Music Ear Training

Ear Training and Aural Skills

Develop accurate listening, faster musical recognition, and stronger performance through practical ear training.

Ear Training and Aural Skills logo
Quick Course Facts
16
Self-paced, Online, Lessons
16
Videos and/or Narrated Presentations
5.2
Approximate Hours of Course Media
About the Ear Training and Aural Skills Course

This Music course in Ear Training and Aural Skills helps you hear patterns with greater clarity so you can perform, transcribe, and understand what you listen to with confidence. Through practical exercises and guided listening, you will Develop accurate listening, faster musical recognition, and stronger performance through practical ear training.

Strengthen Your Music Listening Skills With Ear Training

  • Build a reliable listening foundation with pitch, rhythm, and tonal awareness
  • Improve your ability to identify intervals, chords, and progressions by ear
  • Develop practical transcription strategies for melodies and rhythms in real Music
  • Strengthen sight-singing, memory, and critical listening for better performance

A practical course that trains your ears to hear, identify, and reproduce Music more accurately.

This course introduces the core principles of Ear Training and Aural Skills through a clear, step-by-step approach. You will begin with a focused listening mindset and move into the foundations of sound recognition, including pitch, register, tuning, pulse, meter, and subdivision. These skills give you the tools to hear Music more precisely and respond to it with greater confidence.

As you progress, you will learn to recognize intervals, major and minor scales, scale degrees, and tonal function. The course then expands into harmonic awareness, helping you identify triads, inversions, voicing, and common chord progressions in tonal Music. Each topic is designed to connect listening with understanding so you can hear structure instead of isolated sounds.

You will also practice melodic and rhythmic dictation, sight-singing with solfege and scale degrees, and aural memory exercises that improve recall and reproduction. Additional lessons focus on error detection, transcription workflows for real songs and excerpts, and methods for building a sustainable independent practice routine. By the end of the course, you will listen to Music with sharper focus, recognize patterns more quickly, and apply your ear skills with greater accuracy in performance, study, and transcription.

Course Lessons

Full lesson breakdown

Lessons are organized by topic area and each includes descriptive copy for search visibility and student clarity.

Introduction and Listening Mindset

1 lesson

This lesson explains why ear training is a core musical skill, not an optional extra. Learners will see how stronger listening improves pitch accuracy, rhythm, memory, ensemble awareness, improvisatio…

Foundations of Sound Recognition

1 lesson

Lesson 2: Pitch, Register, and Tuning

18 min
This lesson builds the listening foundation for ear training by clarifying how pitch , register , and tuning work in real musical contexts. Students learn to hear whether a note is higher or lower, id…

Foundations of Time and Subdivision

1 lesson

Lesson 3: Rhythm, Pulse, and Meter

20 min
This lesson introduces the core listening skills behind rhythm, pulse, and meter . Students learn how to feel a steady pulse, count subdivisions accurately, and distinguish between beats, bars, and ti…

Hearing the Distance Between Notes

1 lesson

Lesson 4: Interval Identification

20 min
This lesson teaches you how to recognize the distance between two notes by ear, using interval size, direction, and common reference sounds. You will learn a practical method for naming intervals more…

Recognizing Tonal Patterns

1 lesson

Lesson 5: Major and Minor Scales

18 min
This lesson builds the ear skill of telling major and minor scales apart by sound, not by theory first. Students will learn how each scale type feels, how it usually sounds in musical context, and whi…

Listening Within a Key

1 lesson

Lesson 6: Scale Degrees and Tonal Function

20 min
This lesson teaches you how to hear a key from the inside: identifying scale degrees, recognizing tonic as the center, and hearing how other notes behave relative to it. You will practice hearing stab…

Building Harmonic Awareness

1 lesson

Lesson 7: Triads and Basic Chord Qualities

20 min
This lesson introduces the triad as the most basic three-note chord and trains you to identify its core qualities by ear: major , minor , diminished , and augmented . You will learn how each quality s…

Hearing Chords in Different Forms

1 lesson

Lesson 8: Inversions and Voicing

18 min
In this lesson, you will learn how inversions and voicings change the way a chord sounds without changing its function. You will practice hearing the same chord in different bass notes, different spac…

Recognizing Harmonic Motion

1 lesson

Lesson 9: Chord Progressions in Common Tonal Music

20 min
This lesson teaches you how to recognize common chord progressions in tonal music by listening for harmonic motion, cadence points, and the sense of tension and release. You will practice identifying …

Transcribing Notes and Phrases by Ear

1 lesson

Lesson 10: Melodic Dictation Strategies

22 min
Melodic dictation is the process of hearing a melody and writing it down accurately using pitch, rhythm, phrasing, and contour. In this lesson, students learn a practical step-by-step strategy for tra…

Writing What You Hear Accurately

1 lesson

Lesson 11: Rhythmic Dictation Strategies

22 min
Rhythmic dictation is the skill of hearing a rhythm and writing it down accurately. In this lesson, students learn a practical workflow for listening in small chunks, identifying the meter and pulse f…

Reading Music Internally and Out Loud

1 lesson

Lesson 12: Sight-Singing with Solfege and Scale Degrees

22 min
This lesson teaches how to read music internally and sing it accurately out loud using solfege and scale degrees. Students learn why movable-do solfege helps them hear function, how scale degrees labe…

Retaining and Reproducing Musical Ideas

1 lesson

Lesson 13: Aural Memory and Pattern Recall

18 min
Aural memory is the skill of hearing a musical idea once, holding it in mind, and reproducing it accurately later. In this lesson, students learn practical ways to remember short melodies, rhythms, an…

Listening Critically in Performance

1 lesson

Lesson 14: Error Detection and Correction

18 min
In this lesson, learners practice listening critically in real time so they can spot mistakes in pitch, rhythm, intonation, balance, and ensemble timing during rehearsal or performance. The focus is n…

Applying Ear Skills to Songs and Excerpts

1 lesson

Lesson 15: Transcription Workflow for Real Music

22 min
This lesson shows a practical workflow for transcribing real music, not just isolated intervals or chord drills. Students learn how to listen for the biggest structural cues first, then break a song o…

Building a Sustainable Listening Routine

1 lesson

Lesson 16: Practicing Ear Training Independently

18 min
This lesson shows how to build a sustainable independent ear training routine that fits real practice time. You will learn how to choose clear goals, structure short sessions, use simple tools, and tr…
About Your Instructor
Professor Amanda Davis

Professor Amanda Davis

Professor Amanda Davis guides this AI-built Virversity course with a clear, practical teaching style.