Free · in the browser, nothing to install · no microphone
Ear training, ten minutes at a time.
Ear training is learning to name what you hear: which way a note moves, how far apart two notes are, whether a chord is major or minor, how a melody goes, where the beat sits. Here are eight free ear training exercises that play their tones on your phone, and under them what the research says about whether it works and how long it takes.
The resident hears the squirrel first, every time. These are for the human ear, which takes practice.
Daniel learned harmony by ear, not from books. As a teenager he played Quake for hours with Mingus’ The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady on loop. Somewhere in there his ear learned what chords do. It has stayed ahead of his hands ever since. About Daniel.
The exercises do the same thing on purpose and faster: a sound, your answer, right or wrong at once, again tomorrow. A score is today’s snapshot, not a verdict on your ear.
How to start ear training
- Put headphones on and begin with higher or lower, an endless ear training game: two notes, which one went up. Pitch direction is the floor everything else stands on.
- Then interval ear training: three intervals at first (octave, fifth, major third), a new one each time you get eight of ten. Sing each interval before you answer.
- Add major or minor for chords and the melody memory test for tunes. Ten minutes a day does more than an hour on Sunday.
Not sure where you stand? A sixty-second check picks your first step and gives you a week’s plan; the musical ear test gives one score across pitch, intervals, melody and rhythm.
Themes
What is ear training?
Ear training (music schools call it aural skills) is practice at naming what you hear without looking: a note’s direction, the distance between two notes, the quality of a chord, a melody, a rhythm. It is reading music turned around. Instead of seeing a note and knowing its sound, you hear a sound and know the note, or at least its place in the key.
What it is for: playing a song by ear instead of looking it up, learning songs faster, improvising, singing and playing in tune, tuning your instrument, and following the band when the chords change. Music schools teach it as aural skills next to theory, usually with sight-singing: hearing a written melody in your head before you sing it (inner hearing, or audiation).
Almost all of it is relative pitch: hearing notes against each other, or against the key’s home note. That is what musicians use, and anyone can learn it. Perfect pitch (absolute pitch) is naming a note with no reference at all. It is rare, about one person in 10,000 in the estimate usually cited (Bachem, 1955), and far more common among musicians who started before about age six and among speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin (Deutsch and colleagues, 2006). Ear training doesn’t need it.
What ear training covers, and where to practise each part
| Skill | What you do | Here |
|---|---|---|
| Pitch direction, fine pitch | Say whether the second note went up or down while the step shrinks | Higher or lower (three semitones down to 3 cents), tone-deaf test |
| Intervals | Name the distance between two notes played one after the other, going up and going down (melodic intervals; notes played together, harmonic intervals, are not drilled here) | Interval ear training |
| Chords and progressions | Hear a chord’s quality, then follow the chords of a song | Major or minor (major and minor only, alone and in four-chord progressions) |
| Scales and modes | Hear whether a scale is major, natural minor, harmonic minor or a mode such as Dorian | No drill here |
| Scale degrees (functional ear training) | Hear a note’s role in the key: home note, fifth, leading note | No drill here; the song exercises below train it |
| Melody and dictation | Hold a tune in your head, notice a changed note, write it down | Melody memory test (holding and comparing, no notation) |
| Rhythm | Tap a rhythm back, keep the pulse when the click stops | Rhythm test, metronome |
| Perfect pitch | Name a single note with nothing to compare it to | Perfect pitch test |
| Timbre and frequencies | Tell instruments apart; for mixing engineers, hear which frequency band was boosted | Not here: EQ ear training is its own discipline, with trainers such as SoundGym (as of 2026) |
Does ear training actually work?
For the skill you practise, yes, and fast. In a study by Christophe Micheyl and colleagues (Hearing Research, 2006), 30 non-musicians started with pitch-discrimination thresholds more than six times larger than 30 classical musicians’. Eight more non-musicians then practised telling two close tones apart, and after four to eight hours their thresholds matched the musicians’.
The catch is transfer. Getting quick at a quiz of isolated intervals does not by itself mean you hear them in a song, where they come fast, inside chords, in a key. Many players report exactly that: good scores in an app, nothing recognised on a record. Teachers have pointed out (Michael Rogers, “Beyond Intervals”, Indiana Theory Review, 1983) that a song cue only teaches an interval from one place in the key. The answer is not to drop the drills but to tie them to music: sing what you hear, hear each note against the home note, and give part of every week to real songs (below).
If you are sure your ear is hopeless: about one university student in six calls themselves tone deaf (Cuddy and colleagues, 2005), but in a test of 16,625 adults only about 1.5% had congenital amusia, which is real tone deafness (Peretz and Vuvan, European Journal of Human Genetics, 2017). Most people who think they can’t hear pitch can. The tone-deaf test takes three minutes.
How long does it take to train your ears?
It depends on the skill, and the answers run from hours to years:
- Telling two close notes apart: hours. The 2006 study above needed four to eight.
- Naming intervals on their own: weeks of daily practice. The open intervals (octave, fifth, fourth, major third) usually settle first; the sevenths, the sixths and the tritone take longest, and going down is harder than going up. Interval ear training adds them in about that order.
- Hearing chords and the bass line in a real song: months.
- Transcribing whole songs, hearing key changes: years. Music degrees spread aural skills over several semesters, and working musicians keep at it for life.
