Ear Training and Sight Singing: The Superpower you get from Music School

all right ladies and gentlemen boys and girls and everyone in between I know you've been waiting for me to make this video and hear it finally is ear training and sight singing there are probably a thousand and a half other videos out there that are way better than what you're about to see but you didn't come here for quality did you so first off what is ear training and/or sight singing I hear you say well it is the number one best way to make any musician flinch next time you see someone on the side of a stage taking a break in between sets walk up to them with your phone open and say hey what's this interval and watch em void their bowels it's fun for the whole family no ear training and its sister nightmare sight singing are the two extraordinarily narrow and archaic techniques that all music students have to master before they graduate to retail manager it means that you can hear any music and write it down or conversely read any music and immediately know what it sounds like well enough to sing it for those of you who are wondering and I know there are dozens of you this is what makes musicians and composers especially feel special about themselves for musicians the strength of one's ear can commonly be seen as kind of a score of one's musicianship like if you're on stage with someone who doesn't know their intervals by ear most people with a music degree will probably look down on them when in fact they're actually feeling invalidated because the tens of thousands of dollars that they spent on being able to call themselves a classically trained musician doesn't really matter when the only audience around is a drunk guy trying to get a date and for a composer especially or at least a classically trained professional composer who may or may not have tenure and doesn't really have to worry about food or rent this is what the process of composition is being able to hear a melody in your head and directly write it down without having to first consult an instrument if you really want to get gatekeeping about it you could say that music not written in that fashion is a product of the tool that the quote-unquote composer is using so by that logic the reason EDM sounds the way it does is because the composer is listening to the computer play whatever notes they've input which in turn alters the musical vision that they originally had in their head and ultimately alters the final product but in reality there are deadlines and programs that will play the music for you while you write it oh and by the way rent exists so on one hand you have this ancient almost magical technique carefully crafted by thousands of years of genius minds that have curated a process of the Spirit in mind that neurobiologists have only just begun to scratch the surface of and on the other hand you have teenagers on FL Studio that make more money than you but this was in essence how someone like Beethoven was able to compose while he was deaf he trained his ear while he could still hear and was able to call on that skill when he couldn't externally hear the notes anymore now this is not perfect pitch perfect pitch is what happens when a child's parents actually care about their well-being and development literally the only way to get perfect pitch is to have someone quiz you on notes before the age of six seriously literally in front of the piano and say hey Billy what note is this and then you play a note that kind of stuff sing gee what about B if you get enough practicing you now have perfect pitch for the rest of your life and no one can take it away from you save a really hard swing from a baseball bat but if your parents let you play with matches while watching Power Rangers and eating macaroni and cheese all day well then you make YouTube videos for a living now if you want to do ear training there's only one way to do it except for the other way but we'll get to that after I already confused you okay you have your piano we start on C and we finish on C and we only play the white notes because we're racist like chess and we have a major scale C major except instead of letters we're gonna give these notes special syllables doh rainy Faso law and T then dou once C repeats this is called solfege and if any of you have ever fantasized about being a nun they should look familiar a drop of golden so we have doremi Foss hola Tito yeah I have to sing this otherwise what's the point of me making this video that is our major scale now it doesn't matter what note we start on we always have our major scale I didn't even really pick a note or go to a piano I just picked a sound from my brain and as long as the intervallic gaps in between those syllables and notes remain consistent we have our major scale and that is the basis as to why a system like solfege is so powerful so if we look at a piece of music a very simple one cuz I'm gonna go easy on you and if I gave you the first note how would you find the second note well instead of calling this just a note we'll call this doe and because you've been studying your music theory you know that this is a whole step gap that means that we can call this note ray well because you know what doe ray sounds like that's the beginning of our major scale you suddenly know what this piece of music sounds like doe Rado ray doe doe doe get it again I picked a random note but it's about the gaps in between the notes so from there you can slowly develop out until you have the whole scale just move one note at a time see look at this it's just a bunch of so's and O's so Soto so so doe so doe so so doe so so me rayray you just put the solfege to the notes based on how they appear in the major scale which you already have the solfege to and suddenly you can figure the