Exercises for the development of musical ear online. Music theory: how to develop an ear for music

Online game "Absolute pitch"

To view this page ensure that Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.0 or greater is installed.

If you do not see the game above this inscription, then you need to download and install Adobe Flash Player

For technical reasons, we no longer create a table of records, so you DO NOT need to enter data at the end of the game...

For technical reasons we are more
We do not issue DIPLOMAS and we apologize :-(

The game includes the first 33 questions from this list. The entire list of 55 questions (from 34 to 55 chips with a stave) is presented in full version of this game included in the program.

Alexey Ustinov, 2011-12-30

Game updated 2013-11-30

Teacher's comment

Absolute ear for music- the ability to determine the pitch of a tone, regardless of other tones, i.e. without comparing sounds with each other and, as a result, assigning a note name to this sound. The nature of this phenomenon has not been sufficiently studied in musicological circles and, apparently, is therefore represented by different points of view. But it is even less familiar to practicing teachers. At the same time, the skill of “absolute musical ear” constantly remains the focus of both interest and controversy among almost all musicians. It is generally accepted that all string players (violinists, cellists) have such hearing, but this is not so! On the contrary, it seems that the pianist does not need it at all - however, those who master this skill say that it helps a lot, for example, when reading scores... Another often discussed question is whether it can be developed, or is it something... Is it innate?...

What to do with a child who easily picks out any melody and does not want to look at the sheet music at all? How to develop hearing for a student who knows well music symbols but can play false notes, memorizes them and the teacher cannot help him in any way?

One day, my second grade student asked me to play him Gennady Sasko’s play “Blues,” which was quite complex in rhythm, with a passage at the end. I played it three times... and at the next lesson he played the Blues without notes and at the same tempo as the piece was played. The case of this boy was for me an example of my incompetence in working with a gifted student with absolute pitch... I have not encountered many children with absolute pitch in my teaching practice. And most often such children did not finish music school. From the very beginning, they could remember and play the pieces by hand, “by ear,” but reading a complex text caused resistance in them and, as a result, they lost interest in learning.

In other words, the skill of “absolute pitch” is not something separate in the learning process, clearly positive or negative. Both its presence and absence require additional attention from the teacher and a special approach to the student. Still, this skill is extremely desirable!

To help my students, and to avoid repeating the mistakes of my youth, I am now using S.M. Maltsev’s method. - the author of a comprehensive methodology for teaching piano playing, as well as solfegging, synchronized with piano playing. This method helps me identify children with good developed hearing and constantly work with them by sight reading notes.

For most students and those who want to master musical intricacies, it is easy to learn and play their favorite melodies on the piano or guitar, they still need to develop their hearing. And the game "Perfect Pitch" is an excellent tool for this. It is suitable for all ages.

Small children, who cannot even read, will guess the right answer from the pictures. (You just need to help them - first play the game NOTES - PICTURES so that the child gets acquainted with the notes hidden in in simple words: HOUSE, TURNIP. There, he will become acquainted with the sound of notes.).

Older children and adults, while playing, will discover that they HAVE absolute pitch and that this skill is developing - verified!

Of course, someone might say that there are no halftones in the game (more precisely, a full chromatic scale). Yes, the game only includes white piano keys, i.e. in fact, we are in a major (C) or minor (LA) mode... Someone may note that the degrees of the mode and intervals play a role here... Absolutely right! But, start with simple tasks, achieve confident recognition of these notes, and you will take a big step in improving your musical ear. Believe me, you will get great pleasure from discovering that you can identify the name of a note by ear!

Krivopalova L.N.
Piano teacher, Palace of Children and Youth Creativity, Tomsk
01.05.2011

The Virartek team expresses gratitude to Lyubov Nikolaevna Krivopalova, who received Active participation in the creation of this game and in its testing. THANK YOU! Good luck to you and your students!

Music is an integral part of many people's lives, but not every person is born musical. It happens that you hear your favorite song and just want to sing along with your favorite artist, but the fear of hearing disapproving comments destroys the desire in the bud. However, even an ear for music is just a matter of practice and diligent study.

What is hearing?

