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Epic Ear Training
Improve your ability to learn and understand music by ear with these lessons and exercises from the Joe Luegers Music Academy.
Epic Ear Training
Perfect Intervals: The Movie
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Can I talk about literally only 3 musical intervals for the length of a movie and give you 4 variations of exercises to fully learn the sound of them? Yes, and I could have made this a 3-hour Marvel epic. Today we are diving into perfect intervals and getting to the bottom of why they think they're so perfect.
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Introduction/Lesson
SPEAKER_03If that note is a C, this would be an F. And if that's an F, here's a B flat. If that's a B flat, these notes would be a D and an A played at the same time. All of these notes lit up in my head instantly, and I don't have perfect pitch. I don't even have adequate pitch. In today's lesson, I've got nearly an hour of repeatable ear training exercises to help you develop your ability to identify intervals. You want to learn how to play and understand music using nothing but your ear? This is a learnable skill, and I've got the resources to put you on the right path. Welcome to Epic Ear Training. Please welcome our host, marginally celebrated local earfluencer, Joe Legers. Yay. Hey everybody, we'll be doing a deep dive into perfect intervals today and exploring the limitations of non-functional ear training. Basically, it's a normal Friday night for me. This topic was voted on by my patrons on Patreon, and you're more than welcome to pitch in your ideas for next month if you support my work for as little as $1 a month. I've got some housekeeping to go over before we begin, so if you don't care about me as a person, feel free to go ahead and skip a minute or two. Go ahead, it's fine. So my goal this year was to release one of these videos slash podcasts once a month, but like every other New Year's resolution I've ever had, I fell out of the habit when things got busy in April. Some of the stuff I've been up to is playing guitar for a college production of Dear Evan Hansen. The guitar part in that show is good and not necessarily hard to play, but on every single song I was tuning some strings down or tuning some strings up, or changing strings because of all the tuning abuse, or putting on a capo, or moving the capo to play a single chord, or even putting the capo on across four strings and leaving two others open. So basically in April I forgot how to read music and had to learn it all over again. I also prepared a 120-piece children's choir for their spring concert and it came out alive. Easter also happened in April, which is the Super Bowl for church organists. Although they have told me to stop yelling touchdown at the end of all my postludes. What I'm trying to say here is that the mornings when I normally work on YouTube have recently been spent drinking coffee and just staring at the wall. The good news though is that I'm back with a new goal of releasing an episode on the first day of each month. I figured that this makes it easier to remember when to check your podcast app. It also gives you a new concept to practice each month. And this time I'm sticking with my release schedule until I get distracted by something new, like a video game or a rock that's shaped weird. So let's talk about intervals. Also, let's welcome back all the bad people who skipped ahead to this part because they don't care about me. A musical interval is the distance between two pitches. Here's a big interval. Now here's a small interval. Because so much of ear training is essentially using your ears as an auditory ruler, assigning unique names to these intervals and learning how to recognize them by sound is a very good skill to have. People also generally seem to enjoy interval ear training because there is a very clear answer bank. There are a lot of things that can go horribly wrong with melodic dictation, but if I asked you to name this interval, there are really only so many possible answers you could give. Now, any interval can sound pleasant or unpleasant depending on the context, but when you're first learning, it does help to sort intervals into general categories ranked by consonants versus dissonance. Perfect intervals are the most consonant, characterized as having a stable or restful sound. They also have the most simple frequency ratios. For example, an A near the middle of the piano vibrates about 440 times per second or at 440 Hz. If you go up an octave from that note and play the next A, it would vibrate twice as fast at about 880 Hz. So the ratio of an octave would be 2 to 1. And this would still be true if you were starting on a C or a B sharp or even a D double flat. Compare this ratio to the tritone, which is one of the most dissonant or unstable sounding intervals. The frequency ratio of a tritone is about 64 to 45, and if you really listen closely, you can hear a somewhat wobbly sound, which comes from the vibrations of the two notes not being very aligned. This is especially pronounced when you play it in a low