These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.
So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.
Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.
It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.
Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.
It already has that feature! :) It’s just not very obvious. If you click the small lock icon near the top, it will snap and to that difficulty so you can practice only sequences with that specific number of notes.
I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)
Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.
I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.
Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.
Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.
But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.
It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.
I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.
I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
B D G I K
A C EF H J LA
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)
In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.
For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).
Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p
Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.
I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.
Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.
This is great! For scale degree after chord progression exercise, I'd love a variation where the chord progression is in a minor key.
These are all good exercises that help you build a solid foundation, but they can sometimes cause motivation to dip being somewhat clinical in nature.
So what I usually do is compile a list of melodic hooks from popular songs my students enjoy. Every so often, we’ll play them and let the student try to pick them out on the piano or their instrument of choice. I find that the satisfaction they get from being able to recreate a familiar pop‑culture melody really helps spark their interest in getting better at playing by ear, which in turn motivates them to stick with the exercises.
Shameless plug but I built a unique game specifically to help some of my more classically trained friends get better at playing piano by ear.
It's a free piano game in the style of the old "Simon" toy which presents players with increasingly longer sequences of musical notes and challenges them to reproduce the sequence using either an on-screen piano or connected MIDI keyboard. It also works with acoustic instruments through the mic.
https://lend-me-your-ears.specr.net
Just testing out practice mode, I found what I really wanted was to be able to stay at a certain level until I felt I was getting good at sequences of that length, not immediately get pushed to the next level every time even when it took me 8 tries to get the 4-note sequence right. Give me a chance to feel like I'm improving! Don't just keep giving me harder things when I keep struggling with the existing ones.
It already has that feature! :) It’s just not very obvious. If you click the small lock icon near the top, it will snap and to that difficulty so you can practice only sequences with that specific number of notes.
I was expecting this was a tool to help people who couldn't distinguish sounds in a noisy environment to train their ears. But its for musical training. (which may or may not help?)
Hey this seems like a nice tool. I would request if you can also add examples/demo for a listener before they begin the test, like intervals(what is P5, m6,etc how they sound), chords(major/minor chord in different octave), etc. That way listener would know about each facet of music, and then they can take the test.
The Android app link doesn't seem to work
I think we would be a lot more musically verbal as a society if our musical notation had a more objective foundation in math and reason. For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C. We have a 12 note system with only 7 names for them; 12 names would make sense, and even 6 names would make sense, but 7?
We could be teaching notes to children objectively like how we teach colors, but we're not.
Umm... did y'all not have music class in elementary school?
Literally everyone in my country did, and nobody knows theory except a subset of musicians, not even all of them. Thus highlighting my point that the theory is inadequate, subjective, and immature in nature.
That doesn't highlight anything except the tautology that music theory isn't taught in general education
Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.
Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.
But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.
It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.
I never had a music class at any point in school in California.
I agree, but it seems this is something that will never change, because of tradition.
I tried many times to "understand" music rationally, because I kept people use the term "music theory". I reached a conclusion that there is no "theory" whatsoever: music notation is a hodgepodge of various traditions stacked one on top of the other (we started with 8 notes but then realized that 12 would be better, for example, hence all the mess with flats and sharps). I actually feel better now knowing that you just have to accept it for what it is and go with the flow :-)
There is no "objective" foundation to music.
Mapping twelve letters onto a piano keyboard would then look something like this:
Which means an A major scale in this notation would be ACEFHJLA, which is actually less intuitive than understanding the circle of fifths etc. and arriving at ABC#DEF#G#A (to use this universe's notation)
>There is no "objective" foundation to music.
Well, there is a number of "objective" factors which play a significant role. For example, see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCsl6ZcY9ag
In your traditional system, if you want to play something a step up, you have to actually think about it; which notes will now become sharps, which won't, etc.
In my system (A though L, or more simply, 1 through 12), you simply add 2 to each note. It's easier to work about and isn't as rigidly defined by the culture it came from.
[delayed]
We actually have multiple names for all the notes - which have a 'reason' to exist. A B-double-flat and an A-natural, and G double-sharp exist, distinct for notational purposes... yes, it sounds dumb. Music IS arbitrary in a lot of ways.
For example: 12 tone equal-temperament was chosen/invented (nearly) (by Bach) over just intonation because of 'musical gags' like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Musical_Offering (also written by Bach).
Music making neat, orderly, mathematical sense is the struggle, and reality doesn't play nice with harmonics like we would like... (much like with irrational numbers throwing a wrench with Pythagoras' ideals) so stop being a Pythagoras :p
Music IS weird: no matter how you try to quantify it.
I agree that there are some quirks to music theory but ultimately I think it's a very good system that was been refined over hundreds of years.
As for your point about A->B being a larger interval than B->C. There are two half-steps in the white keys (B->C and E->F) because there are two half steps in the major scale! This way, you can play C to C with all white keys and get a major scale.
A major scale is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks in western music theory and it's encoded right onto the keyboard layout itself.
The oddities of music theory are no more strange than all of the strange things in the English language that we just shrug about and move on once we learn it.
>For example, A to B is a different distance than B to C.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solf%C3%A8ge might be easier for some people.
Haven't heard about CDEFGAE up until I was in my mid 20s trying to learn guitar (after 7 years of music school and musical calsses in regular school)
You're roughly describing Chromatone and their Muto method of notation: https://muto-method.com/en/index.html
Sure, if path dependency was were not a thing, this might make more sense. But it takes an extraordinary amount of time to really get good at music and you don't want to be the only person who speaks a completely different language to the people around you. So it makes sense to stick with what everybody speaks.