The simplest explanation is that musical ear is certain skills and abilities that allow you to fully perceive music and hear all its incredible sounds or even minor errors. Not a single musician, sound engineer or even producer can do without such abilities.

Absolute ear for music

It is believed that it is impossible to train absolute pitch, which lives with a person from birth, and the chance to have absolute pitch falls to one person in ten thousand. Which suggests that many truly great musicians did not have perfect pitch. Absolute pitch is the ability to accurately determine the pitch of any sound without the help of standards. Simply put, it is the innate ability to grasp the structure of music.

Relative or interval hearing

Allows you to determine the size of musical intervals, as well as play them. V in this case determined by comparison with a standard.

Inner hearing

This type hearing is associated with mental activity. Simply put, mentally imagine music and its individual components. Often this happens from musical notations or simply from memory.

Intonation hearing

Allows you to perceive music, determining its character, expression, tone. Most effective method- specialized training course solfeggio. It is important that it is aimed at aesthetic education, not technical.

Rhythmic hearing

This is the ability to feel the emotional expressiveness of rhythm. Everyone can learn to hear and feel rhythm.

And this is far from full list known to mankind however, these are the important components on which the classical understanding of musical ear is based. Having trained them, a person gains the ability to hear and understand a melody. However, the question of whether a particular person has musical taste remains open.

The human brain has certain sections that are solely responsible for musical hearing. This area is located in the auditory zone, and the more nerve endings it contains, the better developed a person’s hearing is. You can determine how things are with a particular person’s hearing at home, without resorting to magnetic tomography. To do this, you can simply try to repeat the melody you heard, let it be the chorus from your favorite song. The main thing is to keep the rhythm. And even if the first time was a failure, you definitely shouldn’t panic; it’s better to spend your energy on hard work and train more.

How to start hearing music?

Developing an ear for music is a task that is much easier to cope with than it seems. The ideal option is to take solfeggio lessons from a professional teacher. The essence of this subject is precisely to develop hearing and musical memory. However, if this is not possible, you should stock up on a ton of patience and study on your own. What is needed for this?

• The first way is any musical instrument. This option is one of the most affordable and effective. Develops all of the above types of hearing. Do you want to train them to the maximum? Learn to play any instrument. Have you dreamed of learning to play the guitar since childhood? Now is the time to do it. Thanks to the classes, you will not only memorize by ear how each note should sound, but will also perfectly train your sense of rhythm and finally begin to understand music. This option is suitable for those who are especially patient and have enough time.

• The second way is singing. The simplest and most obvious method to develop an ear for music. To do this, you will need to have a piano, but don't be alarmed if you don't have one at home. Luckily we live in modern world, which gives us the opportunity to take advantage of free online versions, which are a dime a dozen on the Internet. Ear development begins with scales; play and sing them daily along with the piano. Once your skills have been honed and you feel confident with scales, proceed to the next stage - intervals, chords or melodies. It is important to overcome embarrassment; if you do not get rid of this feeling, then classes will be meaningless. Choose a time to study so that no one is at home.
• The third way is exercises that are very similar to meditation. This method perfectly helps to develop attentiveness to sounds, the ability to listen to melodies and understand them. Are you used to wandering the street with headphones on? It's time to stop this activity. Leave your headphones at home and take a walk without them, trying to listen to all the sounds you hear. It doesn’t matter what it will be, snippets of dialogue, sounds big city, noise forest trees, crunch of snow or rustle of leaves. Only by paying attention to all the sounds around you will you realize how many of them there are around. This exercise can also be done at home; don’t be too lazy to spend five minutes a day to listen to the sound of the water, the buzzing of the refrigerator, noise from the street, barking neighbor's dog.
• The fourth way is to listen to the voices. Let even an ordinary conversation with a person become an exercise. Listen to the voice of your interlocutor, try to remember its sound. This manipulation can also be done when watching films, remembering the voices of the actors. Afterwards, you can conduct a small exam, try to guess the actor only by his voice.
• Fifth way - think when listening to music, learn to hear it. Almost every modern man will say that he listens to music every day, on his way to work/school/to the store. For many, it's a way to distract themselves, and it's great that you can listen to music and not think about anything. But we set a goal to develop an ear for music, so now you need not just listen to music, but try to hear it, understand the essence and structure. Practice distinguishing musical instruments from each other. This exercise not only promotes ear development, but also teaches you to hear music more subtly, noticing all the details, which will give you even more pleasure when listening. Subsequently, you will want more complex compositions, and this is great, because it only means that there is progress and you are not standing still.
• The sixth way is to learn to feel the rhythm. A device such as a metronome does an excellent job for this purpose. Working with this device is extremely simple - tap with your finger or hand the rhythm that the metronome sets. As soon as you begin to cope with this exercise perfectly, you should move on to recognizing the rhythm in melodies. You should start with compositions that contain drums; it is much easier to recognize the rhythm using this musical instrument. The most difficult level in rhythm recognition is classical music. An equally effective answer to the question of how to develop an ear for music is dancing. You can practice both in classes with a trainer and at home on your own. While dancing, try to catch the rhythm and move to the beat of the music.