register because they're vibrating slower. The three perfect intervals are the perfect fourth, perfect fifth, and the octave. Let's do an overview of what each perfect interval sounds like, and then we'll jump into some exercises. An octave is the most perfect of all intervals with its two to one frequency ratio. An octave up from C is another C. And an octave down from C is another C. Octaves always share the same letter name. The root word octa comes from the Latin octo, meaning eight. An octopus has eight tentacles, an octagon has eight sides, october is the eighth month, an octane has eight hydrogen atoms, obviously. If you play a major or minor scale, the eighth note is when the letter names begin to repeat. Thus you have an octave. Octaves are separated by 12 half steps. The song Somewhere Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz begins with an ascending octave. I also like to use the guitar riff from My Sharona as an example because it is just two notes of an octave going back and forth. If you think of the stereotypical funky disco-esque bass line, it probably sounds something like this, which has every note bouncing back and forth between its octave. It's kind of difficult to find good examples of melodies that feature descending octaves. Or most, or really most large descending intervals for that matter. After doing some research by consulting my initial gut feelings and doing a Google search for five seconds, my guess would be that large descending intervals are uncommon because of how awkward they are to sing. Our voices tend to go flat when moving down, and so much of music is based around the human voice. So that's what my first instinct is, so it's right. Harmonic intervals are when the two pitches are played simultaneously or in harmony. Octaves are so in tune that they almost don't sound like two notes at all, especially when you're hearing them through phone speakers. Listen to me sustain a note, and then slowly fade in a note at a higher octave. Notice how the change in sound is almost imperceptible. Perfect intervals and octaves tend to not add very much, um, I guess you could call it brightness or darkness to the sound of a note. It's almost more like they add added weight. A perfect fifth is the second most perfect interval with a three to two ratio. To find a perfect fifth, you can go up seven half steps from any note. Twinkle Twinkle Little Star begins with an ascending perfect fifth. I also used to always use the top gun theme for listening tests, even though I've never actually seen the movie. For descending fifths, I like to use the Flintstones theme. A harmonic fifth is basically what guitarists call a power chord, although power chords typically have a doubling of the root on the top. Perfect fourths have a four to three ratio and span five semitones or half steps. Ascending, I like to remember the tunes Here Comes the Bride. Or Hedwig's theme from the Harry Potter movies. Put them together and you get Harry Bride. Descending, you can remember the bass line from Queen's Under Pressure, which they totally ripped off from Ice Ice Baby. I also like to use the timpani line in Strauss's um also sprock Zarathustra, which you might know as the 2001 A Space Odyssey theme. Uh, after the rising part in the strings, listen to the timpani or kettle drums, just bouncing back and forth between a perfect fourth. I've even heard the perfect fourth categorized as a dissonant interval by some people, but they're all dead now, so don't listen to them. Here, I'll play a bunch of random perfect fourths or perfect fifths in succession, and ask yourself if some sound a whole lot more tense than others. To me, it all just kind of sounds like the same hollow, weighty quality. See, they're all perfect in my book. Think of it this way: if you invert a perfect fifth, which is when you move the top note down an octave to the bottom, or vice versa, you get a perfect fourth. So C to G is a fifth. G to C is a fourth. All perfect intervals stay perfect when you invert them, and I'd argue that their tonal quality doesn't change all that much as a result. To tell fourths and fifths apart as harmonic intervals, I'd like to imagine fourths as part of a suspended chord, which can have the upper note resolve down by a half step. This is exactly what happens over and over and over in the song Pinball Wizard by The Who. It's just an endless string of suspended fourths resolving down. Oh, isn't that nice? Before we start our exercises today, let me remind you of a few things. Uh remember that the video edition has all of the answers and notation displayed on the screen in case you're totally lost and need some extra support. Uh by the way, do you like that? I haven't heard any complaints. Um, so let me know in the comments if you'd rather not have the answers displayed, or if you even look at the screen at all when you're taking these tests. Uh let me know and I'll I will happily ignore you if I don't like your answers. Also, at the very end of this lesson, I'll be talking about memorization in the listener mail section, which I think is an especially good one today. So I will see you there.
