Once we have the Pitch Contour clear, how do we get more fine-grained? How do we figure out not just the direction but the distance from note to note? How do we make that “mental pitch ruler” more precise?
Remember that recognising notes with Relative Pitch is all about the relationships between pitches. Although theoretically any pitch distance is possible, and the exact pitches can vary around a note’s defining pitch (such as when sliding between notes, or applying vibrato to a note), in practice there are certain pre-defined steps in musical pitch. That means there are also set distances between pitches which we can expect.
With our “mental pitch ruler” analogy, it’s like if you knew that any distance you wanted to measure would be an exact number of centimetres, so you would only need your ruler to have centimetre markings.
The upshot of this is that (like with all Ear Training) developing our Relative Pitch involves recognising the different “types” or “classes” of distance, and learning the right label to put on each.
So even though it can seem overwhelming to think about all the possible relationships between all the possible pitches in music, in fact it all comes down to a limited number of “types” of distance. We can consider these our “building blocks” for pitch.
There are three types of building blocks we’ve found useful. Together they let you tackle any melody or harmony you might encounter. They are each a different way to think about the pitch relationships in music, and so each represents a distinct “mental model” or way of thinking about how Relative Pitch works.
Here we’ll briefly introduce each of the three to give you an overview, before they’re covered more fully in the dedicated chapters which follow.
Introduction to Solfa
The Solfa system is all based on the key of the music. If you’re not familiar with that concept, we’ll be covering it in detail later in the chapter, but here’s a simplified explanation for now: a given piece of music (or section of a piece) will have a particular set of notes it uses, called the “key”, and one of those notes is called the tonic or “home note” of the key. When we put the other notes in a sequence of ascending pitches with the tonic at the bottom, that creates the key’s scale.
With Solfa, we give each note in the scale a name. Not just any name, but a single-syllable, singable name, which is distinctive (i.e. we don’t use it for any other musical purpose—it always means “this particular note of the scale”). For example “do”, “re” or “mi”.
Why would we want to do that? Well, remember earlier, when we said that Relative Pitch lets us leverage how our ears and brain already understand musical pitch? In fact, more than anything else, we understand it based on how everything relates to the tonic of the current key.
By naming each note of the scale, we can begin to familiarise ourselves with the characteristic sound of each note in the scale, allowing us to start recognising them when we hear them.
Coming back to our Pitch Contour, the Solfa approach would allow us to spot where in that contour the home note featured, as well as identifying the specific other notes being used, just by the way they sound. Once we identify the key of the song (e.g. “C Major”), which we’ll cover below, we can also translate those Solfa names into the corresponding note letter names, to be able to write them down or play them on an instrument.
Introduction to Intervals
The Intervals approach is still all about the relationships between note pitches, but instead of relating everything to the tonic like we do with Solfa, with Intervals we can examine the distance from any note to any other note. For a melody, that would generally be from each note to the one before or after it. For harmony, that would be between the various notes which are happening at the same time, as well as between the “root” note of each chord compared with the root note of the next.
This is very much about making our “mental pitch ruler” more precise, learning to judge different distances with accuracy. However, as mentioned above, there are certain specific distances which are used in music, due to there being just 12 notes in an octave and typically only seven or fewer being used in a particular key or scale.
Here’s the clever bit about recognising Intervals: even though our end goal is to “measure” the distance, in fact we find that the various distances have characteristic sounds. So just like how Solfa lets us learn the characteristic sound of each note in the scale, Interval Ear Training lets us learn the characteristic sound of the various distances between pitches.
The names we use may seem a bit weird at first (for example “Minor Third”, “Perfect Fifth”, “Tri-Tone”, etc.) but these names are meaningful, not arbitrary, and just a little bit of theory will make sense of them for you.
In terms of the Pitch Contour, gaining Interval recognition skills will allow you to precisely determine the distances from each note to the next. And once you know the letter name of any single note in the sequence (which might be the tonic, but doesn’t need to be) you can determine all the other letter names too.
So by recognising each type of Interval, you can figure out precisely each note of a melody or of a chord.
Introduction to Chords and Progressions
Once you can identify individual notes heard one at a time, what about the combination? How do we handle harmony?
There are two components to this:
- Recognising different types of Chords e.g. major, minor, dominant seventh, etc.
- Recognising how these chords change over time, called “Chord Progressions” e.g. I-V-vi-IV or C Major, G Major, A Minor, F Major
Many styles of music (e.g. typically rock, pop, jazz) actually define harmony in terms of chords and progressions, but even those which don’t can generally still be handled using them.
We can learn to recognise the various types of chords based on their notes, using Solfa, Intervals, or a combination. For example you might hear “do”, “mi” and “so”, or you might hear “There’s a Major Third and a Perfect Fifth”—either one will reveal it’s a type of chord called a “major triad” that you’re hearing.
