The Play-By-Ear Process

Playing By Ear has historically been one of the main reasons a musician will pursue Ear Training, but there was always a big problem. I encountered this myself, very early on in my own Ear Training journey.

I had been elated to discover there was a thing called “ear training” which could finally let me level up my aural skills and have a chance of recognising notes and chords by ear. But after weeks, months, and ultimately a couple of years of diligently doing the exercises from the books and courses I’d bought, I had a painful realisation: I still couldn’t actually do very much, except pass ear training quizzes.

As we talked about in Chapter 7: Ear Training, this comes down to following an isolated Ear Training approach, which in my case was worsened by a focus on Intervals rather than Solfa (as discussed in more in the corresponding chapters).

Shifting to an integrated Ear Training approach at Musical U meant introducing an “Apply” step, after “Learn” and “Practice”, where the musician actually did something musically useful with the core recognition skills they’d been practicing, and Playing By Ear was one of the most interesting, practical and fun activities to include in that Apply step.

It was another couple of years however before we really refined our approach and codified it inside the Living Music program as the Play-By-Ear Process. As soon as we did, it was crystal-clear to me looking back at my own journey, that it was kind of crazy that I’d been hoping to start playing music by ear… without having any kind of method or process for doing so! That’s what I’m excited to share with you in this chapter.

The Play-By-Ear Process we developed is very simple, but very powerful. It hinges on two insights:

1. Just like Playing By Ear is itself a spectrum of ability levels rather than an all-or-nothing skill, the act of “playing a song or piece by ear” is a process of gradually figuring out everything that’s happening musically, rather than something you necessarily do in one fell swoop. This is why we refer to it as a process rather than a method or a single skill.
2. There is a missing middle step in the way most musicians think it must be done, and including this middle step makes all the difference.

Right now that first point might feel like a cop-out to you, like when I said Playing By Ear begins as “figuring things out by ear, step-by-step”. But just like that, what begins as a gradual process can, over time, become an instantaneous leap to the “full, correct answer”. By treating Playing By Ear as a process we allow ourselves the time and space to develop the skills we need to play more and more complex music by ear directly.

The second point probably has you wondering “Well, what is that missing middle step?” We know from our definition of Playing By Ear that the first step must be “hear something” and the last step “play that same thing”. What comes in between?

If you’ve read Chapter 6: Superlearning, the answer won’t come as too much of a shock. There, we discussed how traditional music practice tends to look like an endless cycle of “Plan, Play, Plan, Play, Plan, Play, etc.”, and incorporating an extra step of “Reflect” changes everything, by allowing you to refine what you Plan and how you Play.

Here, the missing step is to engage with the music you heard. Rather than try to go directly from ear to instrument (from Hearing to Hands), we give ourselves the opportunity to analyse and identify what we heard (Head and Heart).

The core of our Play-By-Ear Process is therefore a sequence of:

This 3-part process can be applied to each and every part of the music in turn, and may take repeated cycles to fully get to “the answer”. It’s also not a strict 1-2-3 sequence, you will find yourself naturally moving between the three activities fluidly as you figure things out by ear. However you employ them, these same three steps are all you need to tackle any music you wish to play by ear.

It may help to think of this analogy: when an artist paints a picture, they don’t start in the top left corner and paint each square centimetre in turn. They sketch out the most important elements, then gradually fill bits in where they instinctively feel is next. They may well return to earlier areas to refine them further. Eventually they feel like the picture is complete. Similarly, with the Play-By-Ear Process we can use Listen-Engage-Express (which we’ll abbreviate as LNX) repeatedly, and focusing on different elements of the music, to gradually fill in the full picture of what we heard.

Listen

In the Listen stage of the LNX process we are absorbing the musical material we wish to play by ear. Note that it is “Listen” and not merely “Hear”! As we saw in Chapter 5: Active Listening, there is a big difference between hearing something and truly listening to it, and we can make good use of the Active Listening approach of “listening with a question in mind”.

The music we are working with may be live music, it may be a recording, or it may be music we remember or imagine in our mind’s ear. The same LNX process can be applied in all these scenarios, although when first starting out you will likely find it easier to work with recorded material since that can be easily be played back repeatedly and will be exactly the same each time.

With our 4-D Active Listening framework we analyse and interpret musical sounds across four “dimensions”:

• Timbre: the overall tone, “sound colour” or characteristic sound of an instrument or voice.
• Dynamics: the volume (loud vs. quiet) of the sound.
• Pitch: how high or low the sound is.
• Rhythm: the pattern of note durations and silences.