Level 1 Exercise Instructions
SPEAKER_03Level 1 exercises. Fixed root perfect intervals starting on middle C. For this exercise, I will play 10 ascending intervals, 10 descending, and 10 harmonic all beginning on middle c. You've just got three choices here. Are you hearing a fourth, a fifth, or an octave? For now you can use the tunes I talked about earlier to arrive at an answer. But don't forget that we're measuring distance here. A fourth sounds smaller than an octave, because it is. You've got this
Perfect Intervals starting on Middle C
SPEAKER_03ascending intervals starting on middle C. Question one answer octave C to C Question Two Answer Perfect Fifth, C to G Question Three Answer The Perfect Fourth C to F Question Four Answer Octave C to Con Five Answer Perfect Fourth C to F Question Six Answer Perfect Fourth C to F Question Seven Answer Perfect Fifth C to G. Question Eight Answer Octave C to C. Question Nine Answer Perfect Fourth C to F Question Ten. Answer Octave C to C Descending Intervals Starting on Middle C. Question One Answer Perfect Fourth C to G Question Two Answer Perfect Fifth C to F. Question Three Answer Octave C to C Question Four Answer Perfect Fifth C to F.
SPEAKER_01Question Five.
SPEAKER_03Answer Perfect fifth C to F Question tenct fourth C to G Harmonic intervals the bottom note is always middle C.
SPEAKER_01Question one Octave C and C Question Two Perfect Fifth C and G. Question Three Perfect Fourth C and F. Question Four Perfect Fifth C and G. Question Five Octave C and C Question Six Perfect Fourth C and F. Question Seven Perfect Fifth C and G. Question Eight Perfect Fourth C and F. Question Nine Octave C and C Question Tenfect Fifth C and G.
Level 2 Exercise Instructions
SPEAKER_03Level two Exercises. Non-functional perfect intervals. Do all of the same stuff you did in level one, but this time we are starting on random pitches. This is what I mean by non-functional. None of these notes are related to a tonal center. They're just little points of sound floating around in space. You might be wondering what the point of this exercise is when we live in a world full of tonal music. Um I don't know. As you go, pay close attention to which intervals you tend to get mixed up on. Is there a certain category you mess more answers in, like harmonic intervals? If you're having trouble with descending intervals, just sing them back in reverse and now it's ascending. If you're having trouble with harmonic intervals, try singing the notes individually. If you don't want to sing, then try crying about it.
Non-Functional Perfect Intervals
SPEAKER_03Ascending intervals. Question one, starting on C Answer Perfect Fourth C to F. Question two starting on G. Answer Perfect fourth G to C. Question three, starting on C sharp Answer Octave C sharp to C sharp. Question four, starting on B flat Answer Perfect fifth, B flat to F. Question five, starting on E flat Answer Octave E flat to E flat. Question six, starting on E. Answer Perfect fifth, E to B. Question seven, starting on E flat. Answer Perfect Fourth E flat to A flat. Question eight, starting on Bswer Perfect fifth, B to F sharp Question Nine, starting on A flat Answer Octave A flat to A flat. Question ten, starting on F sharp Answer Octave F sharp to F sharp. Descending intervals. Question one, starting on F sharp Answer Perfect fifth, F sharp to B. Question two, starting on C sharp Answer Octave C sharp to C sharp. Question three, starting on G Answer Perfect Fourth G to D. Question Four, starting on C Answer Perfect Fifth, C to F. Question Five, Starting on A Answer Octave A to A. Question Six Starting on Eswer Perfect Fourth E to B. Question Seven Starting on Dr Perfect Fourth D to A. Question eight, starting on B flat Answer Perfect fifth B flat to E flat. Question nine, starting on C Answer Perfect Fourth, C to G. Question ten, starting on Bswer Perfect fifth, B to E. Harmonic intervals. Question one The bottom note is C sharp. Answer Perfect fifth, C sharp and G sharp. Question two. The bottom note is C sharp. Answer Octave C sharp and C sharp. Question three. The bottom note is B Answer Perfect Fourth B and E. Question four. The bottom note is B flat. Answer Perfect fifth B flat and F. Question five.
