Extensible Ear Training App

Harmony & Theory
#1

I recently finished work on this ear training app. I’m not a huge fan of using apps for ear training in general as I think it removes a lot of the context that normal music has. However, I do think that it is a nice tool to have in your back pocket when commuting/traveling/etc. This ear training app is a little different. It has a pretty extensive level editor that allows creating a pretty large variety of ear training exercises. The existing levels are not really what I would advise for ear training (I’m not nearly good enough to be advising anybody), but should show some ways the level editor can be used. Currently the app is IOS only, but I made it in flutter so if you’re interested in joining the android beta let me know.

App name: Otonic

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#2

Interesting. I’m old school so I used books for ear training. Freshmen and sophomores in music school had to take courses in sight singing and ear training. A lot of the work was sight-singing short atonal pieces with the kind of rhythms typical of atonal music, which is to say, not something you could tap your foot to. Brutal but effective.

But this being North Texas, a very large music school and the home of the first jazz studies program in the world, there were a lot of jazzers, and they were the ones who really masterer the ear training stuff - because they had assignments to transcribe songs and solos. That’s what I would suggest for ear training.

TLDR: Transcribe your favorite songs

#3

I’m definitely sympathetic to the idea that transcribing songs is important (if not the most important thing) for ear training, but in my experience spending some extra time working on hearing scale degrees against a key center (or drone) has been beneficial. To my knowledge this has been practice in most of the world (south Asia specifically), and is essentially what the point of sight singing is. Unfortunately you can’t really sight sing or transcribe while commuting or on a plane. This app is a solution that; not ear training as a whole.