We can learn to recognise Chord Progressions by listening for the relationship of each chord to the tonic using Solfa, or identifying the distances between the root note of each chord using Intervals. In both cases we might have already sketched out the Pitch Contour of the chord movement as a starting point, and will be using our Chords skills to identify the quality (major, minor, etc.) of each chord in the progression.
Again, the system we’ll use is a Relative Pitch one, so depending on the task there may be an additional step of “translating” what we’ve heard into a particular key, to determine the notes’ letter names.
Convergent Learning
For a long time at Musical U (too long!) we taught Solfa and Intervals as two alternative approaches. Both can allow you to identify individual notes by ear, and they each have advantages and disadvantages.
Through helping many thousands of members to learn these skills, and continually exploring new ways to teach them, we made two crucial discoveries:
- For the vast majority of musicians, Solfa is easier to get results with, and lets you more rapidly start applying your skills to real musical tasks such as Playing By Ear and Improvisation.
- If approached in the right way, the two systems aren’t “either/or” alternatives. There is a “both/and” combination which is more powerful and effective than either one alone.
On top of that, Chord Progression recognition is best approached with a sense of Relative Pitch developed through Solfa and/or Intervals It can technically be learned in isolation—if you insist! .
In Chapter 2: Mindset we introduced the idea of “Convergent Learning”: that often in music, the best approach is not a single, focused straight-line—but rather some kind of smörgåsbord of activities, designed in a way which lets it all “add up to more than the sum of its parts”.
This is perhaps nowhere more true than with Relative Pitch Ear Training. As we continue, we’ll share the connections between these three types of building blocks, to help your conscious mind make sense of it all. But please don’t allow yourself to be a “completionist”. You do not need to cover every inch of each topic or skill before moving on.
Explore all three together, allow some space for the stew to simmer, and you’ll be surprised at the faster progress you’ll enjoy.
In the Autumn Season of Living Music, where we first really embraced this Convergent Learning approach for the three building blocks of Relative Pitch, our students saw greater results than the “isolated” approaches had ever allowed, and we saw a constant stream of surprise and delight, as working on one of the three somehow “unlocked” greater abilities in one of the others. The happy result was a strong, versatile, instinctive sense of Relative Pitch.
The 80% Rule
In everything that follows, there can be a great risk of perfectionism. Especially when Ear Training exercises are presented as some form of “quiz”, it can be hard for some people to settle for less than 100% before moving on.
Just like Convergent Learning can be the antidote to completionism, by revealing that the fastest route to your goal is actually to allow yourself some flexibility to move between topics rather than focusing on a single one for too long, there is also an antidote to perfectionism.
Naturally we do want to “get the answers right”, and it is important to make progress with one thing before moving on. But does that need to mean “100% correct”?
We’ve all been the victim of diminishing returns in our music practice, where you keep working away and working away at something, and it just feels like your improvement is getting slower and slower. Naturally the techniques of Chapter 6: Superlearning are a solution in many cases, especially relating to technique and repertoire. Ear Training is, by nature, a “fuzzier” skill, and particularly prone to a maddening speed of diminishing returns. So knowing when to “move on” is especially important here, if we are to stay motivated and enjoying fast progress.
In all our experience at Easy Ear Training and Musical U, we’ve discovered that there is a “sweet spot”. A level of competence which indicates you have mastered a certain skill or ability enough to move on successfully.
Going beyond this level is, in a sense, wasting your time—since further perfection can be gained faster by moving on to the next challenge, rather than spending more time on the same task. Moving on before hitting this level of ability may also waste your time—because you’re rushing ahead and trying to build on top of too weak a foundation.
We’ve found that “80% correct” is a very reliable rule of thumb for this sweet spot.
That could mean getting 80% of the answers right in a quiz. It could also mean “I’m not 100% reliable with it, but I can almost always do it.”
So for all the exercises and learning sequences suggested in the following chapters, steer yourself away from perfectionism and remember that once you’ve got something about 80% mastered, you’ll probably be better served by moving on than by trying to nail that final 20%.
If you prefer using 90% rather than 80%, I’m not going to argue with you :) And if you want to lean heavier into Convergent Learning, and jump around a bit more with “70% correct” as your rule of thumb, that’s fine too. Just make sure you’re allowing yourself that leeway to find your own personal “sweet spot”.
This duo of Convergent Learning and the 80% Rule are a powerful combo. For example, if you’re working on something and find that even getting to 80% correct is a real struggle and you just feel stuck, you could relax your target and move on to the next thing… or you could trust in Convergent Learning and jump to another Relative Pitch skill area for a while. Either one will release that “stuckness” and let you keep moving forwards with ease and joy.