I am not trying to merely provide a service by producing better sight-readers for the choirs and ensembles. My goal is to produce musicians who can hear and think about music equally well - musicians who can understand and see what they hear, and hear and understand what they see. With that vision in mind, all activities must be coordinated in such a way that they all work towards that end. What skills am I trying to teach? There are different opinions about the purposes and goals of sight singing and ear training, so an aural skills teacher must decide which goals he or she is pursuing before developing a program of study. Over the past several years I have experimented with different strategies for teaching aural skills, all of which emanate from my basic beliefs about exactly what skills I am trying to teach, how to integrate them with written theory and how to do it in the most efficient way. Is there more to the study of triads than recognizing the four qualities as isolated events, and hearing which voice has the root? These are the questions and concerns that I will address here, and I will argue for a contextually-based approach to teaching intervals and triads in an ear training program. A similar situation exists with regard to triads. But at the same time, many aural skills teachers question their importance, or the value of the method by which they are most often taught. Nevertheless, the identification of intervals seems to be a major component of many ear training and sight singing texts, CAI music software, and presumably, most ear training programs. Many students do not do particularly well with random interval identification, but can do well with other aspects of aural analysis. Do they need to be proficient at hearing scale degrees and relationships within the context of a key? Most certainly. Do students need to be proficient at identifying random intervals before they can move on to something else? No, I don’t believe so. One vexing problem for many aural skills teachers is the study of intervals. This article was published in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy, VOLUME FIVE, No. It is a violation of copyright to download a copy of this article. If you can identify your starting note, and then identify your intervals as you progress through a piece of music, you're in good shape.Important note: Permission to add this article was given by the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Center for Music Theory Pedagogy at the University of Oklahoma. In my opinion, the most valuable skill set is a combination of pitch recognition and interval recognition. Harmonic minor scale: do re me fa sol le ti do That's what we have solfege for (do, re, mi.) If you want to be able to identify a perfect 4th, sing the opening of "here comes the bride" ("do - fa" going up). Training relative pitch, the ability to identify intervals, is more valuable in my opinion. If an elevator in your office dings at a specific pitch, you could identify it and memorize it. Orchestras tune to the note A every day, so many recognize that pitch. Training absolute pitch, the ability to identify a pitch out of thin air, is a matter of just memorizing a pitch through repetition. It depends upon whether you'd like to train absolute pitch (pitch recognition) or relative pitch (interval recognition.) I would advocate the latter. I like playing along with old movies myself. The tv thing is something I picked up from some guys when I was coming up. Just sight singing and transcribing from records is how alot of players learned to do it. Transcribing from records is great stuff, too. Play along with the jingles on commercials, play along with the background music in a scene, play along with the theme music for the shows.TV provides random melodies a-plenty to ear up and play along with Playing along with the television is great stuff, too. Find simple melodies to sight sing or take bits of the pieces you are working with and sing them Sing the bass, sing the melody (you might need to sing and octave below depending on how high it goes). Take one of your guitar pieces and sing one of the inner voices. When I was in music school, ear training and sight singing were the same course.
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