Any mainstream American pop tune, Beethoven symphony, or British children’s song shares a common thread: Western harmonies. Why does Western culture center on specific chords? What is the link between memory, harmony, and ear training? Does music improve memory?

Growing up in Western culture, your ear and brain absorbed a specific “musical hierarchy” where the tonic of a scale had more importance than other pitches.[1] For example, in D Major, your ear automatically gravitates towards the pitches D, A, and G, and finds notes like C# dissonant. Even as an infant, you demonstrated a clear preference for specific Western harmonies. [2] Why is this?

Since childhood, the music you listened to impressed upon your long term memory a distinct preference for the tonic (D) and the dominant (A). Musical training affected your perception of music and your ability to recognize pitch. [1] The more musical exposure you experienced, the greater the impact on your brain and memory.

To recognize a pitch during ear training, your brain performs mental gymnastics. Click to read the rest…

Learning to recognize intervals is an important part of any musician’s development. Guitarists who play by ear should be especially interested in developing their aural skills so that they can recognize musical elements such as intervals in harmonies and melodies. For players of improvised forms like jazz a good ear is critical for improvising as well. This article reviews intervals on the guitar and teaches a very simple method for learning and identifying them.

Review of Intervals

Musical intervals measure the distance between any two pitches. We identify intervals by their size and quality. We determine the size of an interval simply by counting from one pitch name to the other. For example, the interval from the sixth string, E, to the fifth string A, is a fourth: E F G A, one two three four.

The quality of an interval, whether ‘perfect’, ‘major’, ‘minor’, ‘diminished’ or ‘augmented’, is a refinement of its size. Both an interval’s size and quality make up its unique sound: a major third sounds different than a minor third.

For the guitarist, the smallest musical distance is one fret. This distance is called a semitone. We can list the most common intervals by their number of semitones or frets:

How To Practice Intervals On The Guitar

Shortly we will review how to play some of these intervals on the guitar, but first we can take a peek at a simple method for learning how they sound. This method really involves two parts. We first want to learn how to produce an interval, and then we want to be able to recognize it.

First we play the interval we wish to learn, and sing it back. You can sing using a neutral syllable like la or ta. Below is a minor second. Play it and sing it back:

Minor Second

Minor Second Example

We repeat this play and sing back process for several different minor seconds across the guitar:

Click to read the rest…

For musicians, learning to recognize intervals is an essential part of developing their aural skills, and ultimately their overall musicianship. There are no shortage of different methodologies and mnemonic devices for learning intervals (such as using reference tunes to memorize the sounds). Their overall goal, however, is the same: give the student a set of tools to use to develop their ear to hear different sonorities as having unique qualities. In the end, a major third sounds like a major third, just as the color blue looks like the color blue!

In this article we will briefly review the naming convention for the most common intervals up to the octave. We will then think about an interval’s basic sound quality as falling into one of two categories: either consonant or dissonant. This is an important step for you to learn to recognize intervals.

Review of Intervals

You may recall that a musical interval measures the distance between any two pitches, whether played harmonically (notes together) or melodically (notes in a sequence). We measure that distance simply by counting letter names from the lower pitch to the higher one. In the example that follows, the interval C to F is a fourth, counting the C as “one”.

Intervals are named based on the number of notes they span

1. Perfect Fourth Interval Example

Because notes have sharp and flat variants, counting between letter names isn’t quite enough: we further refine the interval’s name by adding a quality to the interval. For our purposes here, we will limit our study to “perfect” unisons, fourths, fifths, and octaves, as well as the tritone (also known as a “diminished fifth” or “augmented fourth”). We will also look at major and minor seconds, thirds, sixths, and sevenths. The following example shows these intervals from C.

Example of intervals from C (click to enlarge)

2. Example of intervals from C

Consonance and Dissonance

Central to western music theory and ear training are the related concepts of consonance and dissonance. These ideas are extremely important to the way we hear music, both melodically and harmonically.

Click to read the rest…