music out like look at this this looks like so this looks like doe and that's another so then we have Fahmy Rae this looks like a pretty simple melody and before you know it you have the whole tune so so so doe so Fahmy right doe so Fahmy Rado so Fahmy Faure and so with that you can work out pieces that are in a major key signature which if you're smart about it means that you can also sing in minor scales as well if you take your major scale but start on the 6th note or the 6th scale degree you have a minor scale so if you just sing your major scale but start and end on law you get a minor scale or more specifically your natural minor lawtie doremi faso la sofa me read ot law and now you can sing melodies in minor key signatures or you can pick a different note to start on and you can start singing in different modes oh but sideways I hear you cry that's not enough I'm a glutton for punishment I have to chew on light bulbs just to enjoy solo queue and legends well well well mr. overachiever maybe that wasn't complicated enough well then something my professor taught us which I don't know if anybody else got this but this is something he gave us was a completely chromatic solfege system so instead of just the notes of the diatonic or like major scale we had all 12 chromatic notes so we had dou D or raw rayray or may me favi or say so C or lai la Li or teh tea and then dough again meaning that you could sing an entire chromatic scale which we did and we enjoyed it and I used to have to do that after walking two miles in the snow with no jacket because I was young and so full of life god what happened but with that you can theoretically sing anything written in any key signature so for a minor scale you could have doremi faso late a doe tail a so far a doe or you can have the complete chromatic scale but for those paying attention there were different syllables for ascending and descending because when you ascend the chromatic scale you're going up in sharps but when you're descending you're going down in flats so it's doe deer a Rima Fakih so C lolli T dou T tail all a so safe on meme a Rea Rado that's as close as I'm gonna get which means that technically you could start singing atonal skills and melodies like this whole tone scale doremi fee C lido tail a same ear a doe or like this Lydian mixolydian scale doremi fee so lot a doe tail uh Sophie mere a doe or if you're a real psychopath you could just switch where your dough is in the middle of a melody and now you can sing melodies that modulate which is when something moves from one key signature to another doremi faso fedora me faso Fahmy ramie faso Fahmy Rado meaning that technically you can sing anything that you see on the page so long as you can relate it to a scale that you can conceptualize in solfege but if i play you two notes how would you know what those two notes were well what two solfege syllables do they sound like to you it could be a doe rising up to a so or file leading up to a doe it depends on how you hear it but either way you know that's a perfect fifth because you've been studying your intervals because out of solid understanding of your basic intervals and key signatures none of this is going to make sense and you're only hurting yourself and oh my god I sound exactly my music teachers okay so if I give you the first note and you hear an ascending perfect fifth you can calculate what the next note is and if I play you a whole melody you can go step by step and figure out how each note relates to the next based off of the interval you hear so okay that's a perfect fourth down and a minor third down perfect fourth up pull step up half step down another half step down pull step down major sixth up minor third up whole step up major third down whole step up minor third down major third down pull step up minor third down and now if you want to sing that you can put solfege to it doe so me lotty teyla so me so laughs uh so me doe Rea T but I know what you're thinking you're thinking but sideways thinking about Holly's interval sound in terms of sulfa SH is really hard and it takes up too much time and now my avocado toast is getting soggy well do not fret my doomed millennial friend there is a shortcut instead of having a hunt for each interval in terms of how it might appear in solfege or heaven forbid actually having to memorize each interval arbitrarily you can find other pieces of music that will help you figure out the intervals as a kind of shortcut you can take a piece of music that you know really really well listen to a critical interval that's emphasized in the melody and then use that to memorize what that specific interval sounds like here are some that I use to not fail music school [Music] I never actually found one for the minor six that I could remember into this day that interval is my kryptonite so now you can listen to two notes and know what the interval is great good for you but what if I play them at the same time well now you have to be able to hear both of notes individually in your head while you're listening to them at the same time and eventually that sound will permeate your existence so here these two notes you have to separate them in your head then you can hear that they're actually a major third but if I write a new minor third on top of that major third using that top note to start our new minor third you can now hear that a major chord has a major 3rd on the bottom a minor third on top and the whole thing is surrounded by a perfect fifth which is great so now you slowly start stacking intervals on top of one another until you finally get here and yay now you know that this is some kind of major 13 sharp 11 because you know exactly what Lydian sounds like because you started your major scale and fall or you replace the faun your doe based