SPEAKER_01The bottom note is D Answer Octave D and D.
SPEAKER_03Question six. The bottom note is E flat Answer Perfect Fourth E flat and A flat. Question seven. The bottom note is F Answer Perfect Fourth F and B flat. The bottom note is A.
SPEAKER_01Answer Octave A to A.
SPEAKER_03Question Nine. The bottom note is C. Answer Perfect fifth C to G. Question ten. The bottom note is A flat Answer Perfect Fourth, A flat and D flat.
Level 3 Exercise Instructions
SPEAKER_03Level three exercises. Functional perfect intervals and major keys. I'll play a melody and a major key and you tell me what the very first interval is. If the last two exercises were easy and this one is impossible, then you've got some work to do, bub. Go and learn where all of these intervals exist between scale degrees. Octaves are easy because every note has its own octave in all but the weirdest scales that people who want to look smart use. Perfect fifths exist up from every degree in the matrix scale except for seven. And down from every degree except scale degree four. Fourths are the opposite, naturally occurring from every degree except four. And down from every degree except seven. The purpose of this exercise is really just a settle of grudge I have what someone have never met, and people probably never even listened to this. In my first epic ear training video, I mentioned that functional ear training is by far the best type of ear training. And intervals aren't necessarily a useful starting point in comparison. Just a comment. I can tell that this video is excellent just based on the thumbnail. No kind of music by avoided intervals. That's like learning how to drive with a car that has a tent and you have to wear sunglasses. Okay, first of all, that's exactly how I learned how to drive, and I've barely ever hit anyone with my car as far as I know. Also, judge for yourself. You might find that all the little tunes and tricks you were using before no longer feel relevant. After all, intervals can feel dramatically different depending on where they are being used on the scale, the rhythm they're being played with, the underlying harmonies, and even the orchestration. So if I start a melody with a perfect fifth, are you gonna start thinking Star Wars or twinkle twinkle little star in your head to learn an entirely different song? Uh probably not. Hopefully this exercise can be a step toward hearing and using intervals in the real world, which us musicians sometimes forget exists.
Functional Perfect Intervals in Major Keys
SPEAKER_03Question one. The key of C major. Scale degree three moving up to scale degree six.
Level 4 Exercise Instructions
SPEAKER_03Level four. Just so you know, any of the minor scales are fair game here. I might use a natural minor scale, which is basically a major scale with a flat third, sixth, and seventh. Or I might be using a harmonic minor scale, which is like a major scale with a flat third and sixth. I can't remember if I used the melodic minor scale in any of these examples or not. Uh but that scale is really just a major scale with a flat third. I also might be mixing up these scales, which is extremely common in minor key music. So I'm not going to list where perfect intervals exist in all of these scales. Just do it yourself. Play a minor scale and count up five notes from each note in the scale. When do you get a perfect fifth and when do you get something else, like a tritone?
Functional Perfect Intervals in Minor Keys
SPEAKER_03Question one the key of A minor. Question two the key of E minor. Scale degree one moving up to scale degree four. The melody began with a descending perfect fifth, scale degree five moving down to scale degree one. Question four The key of F sharp minor. Scale degree flat three, moving down to a lower scale degree flat three. The melody began with a descending perfect fourth, scale degree five, moving down to a lower scale degree two. Question ten. The melody began with a descending octave, scale degree one, moving down to a lower scale degree one. Question eleven the key of G minor. The melody began with a descending perfect fifth. Scale degree flat seven, moving down to scale degree flat three. The key of D minor.
