IntellEar: AI-powered Ear Training for Musicians
The superpower of the trained ear and an automated system to help develop it
It’d be incredibly naive to think a majority of people reading this know what ear training is. It’s a unique skill that only musicians have and train. It’s esoteric in essence, and its incredible specificity is marvelous and kind of terrifying.
What if I told you that you have this superpower?
How can I have a superpower that I don’t even know about?
Let’s take an example.
This song is probably familiar to everyone, and regardless of how your singing is, you can easily hum along. In fact, if I asked you to draw a quick sketch of it’s shape, you could do it pretty easily.
In fact, you could probably do a similar task for way more complicated melodies. This might seem trivial, but step back for a second. You just:
- Listened to audio with many different signals and immediately recognized it as music
- Accurately interpreted which signal was the most important — the melody
- Using the auditory information you received, you instantly recognized the melody as a popular nursery rhyme
- You had an understanding of how the melody would continue
- Using that, you drew (or envisioned) a rough sketch of how the melody “looks”
- Using that, you can accurately replicate those same audio signals!
That’s insane. No training necessary.
Music is all around us, so it’s no coincidence that something we’re exposed to so often is so ingrained in our heads. From our very first months as a fetus all the way to the sunset of our lives, homo sapiens have a fascination with music that transcends just entertainment. In fact, some of us become so fascinated with it that we decide to study it further. In doing so, personally, I have found an entirely new appreciation for this eternal human fascination.
All because of a little thing called ear training. I said earlier that ear training is a skill only musicians have and train — that’s nonsense! The term ear training might be foreign, but we all have the ability!
Ok, but what even is ear training?
Ear training is exactly what it seems, except not at all:). Ear training is all about training the ability to listen to music with more attention, detail and granularity. I guess ear training is really a misnomer, since ear training is really about getting better at interpreting what we hear.
To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit.
A duck hears also. — Igor Stravinsky
Most of ear training revolves around the distances between notes, rather than the notes themselves (incidentally those with perfect pitch can recognize notes, but most of us can’t). For example, going back to Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, what note we start on doesn’t matter. If I play it starting on a different note but keeping all the distances between notes the same, you’d still recognize it as the melody. Case in point:
You can easily tell that it’s the same melody, just moved up a little bit. If I instead change the distances between notes, you would easily be able to tell.
The principle of ear training is learning to recognize all the different distances between notes (called intervals).
These intervals are the base of triads, chords and a whole new world — harmony. Chords can range widely in complexity and colour, but they form the foundation for much of Western music.
But what’s the point?
Many beginning and experienced musicians have asked this question, but intervals are just the basic stuff that needs to be understood. Intervals are like the letters and words that need to be understood before you can truly start reading. Knowing these letters and words gives you a whole new auditory world to experience, and with in come essential skills for any musician.
Ear training also counts for a significant portion of the RCM (Royal Conservatory of Music) exam. The RCM is one of the largest and most respected music education institutions across the world, and their Certification Program is an internationally recognized system. It is the national standard in Canada, and is also very popular across the US. This makes ear training a required skill for most musicians in Canada!
A Deeper Understanding
You often hear poets, mathematicians and musicians alike talk about a deep appreciation for their field. Akin to words and lines of poetry, each interval has its own character and emotion in each musical context. Ear training is much like learning vocabulary — by learning each individual word and its characteristics, you gain a deeper appreciation of the language all around you.
For example, take the main theme of Star Wars. It’s a very heroic theme, but what in the music makes it heroic?
There are obviously a lot of big jumps, mainly Perfect 4ths and 5ths. These big, open intervals are what give this theme its bold, heroic quality!
This knowledge lets you listen to music in a whole new way! Personally, ear training has given me a new appreciation for the music I listen to. It’s very important for any musician, just like reading is important for any writer. Ear training allows you to listen deeply, and listening is how one improves their own music!
Ok I’m sold! How do I get training?
Anyone can train their ear to some degree! However, just as we all could learn to code, that doesn’t mean we all necessarily train the skill. If you want to do some easy ear training exercises, check out Easy Ear Training by Musical U! From here on in, I’ll be talking about exercises more specific to formal music education.
There’s plenty of resources online on ear training, including one provided by the RCM. However, none of these platforms provide high-quality practice for one of the hardest exercises: melody playback. In this exercise, the student has to play a given melody completely by ear. They are given the key and allowed to listen to it 2 times, and then they have to play the melody back.
With a teacher, it is fairly easy to practice. The teacher simply selects a melody from the book and plays it, you play it back and they judge your performance.
But what if you want to practice on your own?
You’re out of luck. Most popular ear training websites, like musictheory.net and teoria.com either don’t offer melody playback or require users to write it out in an unintuitive way. If you choose the RCM route, you have to buy the Four Star book, and even then the system doesn’t tell you how you did — that’s up to you. Since these melodies are composed by humans, there’s a limited number of melodies — this means after just a couple weeks of good practice you’d probably exhaust all their melodies!
What’s the solution?
Using powerful AI tools developed by Magenta, I’m working on developing IntellEar, an app that takes ear training practice to the next level. Here’s how it’ll work:
- The user selects their desired difficulty and length
- Magenta’s MusicVAE generates a melody that satisfies the conditions and plays it to the user
- The user records themselves playing the melody back
- Using Magenta’s Onsets and Frames model and their Dual-Objective Loss function, give the user a score
- The app saves the score for future reference
This solves both major problems with current systems — it gives an infinite (well, not infinite but pretty close) number of melodies courtesy of MusicVAE, and it can give the student actual scores (not music scores. grade scores)! It’s still a work-in-progress, but you can contact me at dronh.to@gmail.com for updates!
Key Takeaways
- Everyone’s ear has, to some degree, been musically trained
- Many musicians seek to train their ear further, for RCM examinations and to gain a deeper appreciation of the music they play
- Ear training revolves around the distances between notes, called intervals
- Intervals are like the letters and words of a language — together they form motifs, themes and ideas and give music its character
- A key part of ear training, melody playback, can’t be practiced well individually
- I’m working on developing a Magenta-powered ear training system to help musicians improve their ear training!
Before you go
Thank you so much for reading this article! I’m still working on IntellEar, but you can contact me at dronh.to@gmail.com for updates. Stay safe!
