Intervals are often where a musician starts, when they discover Ear Training. Unfortunately, in most cases, that’s also where they end up stopping! As you’ll discover in this chapter, Intervals are an enormously useful building block, and a powerful way to develop your sense of Relative Pitch—but they come with certain properties which can also present major challenges to the uninitiated.
Frankly, it took us quite a while at Musical U to figure out exactly where Intervals best fit in, for the average music learner eager to gain the benefits that a strong sense of Relative Pitch offers. In many ways, the approach we’ve settled on (which has proven to be reliably effective across a wide range of musicians who’ve studied with us, particularly inside the Living Music program) mirrors my own journey with Intervals.
When I first discovered musical Ear Training and started looking for resources to help me, the bulk of what I found focused on Intervals, and predominantly from a music theory perspective. Learning to recognise intervals provided me with a huge leap forwards in my musicality. For the first time I was able to unlock abilities like Playing By Ear and Improvisation which I had always thought beyond me.
The experience of learning interval recognition, however, made it very hard to “enjoy the journey”! Thankfully, I enjoyed the payoff enough to persist, and the early mobile apps I developed (originally created solely to help myself, before I made them available for others) made the process a bit easier and smoother. But both the learning of Intervals and the use of them still always felt like hard work.
Partly this was due to taking a brute-force “massed repetitions” approach, which (as discussed in Chapter 6: Superlearning) typically wastes up to 90% of your practice time. Partly, it was because I was taking a purely “Head and Hearing” approach, learning the theory and doing abstract drills and exercises. The lack of Hands (i.e. application) in particular was a big missing piece, as mentioned in Chapter 7: Ear Training when we introduced Integrated Ear Training as the solution. But it was also partly due to not truly understanding the nature of Intervals, and the pros and cons as compared to taking a scale-based approach (such as Solfa).
When I discovered Solfa, I found that my existing interval skills let me progress very quickly, and enjoy the practical benefits of that approach immediately. Suddenly Playing By Ear, Improvisation, and other Relative Pitch tasks like transcribing just flowed in an easy, natural way. In the previous chapter, when I described how mind-blowing my first Kodály lesson was, a big part of what made that possible was the fact that I already had a sense of Relative Pitch which was, in a way, well-developed.
That was my first clue that Intervals and Solfa could be complementary. Up until then, we had taught them as two separate approaches. In fact, due to the heavy bias towards Intervals in all the existing Ear Training material available, we first introduced Solfa simply as a method for learning Intervals!
Over the following years, as we experimented and developed novel approaches at Musical U, we came to better understand the relationship between the two, how each is helpful in its own particular way, and how the two can be effectively combined as complementary “building blocks” you can draw on when working with Relative Pitch.
Overview
We will follow the Learn, Practice, Apply approach of Integrated Ear Training. We’ll go through these roughly in sequence in this chapter, and you will probably want to read through the chapter in order to begin with—but remember that when it comes to actually doing Ear Training, these three are best done as a short loop: learn a little (e.g. by re-reading part of the chapter), practice a little (doing an exercise or two from the chapter), try applying it (doing one or more of the applied activities at the end of the chapter).
Learn
In this chapter we’ll first introduce you to the theory (Head) of Intervals in the sections “What Are Intervals?” and “How Intervals Work”.
Practice
Then in “Getting Started”, we’ll show you some simple ways you can start to learn the core skill of interval recognition (Hearing and Heart).
Along the way we will also relate Intervals to Solfa, so that you can see how these two sets of building blocks can work together, and the advantages of combining both approaches. If you haven’t yet read Chapter 9: Solfa or started learning Solfa, don’t worry if some of those bits don’t make sense or use unfamiliar terms for now. You might like to circle back in future when you do add Solfa to your musical toolkit.
In the “Start With Aiming For…” section we’ll suggest the most useful types of interval to focus on learning first, and introduce each in turn. Using the Basic Drill and the guidance on how to recognise intervals from the “Getting Started” section, you’ll be able to start distinguishing between the most common types of interval found in music.
Apply
Finally, in the “Additional Exercises and Activities” section we’ll go beyond the Basic Drill with Singing exercises and applied activities (Hands), to help you make real, practical use of your new interval recognition skills.