Why Interval Ear Training Isn’t Working (and what to do instead)

Traditional interval ear training works like this. You hear two notes and you guess the distance between them.

The problem is that real music doesn’t work like the exercise. In the exercise, you get two notes and nothing else. In real music, those notes are part of a song: there are melodies, chords, bass lines all around those two notes. Those two notes will exist in a musical context. And that context makes them sound different.

Here’s why. The music you hear every day has a ‘tonal center’, also known as a tonic. The tonic is the note that all the other notes gravitate toward. It’s like a musical center of gravity: the note that sounds most “at rest,” most like home. Every other note is pulled toward it, wanting to resolve. The tonic is determined by the key, so if a song is in the key of C minor, the tonic is C.

This is why context matters so much. The same interval sounds completely different depending on where it sits in the key.1 A major third from the tonic to the third degree of the scale sounds bright and stable. A major third from the fifth to the major seventh has tension and wants to resolve. (If these examples make little sense to you, don’t worry! In the next section I’ll explain what I mean.)

Think of it like walking the last 100 meters to your house versus the final 100 meters to reach the top of Mount Everest. The distance is technically the same, but the experience is completely different.

Similarly, your ear doesn’t hear abstract distances. It hears notes in relation to the tonal center. So with traditional interval training, you’re learning to recognize something that never happens in real music. And that’s why it doesn’t translate to real-life musical skills, as a large body of research has found.2

“Despite the overwhelming experimental and clinical evidence that there is little connection between the ability to identify intervals acontextually and the ability to do so in a tonal context, such teaching methods nevertheless persist in some textbooks and some classrooms.”

In other words, when you get good at recognising intervals outside of music, you don’t get much better at recognising them in real music.3

Fortunately, there’s also lots of research that confirms there’s a better way.4 Instead of training in a vacuum, we need to train with a tonal context: a sense of home that anchors everything we hear.