Interval ear training

Interval recognition is the base layer of ear training. Chords, melodies and progressions are all made of intervals, so getting these solid makes everything above them easier.

Start with four

Trying to learn all twelve at once is the most common way to give up. Start with intervals that are far apart in character:

1. Perfect octave — obviously the same note, higher.
2. Perfect fifth — open, stable, hollow.
3. Major third — bright.
4. Minor third — the same shape, darker.

Once those are reliable, add the perfect fourth, then the major and minor sixths, then the sevenths, then the seconds. Minor seconds and tritones tend to be easy to notice and hard to name, so leave them until the framework is in place.

Reference songs, and their expiry date

Attaching each interval to a song you know is the standard starting technique, and it works — see the table of reference tunes.

It also has a ceiling. Recalling a tune and comparing takes a second or two, which is fine for an exercise and useless in a rehearsal. The aim is to hear a perfect fifth as itself, the way you recognise a friend's voice without checking it against anything.

Most people move past the reference stage within a few weeks of daily practice. If you are still humming Greensleeves after six months, you are probably practising too rarely rather than doing it wrong.

Practise all three forms

An interval can arrive three ways, and they are three separate skills:

• Ascending melodic — lower note first.
• Descending melodic — higher note first.
• Harmonic — both together.

Descending is consistently the weakest for most people, because tunes we half-remember tend to go up. Practise it deliberately.

Harmonic intervals are hardest of all, since there is no movement to latch onto — just a colour. That one comes last, and it comes.

What good practice looks like

Short and daily. Five to ten minutes every day beats an hour on Sunday, comfortably. This is a recognition skill, and recognition is built by frequency of exposure.

Randomised. Practising in order teaches you the order. Random order is the only thing that tests recognition.

Feedback immediately. Guessing and never learning whether you were right trains nothing. The correction is where the learning happens.

Sing back what you hear. Producing an interval with your voice builds a different, more durable representation than recognising it does. You do not need to sing well for this to work.

Then chords

Once intervals are solid, chord quality follows quickly, because a major or minor chord is identified by its third — which you can now hear.