We are listening for the properties of a note or set of notes in each of these dimensions, as well as how they vary over time. We can also consider the bigger-picture Form (what changes and what stays the same from one section of the music to the next) and Texture (at any given time, what are all the layers of musical sounds present).

To help us explore music in these terms, we use the technique of “listening with a question in mind”. For more on this, see Chapter 5: Active Listening.

Any experience you have with this kind of Active Listening will be hugely helpful to you in Playing By Ear, primarily because it allows you to more clearly and thoroughly hear everything that is happening in a piece of music, and tune your ear and attention in to a certain part.

When it comes to Playing By Ear, our main focus will be on the Pitch dimension. This is because matching the Timbre is quite a different and distinct skill (which we will explore more in Chapter 17: Expression), and mimicking Dynamics and Rhythm both tend to come far more easily to musicians without any dedicated practice required. The biggest challenge for musicians in Playing By Ear boils down to “identifying the note pitches being played”.

In the Listen stage of LNX therefore we will want to use our overall Active Listening skills to help us focus in on the particular part of the music we want to play by ear (for example, the vocal melody) and then listen intently to each of the note pitches being used.

Engage

In the Engage stage, our goal is to get a firm grip on what we heard, and perform some kind of analysis to help us translate it into a form we can easily Express.

As discussed earlier, the Engage stage of LNX is generally the missing piece in musicians’ attempts to play by ear. They try to jump straight from Listening to Expressing (i.e. “hear and play”). While that can work, it’s very analogous to the “brute force” approach to Ear Training discussed in Chapter 7: Ear Training i.e. it’s far harder and slower than it needs to be, compared with equipping your musical mind with the understanding and building blocks required to make sense of everything.

At first this will be a conscious process, but it can become more and more subconscious/instinctive over time. This will depend on the complexity or sophistication of the music—think back to the simple “clap back” and “two note echo-back” examples given in the introduction: no “Engage” step would be required for you to do either.

There are many different ways we can Engage with the music we heard, including:

• Musical knowledge and music theory.
• Audiation and Singing
• Movement
• Pitch Contour
• Finding the Tonic
• Building Blocks
• Vocabulary

Which of these you use will depend on how familiar and experienced you are with them (or want to be), and you will have the opportunity to discover for yourself in the exercises later in this chapter which you find most useful. These are all covered in more detail elsewhere in the book, so here we will just look briefly at each in turn to explain how they can be used in the Engage stage of LNX.

Musical knowledge and music theory

Your conscious, thinking mind (Head) may well have plenty to tell you about the music you just heard. For example being familiar with common meters, scales and modes, common choices in songwriting and composing, the conventions of the genre, etc. can all inform the way we process and interpret the musical sounds we hear, both consciously and subconsciously. * When scientists have used MRI scanners to analyse brain activity during music listening, with trained musicians versus non-musicians, they find that while non-musicians listen with the right-side brain area (associated with more abstract and holistic processing), musicians listen more with the left-brain area (associated with both analytical processing and language). For more, see Dr. Molly Gebrian’s fascinating paper “The Differences Between Musicians’ and Non-musicians’ Brains”.

Audiation and Singing

The “dynamic duo” of Audiation and Singing are our top recommendation for the Engage stage. Why? Because they allow you to “get a grip” on what you heard, giving you the opportunity to then analyse it to your heart’s content.

One of the biggest challenges in Playing By Ear is that music is a time-based artform. Unlike a painting which you can stare at without it changing, music is constantly on the move!

By audiating (hearing back in your mind’s ear) or singing/humming the notes you just heard, you not only confirm that you really heard it clearly. You are able to repeat it, again and again, gradually figuring out the exact notes used.

Assuming you’ve got the hang of the fundamental Singing skills covered in Chapter 4: Singing, we’ve found that a powerful principle to keep in mind is the idea that “if you can’t sing it, you probably haven’t really heard it clearly enough yet”.

Movement

If the Rhythm side of things is more complex or challenging, or if you simply want to connect more deeply and instinctively with the music, allowing your body to move with the music as a way to Engage is highly effective.

There’s also clapping: can you clap back the rhythm? There’s dancing, or more broadly simply “moving to the music”. And there’s “air playing” in the spirit of “air guitar”, where you mime playing the music without your instrument to hand. These are all great ways to engage by really connecting physically with the music. They take little or no learning or practice, but deliver vast amounts of musical information to your brain through your body. More on all these techniques in Chapter 17: Expression.

Pitch Contour

Having a clear sense of the Pitch Contour (as introduced in Chapter 8: Relative Pitch) is a great first step to identifying the note pitches. After all, if you don’t even know when the notes go up, down or stay the same, how can you hope to identify exactly which notes they are?

