Ear Training: From Intervals to Chord Progressions

This module turns the theory you already have — intervals from semitones, chords and diatonic harmony — into a perceptual skill you can use at the machine. In a live-coding set or a production session there is no time to count semitones: you hear a bassline in a reference track and need to know it’s outlining 1–b7–5, or you audition a mode and need to feel its colour before committing a pattern. The whole task here is a two-week daily practice log culminating in a mixed quiz: intervals, chord qualities, a scale named cold, a melody taken down as scale degrees, a rhythm notated, and a 4-bar progression identified by function.

The arc is deliberately spaced and vocal. Two principles gate everything: short daily sessions beat marathon ones because pitch memory consolidates between bouts, and singing each answer before checking it wires the motor loop that makes recognition stick. Week one drills the atomic recognisers — interval ear training, chord-quality recognition, scale identification — the automaticity-critical recurrents you repeat inside every log entry. Week two layers context: functional ear training establishes a key and asks for scale degrees, which feeds directly into melodic dictation (degrees in sequence) and chord-progression identification (function across time), while rhythmic dictation handles the temporal half of transcription and harmonic dictation ties bass, quality, and function together.

Every required atom corresponds to a quiz component or a practice-structure rule the log depends on; skip one and a quiz section fails. The supporting atoms enrich rather than gate: dual interval-plus-degree identification is the advanced bridge beyond the quiz, the absolute-vs-relative-pitch distinction keeps expectations honest, and active listening shows where these ears get used once training ends.

Runnable examples

Generated from the context/ instrument corpus by concept (redistributable idioms only). Do not edit — regenerate with gen-module-examples.mjs.

chord-progression

play_chord progression.tick, release: 4, amp: 0.5; sleep 4

_{sonicpi-0017 · CC0}

Pbind(\degree, Pseq([[0, 2, 4], [3, 5, 7], [4, 6, 8], [0, 2, 4]], 1), \dur, 2).play

_{supercollider-0031 · CC0}