Once you get the hang of the Pitch Contour, develop your sense of Relative Pitch using the three building blocks, and practice finding the key and translating from relative to absolute pitches, you will be able to recognise the notes in any music you hear or play, entirely by ear.
This lets you play music by ear, with no need for notation. We’ll be covering Rhythm Ear Training too in later chapters, but you’ll probably find that mimicking a rhythm you hear is relatively easy—so as long as you know which notes to play, you’re all set! This can make jamming with other musicians far easier and less intimidating too, since you know you can always find a way to join in, even if you don’t know the music in advance.
It also lets you improvise more freely and creatively because (along with the Expansive Creativity framework you’ll learn in Part III) you start to be able to bring out any music you hear in your head (audiate) or sing directly on your instrument, so that your note choices don’t depend on strict rules or memorised patterns, but can be truly free.
Having good Relative Pitch will likewise boost your creative expression in Songwriting and composing by giving you a way to translate from sound to symbol and vice-versa. Again, you needn’t rely on patterns or guesswork to find what sounds good—you can simply imagine it, and write it down.
That sound/symbol connection also allows you to sight-sing or audiate from traditional (score) notation. Imagine being able to glance at a new piece of sheet music and know immediately how it would sound! In this case some Rhythm Ear Training will likely be required too, to help you translate from the rhythmic symbols to their corresponding sounds, but for most musicians it’s the pitch side that’s the biggest blocker. Relative Pitch Ear Training can remove that block for you.
And last but not least, developing your Relative Pitch will improve your Active Listening and your musical memory. The new “mental models” you’ll develop for understanding pitch relationships, as well as the more fine-grained “pitch ruler” you’ll have for identifying specific notes and chords, will create far more vivid and precise mental representations of the music you listen to and learn, as well as making it much faster to form those mental representations for any new music you tackle.
We’ll explore all of these applications more in Part III. For now, let’s continue to look at each of our three building blocks for Relative Pitch Ear Training.