Finding the Tonic

In Chapter 8: Relative Pitch we discussed the prime importance of the tonic note in music, its relationship with the key and scale being used, and introduced a process you can follow for finding the tonic by ear. This will typically provide a huge clue to all the note pitches being used, and is a valuable thing to focus on early in your Engage activities.

Building Blocks

In Part II we met three types of “building blocks” for understanding and recognising note pitches by ear: Solfa, Intervals and Chords/Progressions.

Although these aren’t required to identify notes by ear, they provide a massive accelerator for you, and your skills with them need not be complete or perfect for them to greatly enhance your success with the Engage stage. In fact, if you’ve been through the exercises in those chapters, you will have already had a lot of practice with simple forms of Listen-Engage with a small number of notes!

Transcribing what you heard is also a great stepping stone towards playing it, giving you a way to gradually assemble and refine the notes in a concrete way. You can use the Pitch Contour, Solfa, Intervals, Beat Blanks and Stick Notation as fast, easy ways to jot down what you heard, without necessarily going as far as traditional staff notation.

Vocabulary

In those same chapters we discussed the idea of “vocabulary”: larger sequences of note pitches which you can recognise as a single unit. For example the common mi re do ending of phrases in Solfa, or using arpeggios as a kind of reference song to help with Intervals and Chord Types.

As you Engage with the music you heard, you may well notice familiar “vocab” jumping out at you, as well as having the opportunity to gather more vocab as you practice Playing By Ear over time.

Engage Example

As mentioned, you are free to use any combination of the above to Engage with the music you heard, but here is an example to help illustrate the idea:

• You Listen to a short melody.
• You audiate the melody, hearing it in your head clearly.
• You imagine the Pitch Contour in your mind—it’s ascending, then staying around the same level, and then descending to further down than it started.
• You sing the melody out loud to confirm you really have a handle on the sequence of notes.
• As you sing, you use Solfa to recognise one note as do, the tonic.
• Based on the accompaniment you heard and how the first note blended so well with the chord, your theory knowledge and Chord Progression skills suggest to you that the first note was a mi or a so.
• From there you sing short sections of the melody, coming back to that do to keep a firm sense of the key, and use Intervals and Solfa to determine the other note pitches. You sing the full melody in Solfa, and then Listen again to check it matches.

Express

Once you have Listened and Engaged, it’s time to Express your own rendition of the music. You may have already begun to Express in certain ways—for example singing, clapping, dancing, transcribing—during the Engage stage. Now the final step is to translate what you’ve Listened to and Engaged with onto your instrument.

This is a combination of translating from Relative Pitch to letter names (as discussed in Chapter 8: Relative Pitch and other Part II chapters) and any technique considerations for your instrument (for example the best register to play it in, or determining left hand vs. right hand note allocation on piano/keyboard).

One useful point here is that you don’t necessarily need to play the music in the same key you heard it in. So for example, if you’ve confidently determined the Solfa identity of each note, you can choose any note to be your tonic, and play the notes on that basis. What you produce won’t sound exactly the same as your source music, but like we discussed in Chapter 8: Relative Pitch, it will still be recognisably the same melody. Depending on the musical context and your focus, this may be an acceptable final outcome! Or you may wish to then apply the process for Finding The Key By Ear (from that same chapter) to determine the tonic which will match what you originally heard.

It’s also worth noting that you may wish to bring any degree of your own musical creativity into the Express stage. In all the subsequent Part III chapters we’ll be exploring different ways to “make the music your own”, and although you might think of Playing By Ear as a black-and-white “did I get it right or not” kind of activity, of course it’s entirely up to you whether your goal is to play it back exactly as you heard it or not!

This is particularly helpful to keep in mind if you’re working with source material that doesn’t directly correspond to the instrument you want to Express on. For example, hearing a full multi-instrument arrangement and wanting to perform a solo rendition on your instrument, or knowing that you want to perform a song in a different style than the original recording. Don’t feel like you’re only “winning” at Playing By Ear if it’s a note-for-note match with the original. It’s up to you what you want the “Express” stage to involve.

At first the Express stage typically looks like a combination of activities, some circling back to Listen and Engage, and a spirit of “figuring it out” more than simply picking up your instrument and playing it directly.

Over time as you gain experience and develop your skills, you’ll move along the spectrum towards just “pick up and play”. But note too that it all depends on the complexity of the music! With a simple melody with certain constraints (e.g. our earlier example of using just two melody notes) you may already be able to jump straight to that end goal, while with other music it may for now be more of that “gradual painting things into place”.