Music Intervals: Train Your Ear To Identify Them!
Music Intervals: Train Your Ear To Identify Them!
Good morning, this is Duane. Today, I’d like to talk a little bit about ear training -Music Intervals: Train Your Ear To Identify Them. There are great ear training courses you can take from a wide variety of sources. I’m thinking particularly of Berklee School Of Music in Boston; they have a wonderful course on ear training. It’s spendy, but it’s worth it. Some of the top musicians take that course. Of course, there’s others in many other schools. Today, I’d just like to tell you my history. I never took a course in ear training until much later after I really didn’t need because I’d already learned what intervals and chords sound like.
Let’s take a look at intervals today. I think you can train your own ear to identify intervals. It’s important for any musician, particular piano players, to be able to hear the difference between intervals because then you know what’s going on when other music is playing, when other musicians are playing; then you can pick it up.
Let’s start with the closest interval. That’s the second. You can associate that with … Kind of like that. Second is the closest possible 2 notes, and it sounds like the start of that tune that we all play. Chopsticks. When you hear that kind of sound anywhere, you know that’s a second. A third is the next thing in the song. It’s also the middle part of that song. When you hear sounds like that, those are thirds. Those are thirds.
Let’s skip fourths for a minute because those are a little harder. Let’s go to an octave. I always associated an octave with going from one floor … Say we’re on the main floor, we go up to the second floor. This would be the second floor, that would be the third floor and fourth floor and so on. When I hear that sound, the kind of same sound right there … That string is vibrating exactly twice what that’s vibrating at. We won’t get into the science of sound right now, but just take my word for it. There is an A and this is an A; this A is going twice as fast as that A exactly. If you’re piano is in tune, it’s exactly. When you hear this kind of sound, those are octaves.
Half way between an octave, in other words between the lower floor and the upper floor, you have a fifth. I learned to remember that … I thought of that as a mezzanine. Have you been to some stores that have a mezzanine? Between the first and the second floor, there’s a partial floor called a mezzanine. When I hear that open sound like that, I think of a mezzanine. Another way you might identify is it sounds kind of oriental, doesn’t it? The reason it sounds that way is because a lot of oriental music is based on the pentatonic scale, just a 5-note scale. You have a lot of fifths involved.
Let’s go into a sixth. When I grew up, there was a song called “This Old House” and it’s ends like this “Going to meet the saints”. It ends on a sixth, so whenever I heard that sound, I knew it was a sixth. This takes time to do, but if you concentrate on the various intervals, you can learn to identify them like that. Compare them to things in life, associate them in other words. Any kind of memory of course teaches association. If you associate that with Chopsticks, that with the next few of Chopsticks, that as a mezzanine and that as a sixth … It sounds right or, like I said, the end of My Old House. That’s an octave and so on. You’re going to begin to hear those and train your own ear. It doesn’t cost anything to do that because you can do that at home on your own piano.
A major seventh, or a seventh, sounds like that. It’s kind of distonate like a second, but you can tell it’s not a second because those are close together. You can hear that they’re close together. Those are separated, but if it sounds like a second that’s separated, that’s a second. I like to visualize it like this. It’s a major seventh on Misty. When Misty starts “On my own”, that’s a major seventh.
We’ve covered everything except the fourth. The fourth, to me, is the hardest thing to identify. When you hear that … But I learned to identify it in terms of Da-da-da-da. What was it? The Addams Family that does something that went da-da-da-da or “Walk up the stairs”? Think of that: “walking up the stairs” or “walk down the stairs”. That sound is always the fourth. If you hear that and you can think about walk up the stairs or walk down the stairs, that’s a fourth.
Let’s review a little. That sound’s a second. That sound’s a third. That sound’s a forth. That’s a fifth, or a mezzanine. That’s a sixth. That’s a major seventh. That’s an octave for the next floor. I would train your ear to hear those, just using the white keys, before you do anything else. Then you can go back. After you can successfully identify the second, then you can go to a minor second. That has an even tighter sound, doesn’t it?
If you play these repeatedly … As I was ear training myself, I would do that. I would play the intervals over and over again, to get the feeling of it. Sixth. Minor sixth. Fifth. Diminished fifth. And so on. Just repeat that. Play the notes over and over again on your own piano. Then, have somebody in your family play them like that and you don’t look at the keyboard, but just listen and see if you can identify those notes. You can know a lot of your own ear training without ever taking an ear training course. I’m not saying don’t take it. Of course, if you have an opportunity to take an ear training course, you do it, but before you do that, you can learn a lot on your own. I think you’d be surprised how fast you can learn to identify various intervals.
Tomorrow, I think we’ll talk about identifying chords by ear, in other words training your ear to hear various chords, but today I just wanted to specialize in intervals.