Listener Mail: Memorization Tips
SPEAKER_03So just here writes, What tips do you have for quick memorization of music? I feel like I often spend way too much time just to memorize one or two pages of my music for choir, and want to know if there's any way to cut that time down. So to answer your question, there's really two layers to this. How can you go about memorizing music quickly and effectively? But also I want to add, how can you solidify that memory so that you retain it long term and in high pressure situations like performing? So, first of all, we memorize music the way we memorize anything, by finding patterns, by deeply understanding the material, and by chunking information. And all of this is true no matter what instrument you're playing or if you're singing in choir, like you mentioned. Basically, when you're playing music, you don't want to be thinking note, note, note, stuff, stuff, stuff, shape, shape, shape. Um you want to understand the music that connects it with something and makes it more likely that you actually memorize it. So for a choral piece, uh, for example, you could learn it on Soulfetch or scale degrees like um one, two, three, four, five, um, do re mi fa so. By the way, it's 5 30 in the morning, so if I'm not singing great, uh deal with it. Um you could also learn the piece um by singing the counts of the meter. So if you're in 4-4, you could go like 1e and a two and three and four, like that. You can learn the form of the song. So um, when do parts of the song repeat? You know, find those patterns. Is this piece A section, B section, back to the A section? What you're doing here is taking lots of information and condensing it down into smaller chunks of information. What's interesting is this this can actually slow down the learning process and memorization process a lot if you're not used to it, but eventually it speeds it way up. So if you analyze a few songs deeply uh with scale degrees, Roman numeral, chord symbols, the counting, stuff like that. At first it'll be really overwhelming and take a lot of time because you're not used to it. But eventually you just start to digest music this way, and it makes it way faster to learn. Um, you also want to be utilizing your practice time wisely. Um, I don't really teach piano a whole lot anymore, but when I did, I would have a student uh memorize a Bach prelude, a piece that's you know maybe one minute long, and that's it. Months would go by and they just still quite wouldn't have it memorized. And I'll talk to them and be like, you know, um if you memorize two measures a day, we're talking five seconds of music a day. Uh you could have this memorized in a few weeks, and they'll they'll always kind of be like, Oh yeah, that makes sense, and then they'll show up the next week and still not really know it. And I'm not saying they weren't practicing, and this is just a very human thing to do, um, and most people are guilty of it. But when a lot of people practice, they sit down and they play it all the way through, and then they think, Well, uh, hope it's better next time, and then they move on. Um, when really what you should be doing is big picture, small picture, big picture. So if I'm learning a piece or trying to memorize it, I'll just kind of sight read through the whole thing, and then I'll think, okay, what is my goal today? Because I want to walk away knowing I got a lot better at at least one thing. Otherwise, what are you doing? Why are you practicing? Um, so I might memorize two measures and and really just nail those two measures, uh, learn them inside and out, and then I just walk away. And then the next day I review, memorize two more measures. And it seems slow, but actually, this is the fastest way you can learn music is by um goal-based practice, is what I'm saying. Another point I'd like to make is the more music you have memorized, the easier it is to memorize more music. So I've worked with a lot of people who found me on YouTube uh over virtual lessons, and I always ask them the same couple of questions to kind of get uh oriented of where to start. And what is really interesting is one of my questions is always, how much how many songs do you have memorized? And the people who are really struggling with ear training, their answer is almost always like, Oh, I, you know, maybe two or three, uh, but not all the way through. You know, guitarists who don't play in in bands, which was me in middle school and part of high school, which is, you know, most musicians starting out are extremely guilty of this. So if you ask a guitarist how many songs they have memorized, usually it it's like, I've spent the last year working on cliffs of Dover, and I know this part, and uh I know this riff, and I think I remember the chords from part of this song. Because it's like you're always chasing after the next shiny, like big challenge. But think about how much it would improve your memory to have 50 easy songs memorized, especially if you stay within the same genre. So if you start learning um like reggae songs, you learn 50 reggae songs, pretty soon you'll start listening to songs and you'll be like, oh, I don't even have to learn this. I know it. I can hear what's going on because I've recognized these patterns from songs I've learned before. If I memorized 20 songs by Mozart on the piano, uh pretty soon I'm I'm gonna