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Hi all! I'm trying to wrap my head around how hearing melodies really works, would love to get your insights...

I'm an aspiring musician, my goal here is to be able to transcribe short ( 5 notes) melodies in a simple scale like pentatonic, instantly or near instantly.

I've been working on this daily for 6 months now, and I've reached another kind of roadblock.

First I got good at the interval trainer on tonedear.com, but realized this is a slow way to transcribe, because of the context switching: my interval songs are in a different key than the melody I'm transcribing.

Next I switched to scale degree identification. Using an app that sets up a tonal center with a short chord progression, and then plays a note from the scale. I sing back to the tonic and identify the scale degree. This took another 2 months but did help a bit. I'm still pretty slow though.

My question is... those of you who can do this, do you hear melodies as independent notes, where the scale degree pops into your head as soon as you hear it (2 1 3 or re do mi), or is more like hearing the notes relative to each other (one step down in the scale, two steps up).

This would help me decide whether to try to train more on recognizing melody shapes vs. more work on identifying scale degrees faster.

I've also heard one teacher recommend practicing to identify pairs of scale degrees in a tonal context, in essence developing a 2-note vocabulary internal database.

Sorry for the long post, I appreciate any feedback!

paul kesler
Apr 27, 09:25

One more question for you @Dima G .
When you do the Functional Ear Trainer, how important is singing the names of the degrees when singing back to tonic ?
I would assume pretty important, as it hammers in the name of the note you identified and are singing first.

Though I find I usually have to sing without names, then count (4 scale steps up to tonic = sol), then do it again with the names.

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Dima G
Apr 27, 11:55

@paul kesler i would suggest singing everything as much as you can at first. but you definitely want to eventually turn off the resolution and not even play it in your head. if you use solfege, it will probably take a few weeks before you’ll memorize the syllables themselves pretty well. interval barks is one of the most useful exercises on this website to also help with that.

on the ear training as a whole: this stuff takes a lot of time to master, especially to become useful in real life scenarios. i’m sure there will be room for me to get better even at the simplest concepts for years to come

my progress looked like this when i started this journey about a year ago:
- 1 month with functional ear trainer to be able to identify scale tones within the major scale
- 1 month to expand that to all keys and multiple octaves
- i think within another month i was able to remove the cadence entirely and identify 100 diatonic notes without mistakes and quickly.

since then i have been working on filling in the gaps, working on chromatics (which turned out to be incomparably more difficult), just getting faster at everything and more intuitive, and focusing less on artificial exercises and more on improvising and transcribing real music. what i didn’t anticipate is how big of a gap is between “just getting through exercises” to application, and that is what takes a lifetime to work on.

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Dugal Smith
Apr 27, 13:39

Thanks all. Very interesting posts.

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ToneGym
Apr 27, 12:37 in ToneGym Official

Congrats @Emma C for winning the Silver Ears Award!

ToneGym
Apr 26 in ToneGym Official

Congrats @Lavelle Romain for winning the Diamond Ears Award!

will ward
Apr 26

Congratulations :)

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Kathy Anderson
Apr 26

Congratulations - a huge accomplishment!

1 props

Joe Maissel
Apr 27, 04:53

A wonderful accomplishment. A lot of dedication. Way to go!

1 props

ToneGym
Apr 27, 00:48 in Basic Music Theory

Congrats @Kekus Macca for completing the 'Music Theory Basics' program!

Filipe Costa
Apr 26 in ToneGym Cafe

How do you approach Rhythmic Parrot?

I'm having trouble with this exercise, especially when I try to replicate something like 4 notes per bit, but only subdivisions 2 and 3 are played.

Are you who are comfortable with this exercise relying 100% on feeling or do you have a more mechanical approach, like counting or something like that?

Victor Wilburn
Apr 26

You need to be comfortable with subdividing the beat, first into eighths and sixteenths, but as the game advances, into triplets, quintuplets, and even septuplets. Once you have mentally ingrained what those things sound like and being able to count them, then it's easier to manage when beats or sub-beats are skipped (though I don't think I've ever encountered it skipping sub-beats of quintuplets and septuplets, and I'm at level 146).

Count-singing (e.g. 1-ee-and-uh 2-ee-and-uh, etc., for subdividing into 16ths) is always a good way to reinforce that sort of thing, and that can be done whenever you are listening to music. Count-singing while listening to music with funky rhythms that syncopate on a 16th-note granularity can be particularly helpful. The game does a lot of that sort of thing.

And then when actually playing the game, I try to reinforce auditory cues with visual ones -- e.g. I focus on watching the cursor advance, reinforcing the visual feedback of it crossing beat lines with the auditory feedback of the metronome and the beat itself. Engaging multiple senses helps with retention.

1 props

Terri Winters
Apr 26, 23:55

May be pretty simplistic, but you have to be very aware of where the beats fall. I'm pretty intuitive about doing it, but that is one touchstone I pay attention to when the exercise is played. Good luck -- stay with it -- it get easier!

1 props

ToneGym
Apr 26, 23:51 in ToneGym Official

Congrats @Lisa McGonigle for winning the Silver Ears Award!

Terri Winters
Apr 26, 23:53

Yeah! You did it -- keep going strong.

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