• The seventh method is to look for the source of the sound. You can ask someone from your household to participate in this exercise. The essence of the exercise is as follows: close your eyes and ask your assistant to make sounds from different parts rooms. Your task is to guess where the sound is coming from. Such a simple task is more like a child's game, but the task becomes much more complicated if you ask the assistant to leave the room and move around the entire apartment. If you don’t have an assistant, you can simply go outside, sit on a bench in busy place, listen to surrounding sounds.

Hearing Test

In order to reliably determine whether a person has an ear for music, you should contact a teacher; doing this on your own will not be easy. The presence of hearing is diagnosed according to the following criteria:

• Intonation assessment.
• Development of musical memory.

Exercises

The musical ear test consists of the following exercise: the teacher taps out a certain rhythm with any object, and the test subject must repeat it as reliably as possible. If the rhythm was reproduced flawlessly, this indicates the presence of hearing. Exercises can be made more complex in order to determine the level of hearing development.

The assessment of intonation involves the teacher humming a familiar melody and asking the subject to repeat it. This exercise also allows you to reveal your vocal abilities. But this exercise is not the main indicator in a hearing test. Even with a weak and not very clear voice, a person can develop excellent hearing, which will allow him to master playing any instrument without any problems.

Still wondering how to test your musical ear? There is an answer: musical memory or the so-called game of hide and seek. The exercise is extremely simple: the subject turns his back to the instrument while the teacher presses any of the keys. The test subject’s task is to find that very key from memory. If a person is able to accurately guess all the notes when pressing a key and listening to the sound, he has an excellent ear for music.

Ear training is a complex process that involves engaging the brain rather than mindless exercises. This means that even acquiring basic knowledge about music already contributes to the development musical abilities. Start simple musical notation, study classical music. The richness of sounds, harmony, and the sound of instruments is what is so necessary for those who want to develop an ear for music.

An ear for music is not exclusively an innate ability. It can be formed already in adulthood, the only difference is that children learn easier and faster. With enough effort and patience, you can learn to hear music, the main thing is to stop imposing on yourself that you will not succeed just because you have no talent from birth.

1. We read poems syllable by syllable to music.
2. Let's clap to our favorite and well-known melody.
3. We create a rhythmic pattern and march at the same time. The count is 1-4, on the first and third strike we stomp harder, then we change and place emphasis on the second and fourth. Practice to different music.
4. Listen to melodies with complex rhythms.

1. We sing the scale: do, re, mi, fa, salt, la, si, do and vice versa. Repeat at least 20 times until you fix the sound of each note in your memory.
2. Chromatic scale - movement in semitones or consisting of semitones. Halftones are the closest sounds. Press all the keys in a row. To sing them clearly requires enormous concentration and attentiveness.
3. Study classical music, it has the most expressive and rich melody.

Phonemic (speech) hearing is the ability to catch and identify the sound (phonemes) of native speech, determine the semantic load of words, sentences, and texts. This type of hearing allows you to distinguish the volume of a conversation, intonation, and voice timbre.