start seeing the same stuff. I'm gonna be like, oh, you've got the Alberti bass in the left hand, you've got your scales jumping up and down in the right hand. Um, and you just, you know, you don't this will not happen unless you have a very big repertoire of memorized music. I actually keep uh an Excel sheet of all the songs I have memorized. Musicians are very resistant to being um organized. It's like, you know, why should I have to do this? I'm an artist. Um and you know, to be fair, the number one goal of music, I feel, should be to enjoy your life and to have fun. And if you don't enjoy being organized, uh, okay, I get it. Uh, but on the other hand, I also don't think it's very fun to just beat your head against a piece of music for a long time and come away not actually knowing the song. I think it's more fun to improve. So that's why I've actually kind of grown to like these very neurotic uh practices that I've gotten used to over the course of my life. Final thing I want to say about memorization is how do you actually practice memorization to make sure you retain it? Because I think uh a lot of us have been in situations where we think we have a song memorized, and the next thing you know, you leave your bedroom and you go to play it for somebody, and turns out you don't know it. And can you imagine what it's like in a in a formal education setting? Uh, you know, when I was in college, you I think I had a song down really well, and then you go to play it in a room full of stony-faced professors who are better musicians than you'll probably ever be, and who are writing down every minute microscopic problem with uh your performance, you know, you're in that situation and you're like, oh, it turns out I don't have this memorized at all. So I took uh organ lessons from a really amazing teacher, and organ was not even my primary or secondary instrument. Um, but my teacher was Douglas Reed, and he had me write down at the front of my uh organ method book, 10 memorization strategies. And every now and then I happen across it, I'm like, oh man, this list is good. Like, I don't have really anything to add to it. I'll go ahead and throw a picture of that list up on the screen in the YouTube version of this. Now, some of these uh are very much piano or organ specific, but a lot of them also could be applied to any instrument or even just uh for a vocalist. So, number one, practice slowly with a metronome. If you run through a piece quickly and you make a bunch of mistakes, and then you run through it full speed again the next day and make a bunch of mistakes, what you're actually doing to your brain is reinforcing the connections between neurons that just make it more likely you're gonna make another mistake. You're practicing mistakes. Uh, number two, practice hands separately. Obviously, you could apply that to the piano or the organ. You can actually do it with a guitar too. If I'm having trouble with a really fast picking pattern, um, I map out when I'm changing strings and jumping between strings, and I'll actually just practice the picking on its own with open strings. Uh or if it's a really difficult left hand part, like a weird chord change, I'll just um make the chord shapes with my left hand and switch them back and forth over and over and over. Number three, sing the voice parts while playing. So if I'm learning a song on the piano, um, I might sing along to the bass line while I'm playing it. And this kind of forces your ear to notice some things and ignore other things. Um, practice on a quiet registration. So I'll practice a piece of music with my keyboard turned off, or I'll play something on the electric guitar not plugged in with a lots of noise and stuff going on in the background, so I basically can't hear myself. And this makes you mentally practice. It puts the music in your head and you in your ears where it really should be in the first place. Uh I might skip through a few of these that are more like classical oriented or organ-oriented. Uh number nine, starting places. Be able to start from any place in the music. Don't always go back to the beginning and start at the beginning when you're practicing. Because if you mess up in a performance, that is not an option. You got to keep going. Number 10, um be sure or be able to think through the entire piece of music away from your instrument. Uh, we often neglect the idea of mental practice. You know, let's say you have an hour-long drive by yourself. One really good thing you could do is put on a playlist of the songs you have memorized and just imagine the songs on your instrument in your head. Um, this is what I do if I have a lot of music to learn, like I'm learning the musical, or I have to memorize three hours of music for just kind of a um a gig playing like pop songs that are fairly simple. Um, but you can do a lot away from your instrument. If you're a choral singer, can you um record yourself singing your part along to a recording and then just kind of passively listen to it in your downtime? Um, you can make massive progress doing this, it doesn't have to be a formal thing all the time. Um, so I think that is enough of me talking. Thank you for coming to my Joe Rant and please enjoy a slow drum fill leading into a power ballad about intervals. Bye.
SPEAKER_02We learned about interval and made some friends along the way.