You don’t need a fancy Hi-Fi system to have fun ear training, but good sound reproduction can inspire your creativity, reveal unheard detail in a familiar recording and is less tiring for extended listening sessions. In this series of articles I will be providing some hints and tips on how to get the best listening experience at home and on the move.

You may wonder why I need to write this article; after all there’s a huge amount of information available on the web. Unfortunately few subjects provoke as much ill-informed, unscientific nonsense as home audio. Audiophile magazines are full of reviews claiming a £1000 speaker cable makes music more “emotional” or advising you to spend £500 on a mains lead for your amplifier. I hope to share with you lessons I’ve learned with my own ears in my years as a broadcast engineer and musician to get maximum enjoyment out of your music – without breaking the bank, or blinding you with science.

In the first article of this series I’m going to talk about playback sources. Playback sources come in a variety of shapes and sizes from CD players, to iPods, to laptops and they are key to getting great sound. Click to read the rest…

Up to this point in the series we’ve focused on characterising each sound with a single frequency representing its pitch. In today’s article we’ll consider the other frequencies present in musical sounds.

Compound frequencies, harmonics, blah blah blah!

Right?

No; actually in the real world, most sounds are made up of more than one frequency. We’ll forgo the actual full-on physics formula for sound creation, as that is way past our scope here…BUT…what IS of importance is that most sounds have a blend, or ratio, of multiple frequencies that resonate to create the sound that you hear. Hence the term ‘compound’ frequencies.

Harmonics

Now, speaking of this resonance business; all of the frequencies contained in a sound except for the main (’fundamental’ or ‘dominant’) frequency are called harmonics. Usually, they are found at precise multiples of the main frequency. The pattern is this: Click to read the rest…

In the last article we covered first and second inversions of major and minor triads. This week we’ll do some further exercises on these, and look at inversions of augmented and diminished triads.

Recap exercises

The following example simply presents a series of major and minor triads in second inversion, block form. After you hear the chord, stop the player and sing them back, first paying attention to the basic size of the intervals. On a second listening, try to figure out their quality:

Once you have spent some time with inversions of major and minor triads you can use the following example to test your skills. Click to read the rest…