When the average musician decides to “try ear training”, more often than not they dive head-first into trying to recognise Intervals. That happens due to the historic prevalence of Ear Training materials focusing on that topic, rather than because it’s necessarily a great place to start.
In fact, before we start practicing with Intervals and the other “building blocks” we’ll be covering, there is a much simpler Relative Pitch skill to put in place.
In Chapter 5: Active Listening we introduced the idea of a “Pitch Contour”: in any given series of notes (for example, a melody) the pitch can go up, go down, or stay the same. This creates a contour, the overall shape of the pitch movement over time:
When the series of notes happens to be a melody, we can also call this the “Melodic Contour”. Since we’ll also be applying this concept to basslines, chord root notes, and other cases, we’ll use the broader term “Pitch Contour”.
This is an extremely simple idea, but it proves to also be extremely useful. In fact, it’s turned out to be one of the biggest “Why did no-one ever teach me this?!” concepts we teach at Musical U. Our members often remark on how astonished they are that something so simple was never explained to them, even though it’s relevant and useful across a wide range of musical tasks.
The Pitch Contour is useful because it provides the “broad brushstrokes” sketch of a melody (or bassline, or other series of notes), without requiring any prior training. We’ve found that almost every musician who comes to us with at least a few months of music learning under their belt has little trouble immediately starting to sketch out Pitch Contours for the music they’re hearing or working on. In other words, this is a starting point for Relative Pitch which doesn’t require any Ear Training at all!
Above, we introduced the idea that you have a kind of “mental pitch ruler” which allows you to judge the distances between pitches in music, and that Ear Training can help you increase the granularity and reliability of those judgements. Think of the Pitch Contour as your starting point. It’s not very precise—we’re only judging direction, not necessarily even trying to judge the size of distances up or down. But you’ll probably find that it is quite reliable for you, even before you begin practicing with it.
You may never have tried doing this before, but when you listen to a melody (for example the vocal part in a song you love), can you hear when the notes are going up, down or staying the same?
When you stop and think about it, this must surely be a precursor to do anything more sophisticated like recognising the notes—and yet almost every musician who comes to us having tried to learn Intervals or Solfa has been skipping this step!
Showing the Pitch Contour
There are two main ways you can “show” the Pitch Contour:
- Draw the Pitch Contour. Just like in the diagram above, when you listen to a melody, or even when you’re reading one from notation, it’s instructive to literally grab a pen or pencil and a sheet of paper, and sketch out the shape of the pitch movement.
Don’t worry too much about the distances or scale of it all for now. If you can tell, for example, that the note it ends on is higher than the note it started from, then great, and by all means try to represent that in your sketch. But our goal is to simply capture the up/down/same movements between notes.
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Demonstrate the Pitch Contour with your hand. As you listen to or sing the notes, hold one hand out in front of you (you might like to point with a finger) and move your hand up and down to match the movement of the notes.
We’ll be exploring the “Hand Signs” method more when we cover Solfa, and this is a great stepping stone towards that. You’ll get some of the same benefit already, in terms of making a visceral connection to the pitches in music through your physical movement.
Start with simple melodies. You could, for example, sing or hum a nursery rhyme like “Mary Had A Little Lamb”, or listen to a piece of music with a clear and relatively slow-moving melody line. Try both methods and see which feels more natural, interesting or useful to you.
Practicing with Pitch Contours
As we continue, you’ll see various opportunities to use the Pitch Contour as your first step in a musical task. For example, if you’re trying to figure out the Solfa for a melody, make sure you first have a rough sense of the Pitch Contour. Or if you’re trying to transcribe music in traditional notation, make sure you know the Pitch Contour first. We also already saw in Chapter 5: Active Listening that the Pitch Contour is a great thing to listen for as part of your Active Listening habit. We’ll be making some specific suggestions for using it along the way, but this is a highly versatile concept which you’ll find becomes a frequently useful “first step” for you across many musical activities.
Like everything in Active Listening and Ear Training, at first figuring out the Pitch Contour will be a very conscious, step-by-step explicit process for you, but over time it will become instinctive and you won’t need to literally draw or demonstrate it physically. You’ll just automatically have an awareness of the Pitch Contour as part of your mental representation of the music.
So the rule of thumb is to “do it… until you don’t need to.”
Even once you’re skilled with the more precise forms of Relative Pitch judgement (using Solfa and Intervals), it can still be useful at times to literally sketch the pitch contour. For example, in the Play-By-Ear Process described in Chapter 14: Playing By Ear, a good starting point is to sketch out the Form of the music (see Chapter 5: Active Listening) as well as the Pitch Contour of the melody or any other parts you intend to figure out by ear.
The Pitch Contour can also be highly useful in creative tasks like Improvising and Songwriting, by serving as a constraint. We’ll cover this in Chapter 15: Improvisation when we explore Expansive Creativity, but the basic idea is that you would decide on the overall Pitch Contour of the melody you’re creating, and then fill in the details of exactly which notes are used. By setting the constraint of following an overall Pitch Contour, you limit the possible note pitches, while still leaving plenty of creative freedom within that.