ear training

I am a new composer and i was wondering, is ear training neccessary as a composer, and, if so, what is the best (easiest?) way to become ear-trained?

micah pianoforte

I think ear training is quite important - mainly because music is all about sounds, and ears are also all about sounds (well mostly) (also for licking) (ewwwww)

That been said, I don't believe you need perfect pitch to be a good composer, but you do need to have a good sense of sound, and since you'll most probably work with the western notational system and under western music circumstances, it'd be good to start with the elements that consist and have been prevailing in this western musical tradition.

what is the best (easiest?) way

I think this is a fundamental idea that you have to get over - what's good is usually not what's easy (or what's not easy).

The best way is to learn your scales, learn your intervals, learn your modes, learn your chords, learn chord inversions, learn your rhythms, learn your sounds and do dictation.

There is a really good book by Hindemith on aural skills, which goes from the very basic of clapping a rhythm to learning how to write down very chromatic rows just by listening to them.

Other than that, it takes a lot of work, a bit of work, some work, more work, and work, and effort, effort, effort, effort, and lastly time. Training your ear is exactly that - training it. Just as you can't possibly master the violin in one day or one week, you can't train your ear perfectly in one day or one week - it's that kind of tacit knowledge that requires a lot of effort and time to sink in and become part of you.

As a last tip, if you do a little bit every day, but you do it every single day, in the long run you will see incredible results - this is the magic of routine.

And of course, if you don't think you're disciplined enough to do that, get a friend of yours to help you out, or a teacher of yours. Ask someone, and they'd be glad to help you.

Hope that helps :)

and ears are also all about sounds (well mostly) (also for licking) (ewwwww)

Actually that would be the tongue. You must be doing it wrong!

So you mean, what, you.. you stick out your tongue, out from your mouth? and you touch someone with it? is that what licking is? really? that's disgusting!

Listen to juji, I echo everything he said...cept for the ear thing...actually...I echo everything he said.

You don't really need perfect aural skills. You might be able to copy out a Mozart Symphony after the second hearing, but that's not being a composer. It might help you to write down the intervals and chords you hear in your head, but a piano can remedy that easily.

Lastly, I don't think aural skills can be improved. In my experience, you're either good at it, or not. But on the whole it makes no difference. I have met fine composers with atrocious aural skills. One of them couldn't clap a rhythm if it had syncopation in it.

rautavaara: You don't really need perfect aural skills.

Yes, you may need some, but not an extraordinary hear, I Think what you already have is good enough...

Violin Players need much more than a composer could need...

or maybe I'm misunderstanig ....what do you exactly means with "ear-training" ?,

The ability to decifrate and recognize chords, beats ? or what is playing a instrument inside an orchestra ? The dB sense of your hear? the frequency-range ?

Aural training is of critical importance to a composer and anyone telling you otherwise is lying.

You don't need perfect pitch. There are plenty of good composers who didn't have it, like Stravinsky. But improving your aural skills with ear training can only make you better; being able to listen to a piece of music and really understand exactly what is going on is a critical skill.

The best way to improve aural skills is to work on your recognition of intervals, chords, rhythms, etc through exposure. Fiddle around on a piano and try to find out what different note combinations sound like. Listen to music and try and hear and understand the chord progressions. Check with a score to see if you were right. If so, great! If not, oh well, at least you know now and can hopefully recognize it in the future.

Also, singing can really help your aural skills. Join a choir if you're not in one already. Learn to sing melodies on paper without hearing them first. These skills can only make you a better musician.

There is a very good program for ear-training called EarMaster

I've been using it for a few years, and it has anything from learning you to read notes, recognize scales, chords, intervals, rhythm dictation, just about anything, my teacher actually gave me that program and it is really helpful.

Lastly, I don't think aural skills can be improved.

:huh:

Three years ago, I couldn't distinguish a minor sixth from a major ninth.

Now I can name the notes of a chord if you play it to me and tell me the name of any of the notes, and I can almost whistle an A quite accurately out of thin air (but "quite" means some of the times). Also, I can now sight-sing a lot more easily (I couldn't, 3 years ago), and I can sing and dictate at the same time (just easy stuff, for the moment).

I was worse, I got better. (= improvement.)

What personal experiences have you had that gave you this idea, that aural skills cannot be improved/developed?

Yeah, honestly...

It's a matter of training. Some people may have a headstart due to various reasons, which might create the impression that "they're just good at it" while others aren't, but that's just wrong, and for some people just an easy excuse not to bother with it. I certainly hope I got better at listening analytically and all the other eartraining stuff than when I was a five year old kid. And I'm pretty sure I have.

The primary benefit isn't that you can write down a Mozart Symphony after one hearing. It is a training in connecting a sensual impression (such as music played live) with an intellectual abstraction (such as musical notation, or a verbal description of sounds). As composers, we always have to deal with this translation, be it in order to pull something out of a piece of music we hear to learn for ourselves, be it for putting down our musical ideas in the form of abstract notation, or be it to help ourselves gain new musical ideas through abstract concepts by imagining how they might translate to sounds.

Learning how to notate a melody we hear or to clap a rhythm we see isn't the actually important thing about it. Those are just vehicles that help us in the general process of connecting musical abstractions with actual sounds, which may in reality take quite different forms.

Every one of Gardener's posts is a gem.