Prolobe Online Absolute Pitch Ear Training

Is there anyone out there with really good relative pitch that can help me with this?

I'm trying to listen for chord inversions. I know that you need to first hear the home base note and relate it to the lowest note which is the inversion. However, how do you relate the home base note to the lowest note? how can you tell that the low note is a 3 or a 5?

Forget chord inversions. Instead, go straight for the jugular and start listening for chord function. Weren't you the one who wanted to learn how to hear all possible chord changes? Well now's your chance. I recommend you record three samples for I, IV, and V in C major with these exact voicings:

CEG
BDG
CFA

now, try to identify them when played at random. A pretty trivial exercise, right? You can add more chords in various inversions as you go along.

basic as it is what you're developing here is the ability hear chords as single units, instead of each chord as three individual units -- this is the beginning of harmonic listening. Funny thing is random pitch drills never develop this ability to hear entire chords as single units. These are the words of music (as opposed to syllables), and as you progress with these sorts of chord progression drills your brain will naturally learn how to arrange these words into sentences.

Now, regarding the above samples, I highly recommend you do the following:

first learn how to recognize them instantly, which should be no problem for you.

then download both Chord ID and Ear Master, as they are both excellent programs for tackling the difficulties of chord progression ear training in a systematic manner. I would also recommend Auralia, but it's damned expensive and really Ear Master is much better for our purposes here.

let's just start with Chord ID (if I'm not mistaken the demo restricts you to I and V).

find a sequence in C major

now, when you think you've heard a I chord, compare it to the CEG sample (either that or have a synthesizer handy)

and likewise, when you think you've heard a V chord, compare it to BDG just to make sure

there are a number of ways you can compare the above samples to whatever progressions you might encounter so be sure to mix it up -- you can even go so far as to double click on the corresponding sound files (I just use Windows Media Player) as the progression plays.

Now obviously to work in keys other than C major you're gonna have to compile more chords -- in G major the above chords would become GBD, F#AD, and GCE.

This process of comparison is really gonna take the voodoo out of hearing chord changes and soon you'll realize that every chord has its own collective harmonic signature that can readily be identified (for the above chords it's scale-degrees 135, 725, and 146 in major and 1b35, 725, and 14b6 in minor).

other recommended sites:

musicawareness.com for an excellent introduction to this sort of ear training.

teoria.com if you're interested -- it's got some nice samples of some fairly typical chord progressions.

Wow, awesome Nick. Thx for these links!

you can tell whether the low note is a 3, 5, 7 or whatever because you can tell
you basically memorize the sound of notes and their combinations the same way you learn to recognize phonemes, words, phrases and sentences
you don't learn to understand language by breaking things down m-a-m-a, h-u-n-g-r-y
you just copy the sounds you hear until you get it right
then you go back AFTER the fact the figure out HOW you did that
that's how you learn to spell and read
do you ever sit down and learn music by ear? maybe by sitting down with recordings and figuring out what they did?

one really can't learn how to identify chord inversion in a musical way until one is first able to hear chord function, and learning how to hear chord function usually begins with learning how to hear the function of individual pitches. Doing chord inversion drills before chord function drills is ass backwards, and using the interval trick to assess the structure of chords is a terrible strategy that has crippled the aural development of a great many musicians.

Thanks so much for the advice Nikolaus and rarcher. I know I wanted to learn chord changes before but I guess I got sidetracked and then just forgot.

"using the interval trick to assess the structure of chords is a terrible strategy that has crippled the aural development of a great many musicians."

Hmm... I think so too.

I use solfeggio, So (V) likes to go up to Do right? So it's simple to hear a V stressor wanting to resolve to the root in a chord.

The third likes to go down (MI, Re, Do), for me it helps more with the Mi resloving to Do as in a Mozart/Beethoven cadence in the soprano, but that's if you have training with those.

Hey Anth (and anyone else who has mastered his Melody Triggers),

Since I know you mastered your MT's long ago, could you also play or understand music just as well if you somehow suppressed your RP using only your MT skills, *cough* perfect pitch *cough*?

At the moment I am working with EarMaster Pro 5 going through the 'Melodic Dictation' drills and being at lesson 18 I do feel like I am getting more accurate and developing some speed in playing back from memory.

Yet, perhaps my approach of using only my MT knowledge is not favorable and efficient enough for the purpose of this exercise.

What do you guys think?

Peace,
Elcon

'Since I know you mastered your MT's long ago, could you also play or understand music just as well if you somehow suppressed your RP using only your MT skills, *cough* perfect pitch *cough*?'

Heh, no. Like I said understanding of music is RP knowledge.

All AP is............is the talent of a human parrot.