Interval Ear Training

In this episode, Greg Ristow and David Newman talk about the value and role of intervallic ear training, why it's time to move beyond Here comes the bride, and ways of teaching intervallic hearing that build fundamental skills for sight singing and dictation.

Links:

Karpinski, Gary. "A Cognitive Basis for Choosing a Solmization System," Music Theory Online, Vol. 27, No. 2. June 2021. https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.21.27.2/mto.21.27.2.karpinski.html

 

Transcript

[music]

0:00:21.2 Gregory Ristow: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the Creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training, and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

0:00:35.5 David Newman: Hi, I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University. And I write code and create content for uTheory.

0:00:43.4 GR: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow. I conduct the choirs at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and I'm the founder of uTheory.

0:00:49.9 DN: Thank you listeners for your comments and episode suggestions. We love to read them, send them our way by email at [e-mail], and remember to like us and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

0:01:01.7 GR: So today we'll be talking about interval ear training. And interval ear training is central to many teachers' and textbooks' approaches to sight singing and dictation. But the title of this episode is maybe a little bit misleading because research in music cognition suggests that for most common aural skills, ear training tasks we process notes by their relationship to a tonic or by their position in a scale rather than by actually hearing adjacent note to note intervallic relationships. So in our conversation today, we'll look at this research on how we hear and the role that intervals play in that hearing. We'll talk about why classic techniques we're teaching intervals can actually undermine students' reading skills. And we'll look at ways of teaching intervals that instead compliment and strengthen students' aural skills. It's a lot to get through in the course of an hour. [chuckle]

0:02:03.2 DN: It is.

0:02:04.5 GR: But David and I have agreed to play particular roles on this. So I'm going to, I'm gonna be sort of the the playback, keep us on track role and David's gonna be the the color commentary, [chuckle] role.

0:02:14.0 DN: Playing to our strengths.

0:02:15.4 GR: Playing to our strengths for sure, for sure. It is hard to talk about or even to think about how we hear, so much of how we hear music is really innate, that we don't, especially for someone with a well-developed ear, "how do I know how I know what I'm hearing?" is a hard question to answer.

0:02:40.1 DN: Yeah.

0:02:40.8 GR: And fortunately we have scientists and researchers who've been looking at exactly this question for a little, I don't know little over 40 years now. And what they have pretty consistently found is that when someone who is experienced in a particular musical culture, and so let's say broadly Western music, music that exists within the notes on a Western piano.

0:03:17.7 DN: An equal tempered scale.

0:03:19.2 GR: Yeah. A tempered major-y minor-y or rotation of its scale as opposed to for instance, some of the Turkish collections that have more notes in the scale than we have and notes that don't exist on our piano. So when someone is encultured in a musical system, when first they start hearing notes, the primary thing that their brain does is seek to determine a central pitch, what we would call a tonic and that's known in music cognition as the primacy hypothesis. The idea being that David, if I throw a few notes at you, before you're going to do anything with those notes, your mind is going to say, "what could potentially be tonic given these notes?" And we're gonna hold onto them.

0:04:20.8 DN: We contextualize it.

0:04:22.5 GR: Exactly. We seek to find the context in which that's occurring and will tend to hold onto our belief of that central note as long as we reasonably can even through the first few notes that contradict it.

0:04:39.1 DN: Yeah. I even think this is central to so much of why we enjoy music. And so if you enjoy music, you probably do this.

0:04:47.8 GR: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. And it should be said we're saying this and let's just imagine that if I'm someone with really strong absolute pitch. And even in those cases although yes, someone with absolute pitch will know immediately, yes I'm hearing these particular letter names. They are also still working to contextualize them within some sort of tonal framework. If that's something that you're interested in reading about, one of my favorite articles on this is by Gary Karpinski and it's his, it just came out a couple of years ago in Music Theory Onl