ear training.
Through this site you will learn to:
- Immediately recognize the function of a note within a key
- Immediately translate this to musical notation or to an instrument
- Remeber increasingly long and complex melodies
- Recognize intervals immediately by their specific sound
While you won't learn perfect pitch (most scholars agree that if you haven't learned perfect pitch by age 7 you won't ever learn it), you will learn what I call perfect relative pitch -- the ability to immediately know what any note is, so long as you know what key you started in.
Want to impress your friends with your freakish ability to sing anything on solfege? Or to name all the notes you hear played at any given moment? Just looking to do better in an ear training or aural skills class? The games on these pages will help increase your speed and accuracy at basic ear training tasks. Once you can beat the highest level of all the speed trainers, you too will be an ear training guru!
The Complete Set of Drills
New additions!
4/21/08 - New Applet! Trichord Interval ID plays 3 notes at once, you have to figure out the interval between the upper two and the lower two. This is super-difficult. Good luck!
4/20/08 - Bug fixes: fixed bug that sometimes prevented the next note or notes from playing. Updated interval applets so that the same question is never repeated twice in a row. Updated interval applets so that each level has approximately the same number of questions for each possible interval (raw chance sometimes meant certain intervals were omitted in levels).
4/5/08 - All of the online drills now track your high scores; the server communication code has been completely rewritten to require fewer calls to the server (increasing the processing speed at the end of the levels).
4/5/08 - Fixed bug in Piano Note ID applet that sometimes made it impossible to answer when starting a new level. Fixed level select bugs in both interval applets. Added timeout to applets so that they won't hang if the network goes unavailable while trying to process high scores (downside: if this happens, the score goes unrecorded...). Fixed bug in interval applets that allowed users to advance levels & increase scores by pressing the key for the last right answer over and over after the level ended.
4/3/08 - View your high scores with My Musical Mind, or see the All Time High Scores.
3/30/08 - You can now create an ID and login to track your progress. Currently only the Interval IDs and One Note Piano ID applets use this feature, but soon this will be extended to the other applets and more functionality to view your progress will be added.
3/23/08 - Try the new Note ID on the Piano speed drill!
Coming Soon:
Don't worry, I'm constantly dreaming up new ideas for drills -- it's just a question of how much time I have to program them. Coming in the near future are drills to identify the quality and inversion of triads and seventh chords, speed note-id drills, and versions of the current drills where you play the answers on a piano keyboard instead of using solfege or the staff. In the more distant future (probably not before mid-May) I hope to develop a full set of drills to work on hearing functional harmony.
Obviously rhythm is completely neglected from these pages -- and it probably will be for the forseeable future. Sorry!