They say that a child receives absolute pitch from birth. However, without supporting and developing it, “absoluteness” gradually fades away with age. To prevent this from happening, hearing must be fully developed.

An unborn child can hear great amount sounds. Among them are contractions of the mother’s heart, the sound of amniotic fluid, and external sounds. At birth, the baby is able to hear even things that an adult is unlikely to pay attention to. The peculiarity of an adult is to focus attention only on those sound options that are given time he needs, while completely ignoring the rest. A newly born child does not yet know how to focus his attention and separate sounds into necessary and unnecessary. This is what he must learn.

Phonemic hearing helps to isolate individual sounds from ordinary noise. To begin with, the baby begins to identify the individual sounds that he hears most often: these are the voices of his parents, given name. That is why often the first word spoken by a baby is the word he hears most often.

If in early childhood the child is surrounded musical sounds, including lullabies that his mother sings to him, we can say that in the future the baby may develop an ear for music. Of course, such hearing also needs to be developed: together with the child, listen to and analyze musical works, master rhythms, which can be achieved with simple playful dances with baby. The child must learn to distinguish good music from aggressive, playful from sad, etc.

What awaits a child if you do not pay attention to the development of his hearing? Let's give an example: a deaf-mute family has a baby who can both hear and speak. He does not hear the conversation as often as necessary, does not understand its significance in social world, he loses the ability to distinguish sounds, much less repeat them and use them for his own communication. As a rule, such children either do not know how to speak at all, or do not do it well enough.

For the same reasons, study foreign language It’s much easier to be in an environment where everyone around you communicates in given language. Every person has a natural gift for imitation and capturing sound differences.

Exercises for the development of speech hearing must be carried out starting from the moment when the child begins to respond to sounds, first showing him the source of the sound, then explaining what and how allowed him to reproduce this sound. How can you determine whether your baby’s phonemic awareness is developing sufficiently? We will give you several activities that can be used both as a diagnostic of development and in developmental terms. When performing exercises, take into account the age of the child: a three-year-old child may not be able to cope with the last exercise, but if this happens at 6-7 years old, the development of his hearing must be urgently helped.

First, the child should be taught to separate speech among other sounds.

• What's the sound?

This lesson has three difficulty options:

1. The sound of a rattle, bell or whistle?
2. The sound of apartment keys, the sound of a spoon hitting a plate, or the leafing of a book?
3. A box of matches, sand or pebbles?

• What's the weather like?

An activity in the form of a game, taking place during a walk on a fine day. The adult quietly shakes the rattle (good weather), then shakes it sharply, making a strong sound (it started to rain) and asks the baby to run up and supposedly take shelter from the imaginary rain. It is necessary to explain to the child that he must listen to the sounds of the rattle and, depending on the intensity of the sounds, “walk” or “hide.”

• Guess the action.

Several children are sitting on chairs. The hands are on the knees. The adult hits the drum hard, the children raise their hands up. If the blow is weak, there is no need to raise the handles.

• Guess the instrument.

An adult should introduce children to popular musical instruments. It could be a whistle, guitar, pipe, drum, piano. You need to play the sound of each of them. Then the adult hides behind the partition and makes instrumental sounds, while the children must guess which instrument was sounded.

• Guess the direction of the sound.

The child closes his eyes, and at this time the adult blows the whistle. The baby must determine where the sound is coming from. Without opening his eyes, he should turn around and point in the direction with his pen.

Only when the baby learns to separate sounds can you move on to further exercises. Now it’s time to explain that the same sound can have different sounds:

• a-a-a - we show the doctor the neck;
• a-a-a - we lull the doll to sleep;
• a-a-a - something hurts;
• o-o-o – it’s hard for grandma to carry the bag;
• o-o-o – surprise;
• o-o-o - let's sing a song.

To begin with, the baby learns to repeat the sounds on his own, then tries to guess what the adult wants to say with this sound.

In order for the baby to easily navigate the variety of different sounds, an adult must tell how a particular sound is reproduced. To do this, it is necessary to demonstrate the importance of lips, tongue, teeth: it is better to use a mirror for this purpose. The baby learns to recognize and pronounce sounds, starting with vowels, gradually increasing complexity with the use of consonants.

