Ear Training for the Tone Deaf

I suppose I could be called tone deaf, if by tone deafness you mean an inability to reproduce notes accurately after I have heard them sung or played.

This is one of two definitions of tone deafness. The other is being unable to correctly hear relative differences between notes in the first place. I think I hear the notes in music and the intervals between them just fine, since I enjoy music without reservation. But when it comes to reproducing those notes and intervals, it's hit or miss for me — mostly miss.

The latter malady "is most often caused by lack of musical training or education and not actual tone deafness," says Wikipedia. Again, check. I've had very little musical training.

One way to remedy that is through "ear training," a process of exposing the ear over and over again to various pitches, intervals, and other musical entities and asking the student to identify what he hears. I have found a web site that does that quite well, and for free. It is www.good-ear.com.

The meat-and-potatoes of it is the Ear Trainer. In addition to the beginner lessons I am currently using, it offers further lessons in intervals, chords, scales, cadences, jazz chords, note location, and perfect pitch.

The beginner lessons in intervals are simple in concept. The Ear Trainer plays a succession of two notes, and you have to decide whether they constitute a prime (i.e., a unison), a major third, a perfect fifth, or an octave. Sound easy? Try it. You may find it's a lot harder to achieve perfection — 100 right out of 100 — than you thought.

It gets even harder when you avail yourself of the option not to always use the same first note, but to change the pitch of the initial note at random. You do this by removing the check mark next to "fixed root." You can also change from the sound of an ordinary piano to that of a guitar or violin, an electric piano, or a Rhodes piano, whatever that is. There are three selectable volume levels and three available tempos.

I cheated. I went to Ricci Adams's MusicTheory.net site and popped up the ersatz keyboard window, located here. It allows you to click on any of the piano keys to hear its sound, and also to put red dots on the keys you are most interested in. Using Ear Trainer's default "fixed root" mode, I played various keys until I identified the root note — it changes each time you initialize the Ear Trainer — and then I put red dots there and on the associated major third, perfect fifth, and octave notes. When Ear Trainer played an interval that I was uncertain about, I experimented to find which red-dot key played the same second note. That was a big help.

Even so, my best score so far is 90 out of 100. It will take a lot more ear training to cure my tone deafness, I fear.


Addendum: Since I wrote the above, I have practiced some more. I managed to get a score of 99 out of 100 on the simple intervals trainer using a fixed root note, so I advanced to varying the root note. That's an order of magnitude harder for a tone-deaf person such as myself. Plus, I found that the two octaves of Ricci Adams's virtual piano were not enough to contain all the notes in the training examples, so I've moved on to Wai-man Wong's Java Piano at PianoWorld.com. It spans three full octaves. The same virtual piano keyboard is also available here.