Aural Skills Help

I’m behind in my aural skills abilities and I want to know what I should be doing to improve.

My goals:

I want to be able to transcribe any music I hear.

I want to be able to listen to music and hear the underlying harmonies as I listen.

I come up with music in my head and I want to be able to translate what I’m hearing in my head and notate it down.

I want to be able to accompany other musicians and play by ear.

Currently:

If you played a simple chord progression for me, I probably couldn’t tell you what it was.

I can only transcribe the most simple and basic of melodies.

Identifying descending intervals are a problem for me.

I know that sometimes I confuse the sound of an octave with the sound of a perfect fifth and minor chords with diminished chords.

I can’t play by ear.

Here’s what I’m working on now:

I sing major and harmonic minor scales up and down.

I sing them in 3rds. Do mi re fa……. Do la ti sol la fa….

I sing the major and minor arpeggios up and down.

I sing a I-IV64-I-V6-I progression in major and minor Do mi sol mi do ----Do fa la fa do---do mi sol mi do---ti re sol re ti---do

I sing Do-te-le-sol-la-ti-do (natural minor down to sol, melodic minor back up to do)

I have the Ear Master software, and I try to identify intervals, chords, arpeggios, progressions, scales and so on.

I do a little sight singing out of my sight singing book. When I sight sing, I like to linger on a piece and perfect it. I’m always worried about whether or not I sang it in tune or not. My thinking is that if I sang it out of tune and didn’t correct it, I might continue to do it that way and learn the wrong sound of an interval.

When sight singing, do you linger on a piece, polish it up, and then move on to the next, or do you sight sing a piece and move on when you finish, correct or not, going through many different examples in a single sight-singing session?

Should I sing my exercises slowly or speed up? I tend to sing them very slowly, playing each note on my piano after I sing it to make sure I was in tune.

Should I stop that and start singing scales, arpeggios etc. all the way up and down without checking? (yeah I’m kind of obsessive compulsive about singing in tune and making sure I’m in tune)

So what should I start doing to improve my ear?

Are there any exercises that I should be doing?

Any good books?

Often aural skills gets cut short because I devote so much time to practicing and studying piano and theory. How much time should I devote to it a day? About how long until I can achieve my goals?

http://www.musictheory.net/ this will be a lot of help in that, there's this tool on here where you can practice identifying intervals, this is what I'm using to help me become perfect pitch, I'm not there yet, but I'm getting to partial pitch thanks to this and singing. So, musictheory.net and singing are probably your best friends here...that and practice with patience

do lots of dictation... here's a site with a bunch of dictation exercises http://www.uh.edu/~tkoozin/musicet/index.htm. Should keep you busy. As for sight singing, I usually sight sing a piece and move on because then I can do the same exercise a couple days later, since I didn't commit it to memory by polishing it up.