After mastering such knowledge, it is necessary to begin developing auditory memory - the ability to compose words from sounds. Here it is important not only to hear the set of sounds in words, but also to remember their order. You should start with simple ones short words, pronounced in the following order:

• boom-bom-boom;
• rock-rak-roar;
• so-tok-tok;
• hand-flour-pike;
• vine-goat-thunderstorm;
• jar-semolina-ranka.

You can invite your child, after listening to a number of words, to isolate the unnecessary from it (this is how a sense of rhyme is developed):

• mountain-hole-feather;
• laughter-snow-sun.

You can practice solving riddles, the answer to which should rhyme. For example: there is a belly and four ears on both sides, but what is her name? Pillow!

Imagine that you are at a children's competition and rooting for some team. We clap our hands and say with emphasis: well-done, let's-be-dim, ve-se-lei, do-go-nyay. In this way, you can teach your baby to separate words into syllables.

So simple play activities Not only will your baby definitely like them, but they will also expand his phonemic awareness. Beginning with simple exercises, in this way you can prepare your child for more complex activities.

Exercises for developing musical ear

Support musical form Hearing is required for every person who loves and respects music or is involved in active creativity. Let's understand the concepts of relative and absolute hearing.

Notes, in fact, are certain sound signals that differ in sound frequency. The presence of absolute pitch in a person makes it possible to separate the main tonality from multi-frequency reproduction without error.

The relative form of musical hearing allows us to determine comparative characteristics notes and their relationship to each other. Speaking more in simple language In order to name the required note, such a person needs to hear another, preferably nearby note.

Huge role in studying musical development children belongs to the famous Soviet teacher V.V. Kiryushin, who, instead of boring and obscure solfeggio classes, read to the children a number of fairy tales he invented. The children not only listened with pleasure, but also remembered what was told, because there were so many interesting things in the fairy tales: the adventures of the kind animals-intervals, the teddy bear who raised the turnip, the struggle of dissonance and consonance, the septim dragons with seven heads and much more. Such fairy tales turned out to be extremely effective and allowed the child to master with ease and pleasure musical literacy.

It is possible to start classes according to the Kiryushin scheme almost from the first days of a child’s life. There is quite a lot of material about the system on the Internet. famous teacher: collections of his fairy tales, musical works for children, classes on independent play on musical instruments.

Ilana Vin’s educational system is also well received by children. Thus, her book “How the Notes Met” received positive assessments from many music teachers.

In home practice you can use some simple exercises, subconsciously developing hearing:

1. When you walk the streets, listen to what passersby say. Short excerpts from phrases, fragments of words - all this will help you remember sounds in the future and be attentive to them.
2. Try to remember the timbre of the voice of those people with whom you have to communicate. What is the point of this exercise? Each voice is individual, it has its own unique features and manner, intonation and pronunciation. This will allow you to identify and remember sound variations. Some people, having barely heard someone else's speech, can accurately determine where a person comes from, and even guess many of his personal qualities.
3. A good effect is observed when guessing talking man by voice. This is a kind of game, and even quite interesting.
4. Try to identify your acquaintances and friends by the sound of their steps.
5. Listen to a fragment of music and try to sing it from memory, hitting the notes as best as possible.
6. And finally, memorizing songs: this develops musical memory. Memorizing musical composition, repeat the failed section of the melody until you can repeat it without errors.

There are also many computer programs aimed at developing the musical form of hearing: these are “Musical Arcades”, “Ear Master Pro”, “Music Examiner”, “Ear Gryz”, etc. Such programs should not be considered as the main tool for self-development, but only only as an addition to general training.

Regarding the musical development of a child, it should be noted that often even the most capable children, from the point of view of teachers, are reluctant to agree to study music. In such cases, we can only advise one thing: never force your child to study by force (they say, when he grows up, he will say “thank you” himself). Try to interest the child, show him the most attractive and fun sides of such activities: the child should develop motivation and personal interest in music.