Lydian with fie because of the raised fourth but now now's where the real fun begins this is where we get to hit the nightmare level after you've gone through all this chaos after you've memorized all your solfege and all kinds of different scales and you've gotten to the point where you can write down full four-part melodies by listening to each of the internal voices and writing them out one by one and you've started singing and modulating in atonal melodies where your solfege is gonna have to change depending on the context of the note that comes after it now you start hearing these shapes in your daily life remember this isn't perfect pitch now you're just finding the intervallic structures and pieces of music by listening really really hard when you turn on the radio you can't help but listen to the chords in the background and how frequently the same four chords appear you can hear the solfege in the bass line and all the chords are in root position so you know the harmonic progression you can't help but notice that almost nothing on the radio modulates and the whole thing is just a major or minor scale which means you don't even have to break out your chromatic solfege to keep up now to keep yourself entertained during long trips in car you find the relationships between the radio jingles and the pop tunes that you hear by figuring out what the dough is in one of those songs and then trying to figure out what the interval is between the dough of that song or the key signature that was in and the dough or the key signature of the song that you're listening to now now you start seeing people around the music building who can imitate perfect pitch because they were just in a practice room and they're holding onto the dough of whatever key the piece of music they were just playing was so when they walk into a room and they hear a piece they can tell you what those notes are professors can tell you exactly what notes you're playing wrong without ever having to turn around and look at the keyboard your friends will start interrupting conversations with you because you happen to walk too close to the practice rooms and they just happen to overhear someone playing a German six five chord in a minor and you're left staring at their horrified expression because they just realized how almost involuntarily they just had to let you know now when you're working on a project in the composition lab and you're old dying laptops fan kicks on your friend will turn around and ask if that's an f-sharp and neither one of you will be able to continue on with your day until you realize that your laptop fan is a quarter tone flat of f-sharp and that's what we did for fun but the scariest part was that we liked it now I'd be lying if I said my ears were still that strong without having those daily quizzes or even just the necessity of ear training quizzes in general I've definitely let them rest a little bit but I still head over to ear training exercises on the computer every once in a while when I'm in between cues of some online game or whenever I'm waiting for something to render and I look at pieces of music I've never heard before and try to hum the melody before I hear it played out because the thing is your training and sight singing gave me a new appreciation for music that I never had before I wish I could just like Vulcan mind-meld with people and show them what it's like and in all honesty I was kind of scary when I started hearing new things and music like some of the stuff I used to like got a little more monotonous faster and a stuff that I used to think was really dissonant suddenly became way more interesting I was literally listening to music in a different way I wasn't just feeling the music anymore but I could think the music at the same time it's kind of like when you hear about people playing Tetris a whole lot and then having dreams about Tetris I was perceiving music in a very different way than I ever had my entire life but without question being able to pick apart the fragments of what went into a piece of music deepened my appreciation for just how much music can be used as a storytelling device if it wasn't for those classes and those terrifying Friday mornings where I'd have to sightseeing in front of the class for a grade I wouldn't have the same love and respect for music and especially soundtracks that I today so yeah my ears have gotten a little rusty I can't really pick out cords with more than four notes as fast as I used to and it takes me a little longer to figure out a melody in my head and sometimes I just have to crunch it out in front of a keyboard but I can still hear those little pieces in the music all the little gears and the inner machinations which I wouldn't trade for the world and sometimes it feels like a superpower thanks for watching I'd like to thank my patrons for making these videos possible the very special thank you to Hayden Elza Charlie Hobart Donovan Hodges if and Matt Ethan Rooney Karin Rosa now and Clara tan if you like I just saw here be sure to check out my other videos follow me on twitter and twitchtv musical questions answered live and if you really like what I'm doing consider supporting the channel on patreon that's like I for now

Channel: Sideways

Views: 1,458,488

Keywords: Ear Training, Ear, Training, Sight, Singing, Sight Singing, Ear Training and Sight Singing: The Superpower you get from Music School, Music, Theory, Music Theory, Education, Music Education, Aural, Skills, Aural Skills, Beethoven, Composition, Performance, Intonation, Scales, Intervals

Id: Ed2VUq9cu1I

Length: 14min 35sec (875 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 31 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TheDepressedSolider]

Recommend any programs/ apps I can download to train my ear .