88CET Ear Training CDs, Part 8

Types of Exercises
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So, let's move on now to different possible types of exercises you can
use on your ear-training CDs. My goal will be to suggest exercises and
qualities of exercises that work, and don't work, on CDs.

In traditional University "Musicianship" classes, the ultimate focus of
ear-training efforts is often an exercise called "four-part dictation". In
four-part dictation, you hear a short (hopefully!) Bach-chorale-style
composition, and your task is to write out all four parts within a few
hearings.

Is four-part dictation a valuable ear-training goal? I suppose
everybody could have a different answer to that question, or a different
goal. Since I'm most interested in composition, I'm interested in anything
that makes it easier to get down on paper (or a MIDI sequencer, or directly
to an instrument) the music that's going on in my head.

Whether being able to write down, or play directly, the music going on
in our heads is the ideal goal or not, for this series' purposes, I'll
operate under the assumption that that's what we want out of these CDs.

What does that entail for 88CET tuning, or analogously with other tunings?
1. Familiarity with 88CET intervals.
2. Familiarity with 88CET notation.
3. Familiarity with 88CET block-chord harmonies.
4. Familiarity with 88CET scales, as building blocks.
And just as with reading music, this leads to being able to recognize
groups of notes - motifs or "riffs" I suppose - as atomic units of melody,
just as block-chords become atomic units of harmony. But certainly you
have start with individual pitch relationships, or you won't even be able
to handle those motifs.

But familiarity implies speed. You can't realistically expect to write
down music as fast as you dream it up. The process of writing a run of
16th notes for example usually takes a lot longer than the notes themselves
last. That's not the case for improvisation though; you certainly can and
must play notes and think them at the same musical speed. But in either
case, you clearly can't afford to stop and think, "and then the melody goes
down to... dang! what the heck is that note?".

So most of the exercises I put onto my ear-training tapes and CDs
specifically demand a quick response. "Quick! What's a subminor third
below A? Below Db? Below F? What are the notes of the pseudodiatonic
scale on B? On G? What are the intervals in a harmonic-series fragment
chord?" That sort of thing. In short, I don't give myself much time to
respond.

Clearly though, you have to be realistic about how long you give
yourself to answer a question, or at least about what material you put on
the CD. Don't ask yourself to answer questions two years above your
proficiency level in two seconds.

Perhaps a better way to put it is that you should use these ear-training
CDs to improve your proficiency and speed on tasks that you already can
perform, more often than to learn tasks that are mostly new to you.