Exercises to develop phonetic hearing

It is extremely necessary to develop a child after 4 years, activating his speech, expanding lexicon, making speech more expressive, training the coherence of statements and the presentation of one’s emotions and sensations. It is not necessary to force the baby to do any exercises: it is enough to unobtrusively communicate and play with the child.

Use in your games everything that your child observes around him in Everyday life. The child must know not only what a bus is, but also that a bus has a steering wheel, wheels, an engine and an exhaust pipe; the house has a foundation, walls, roof and basement. In addition, children must be well versed not only in the color of objects, but also in their shades: dark blue, pastel, burgundy.

Often invite your child to describe the selected item, think of what it can be used for, what it is made of, etc. Ask your child questions: “What could be bigger?” - “Mountain, elephant, house...” - “Can an elephant be bigger than a house? In which cases?". Or: “What could be cold?” - “Winter, ice cream, ice...”. In this way, the child will learn comparison and generalization.

After an adult reads a fairy tale to a child, you should ask suggestive questions, which will not only train his memory, but also form a connection between words and phrases, determine the sequence of phrases and actions. For example, ask: “Where did Little Red Riding Hood go? What did she carry with her in the basket? Gray wolf, who met her on the way, good or bad? Why?". In the same way, you can ask to retell a cartoon plot or the content of a children's play.

A good effect is observed from inventing your own plot, compiled, for example, from a picture or toy. Compare the pictures: “A boy is drawn here, he is smiling. And here is a picture of a puppy, he is playing. The boy is happy that he has a puppy to play with.”

It is useful to record your child's conversation on a voice recorder, and then listen to the recording together with him. Words that the baby fails must be repeated again.

Exercises for hearing development will help not only to intelligently reproduce sounds, but also to develop auditory perception and identify almost imperceptible differences in sounds. Remember that the vast majority of children have this gift: the task of adults is to preserve and maintain this ability.

Every person, if he loves to sing, dreams of performing compositions so that the audience then applauds him enthusiastically. But all you need for this is to have perfect hearing. But how to achieve this? Exist special exercises for hearing development.

What are the types of hearing?

Oddly enough, musical ear is a rather complex concept and cannot be categorically denied or affirmed (“I have hearing/I don’t have hearing”). The fact is that every person can have one or another subtype of musical ear. Whether it is possible to develop a certain type of hearing cannot be answered unequivocally, since there are a lot of these types.

1) Rhythmic hearing, that is, the ability to feel the rhythm, the emotional component of the melody.

2) Modal hearing, responsible for the ability to understand chords.

3) Ear of intonation, which allows you to understand the nature of the music (cheerful or sad).

4) Inner hearing - the ability to reproduce the musical notation of a melody.

5) Interval hearing - the ability to sing musical intervals and determine the pitch of sound.

6) Absolute pitch - the unique ability to determine the pitch of any sound without comparing it with a reference sound.

How to develop an ear for music

If you don’t know how to develop any type of musical ear on your own, try doing the following exercises daily.

1) To develop rhythmic hearing, try to read poetry to music, dance to your favorite music, counting the bars. By the way, we develop musical and rhythmic hearing precisely by moving, so body plasticity has no last value for a musician. The opposite is also true: any dancer must have perfect pitch. These are interconnected things.

2) Listen to your favorite compositions, preferably short ones to begin with, and then try to reproduce this thing in your own voice, but without music. Then test yourself by turning on the original.

3) Sing monochromatic scales (note series "C - B" and "B - C"), even though it is boring and uninteresting. This is an invaluable experience for hearing development.

4) Sing “chromatic scales” (played only on the black piano keys in one tone). Such scales help to better develop an understanding of the differences between modes.

5) Choose your favorite tunes on musical instrument without even knowing exact notes. Eventually, someday it will be almost impossible to distinguish you from the original.

6) Enroll in a music school. Exactly music teachers will help develop an ear for music with the help of a special discipline called solfeggio.

How to develop absolute pitch?

Oddly enough, but not at all. A person can only be born with an absolute ear for music. Therefore, the question of how to develop absolute musical ear is not entirely appropriate. In the absence of absolute innate musical ear, it is better to focus on the development of other types of hearing - intonation, rhythmic, internal, etc.

Video on the topic of the article