Many of the abilities mentioned in the answers to “what is musicality?”, and featured in the list of 15 skills in Chapter 1: Musicality rely on an ability to recognise pitches by ear.
That could be identifying the notes of a melody so that you can play it on your instrument without needing to look up the notation or learn it in advance. It might be improvising on-the-fly without relying on strict rules, patterns, or guessing to tell you which pitches to play. Perhaps for you the focus is transcribing the music you love, or composing your own, whether on paper or with software. In each of these cases, being able to recognise note pitches by ear is central.
In Chapter 5: Active Listening we defined four “dimensions” of music: Pitch, Rhythm, Timbre and Dynamics.
It is possible, but generally not necessary, to do dedicated Ear Training exercises for Timbre or Dynamics—Active Listening alone will serve you well there.
Rhythm skills do certainly benefit from Ear Training, and we’ll be covering those in Chapter 12: The Beat and Chapter 13: Rhythm. This is particularly true for making the connection between sound and symbol, so that you can write down rhythms you hear in notation, or sight-read new rhythmic notation and produce the corresponding timing accurately. We’ll also see how it can open up more rhythmically-precise playing, and rhythmic creativity. However, when it comes to Playing By Ear, Improvisation, and Songwriting, we’ve found that for the vast majority of musicians, the Rhythm side actually comes relatively easily.
That’s why we’ll begin this part of the book by focusing on Pitch recognition skills, which tend to be the biggest barrier between the average music learner and being able to play by ear, improvise, write music, jam, and more.
Naturally, this is most relevant to those who identify primarily with having a Creative or Jammer Musical Core, but if you’re firmly in the Performer camp, don’t tune out. You’ll find that developing your ear for Pitch has wide-reaching positive effects on all the music you learn, play and perform.
When you develop your ear using the “building blocks” of Pitch you’ll discover in Chapter 9: Solfa, Chapter 10: Intervals and Chapter 11: Chords and Progressions, a whole new world of musical abilities will quickly open up for you.
Overview
In this chapter we’ll introduce Relative Pitch and the three types of “building blocks” you can take advantage of to develop your own sense of Relative Pitch. We’ll introduce a process for identifying the key of a piece of music by ear, which will allow you to “translate” from Relative Pitch into the corresponding letter names. Finally, we’ll talk briefly about some applications and benefits of Relative Pitch, which will be covered more fully in Part III of the book.
As with many other topics in Musicality, if we are to truly understand what does work, we must first get clear on our definitions, and address any common-but-faulty approaches which might otherwise lead us in the wrong direction.
When it comes to Pitch, the first and most important thing to discuss is our choice of Relative Pitch as the approach to take. In particular, distinguishing Relative Pitch from “Absolute” or “Perfect” Pitch.