- Perfect pitch as an adult: possible for a few, never promised. In a 2019 study (Van Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum, PLOS ONE) six adults picked for a strong auditory working memory trained about 32 hours over eight weeks. Most improved only a little. Two reached perfect-pitch scores on note-naming tests, the best one passed every test, and both still had it about four months later; those two had been ahead of the others before training began.
Short sessions spread over days beat the same minutes in one block. That spacing effect is one of the best-replicated results in memory research (Cepeda and colleagues’ review of 317 experiments on verbal recall, Psychological Bulletin, 2006), and teachers see the same with ears. Ten minutes a day is a good unit.
What is the best ear training method?
Not one app. What works across most methods:
- Little and often, with feedback. Every answer marked right or wrong at once, and a wrong one followed by the right sound. That is what a teacher, a partner or a trainer gives you.
- Sing it. Sing the second note, the interval, the chord’s notes low to high, before you answer. If you can sing it you can usually name it, and singing turns a guess into a check.
- Hear notes in a key. Hum the home note (the tonic) and hear each note against it. Movable do (do re mi, where do is the home note of a major key; in minor, la or do depending on the method) or scale-degree numbers (1 is always the home note) give each role a name. This is functional ear training.
- Use song cues to start, then let go. Here Comes the Bride for a fourth up gets you going; after a few weeks, try to hear the fourth without the song. Some teachers skip song cues entirely.
- Take it to real music every week. Pick out a melody, sing the bass, clap the rhythm of a chorus. Drills build the vocabulary; songs are where you use it.
A ten-minute ear training routine
- Two minutes, warm up: higher or lower until the step gets small.
- Five minutes, the main set: one round of interval ear training, ten intervals. Sing each before you tap; after a miss, sing the right one.
- Three minutes, one more: major or minor, the melody memory test or the rhythm test, a different one each day.
Once a week, swap the drills for one song from the exercises below. Once a month, take the musical ear test and compare. It is the slowest number to move, which is why it is not a daily check.
Ear training exercises you can do with any song
- Find the home note. Pause a song anywhere and hum the note that sounds like the end. That note is the tonic; finding it is the start of every other skill on this page.
- Sing the root. In a three- or four-chord song, hum the bass note of each chord as it changes. Berklee Online’s ear training course uses Under the Boardwalk; any campfire song works.
- Hear I, IV and V. In a three-chord song, the V chord pulls back home to I; IV going to I is the softer “Amen” ending (the plagal cadence). Name each chord as I, IV or V while you sing its root.
- Sing against a drone. Hold one note on the tone generator and sing a scale or an interval over it. Off, it sounds rough; on, it settles.
- Pick out a melody. Take a tune you know cold and find its first four notes on an instrument. What note is this? names each note you play, so you can check.
- Transcribe four bars. Write a short phrase down in note names or numbers, then check it. Four bars done right teach more than a whole song guessed.
- Clap the rhythm. Clap the rhythm of a melody while the metronome keeps the beat, then without it.
- Find the meter. Conduct along: count 1-2-3 or 1-2-3-4 and check whether the strong beat keeps landing on your 1. A slow song in 6/8 moves in two groups of three.
Ear training for singers
For a singer, ear and voice are one loop: hear the note, aim for it, hear where you landed, correct. Ear training sharpens the hearing half; the other half is pitch matching, and the two train each other. Answer every interval by singing it first, then check your aim with Can I sing in tune? or the pitch matching game: both play a note and read the one you sing back. What note am I singing? names any note you hold. Choir singers gain most from hearing their note’s role: the third of the chord, or the seventh degree of the key that wants to rise to the home note. That tells you where to go when the chord changes.
Ear training for guitar and bass
A guitar gives your ear a map. In standard tuning (E A D G B E) neighbouring strings are a fourth apart, except G to B, a major third. So one fingering shape plays the same interval anywhere on the neck, moved up a fret where it crosses from the G to the B string. Play an interval, sing it, then find it from three other frets.
Tuning by ear is ear training too. Tune the low E with the guitar tuner, then play each open string against the fifth fret of the next thicker string (the fourth fret of the G string for the B string) and listen for the wobble to slow down and stop. Check with the tuner afterwards. On bass, the same with the bass tuner, and sing the roots of every song you play: that is your job in the band anyway.
Ear training for piano
On a piano you can see every interval, which helps and gets in the way. Close your eyes, play two keys, name the interval, then look. Play a tune you know from memory starting on C, then starting on F♯: the same tune under different keys is relative pitch in your hands. For chords, play a major triad and lower its middle note by a semitone. That one key is the whole difference between major and minor.
Is there a free ear training app?
The eight exercises above run in the phone’s browser: nothing to install, no account, no microphone. The tones are made on the phone, so they sound the same every time, and your interval level and day streak stay in that browser. They cover pitch, intervals, major and minor, melody memory, rhythm and perfect pitch. They don’t cover chord types beyond major and minor (sevenths, diminished, inversions), scale-degree drills or dictation in notation. For those, free sites such as tonedear.com (scale degrees, melodic dictation) and musicca.com (scales, seventh chords, inversions), teoria.com, or installed trainers such as EarMaster or Functional Ear Trainer have them (as of 2026).
For a course or a book: Berklee Online teaches Ear Training 1 and 2; the standard university texts are Gary Karpinski’s Manual for Ear Training and Sight Singing (Norton) and Steve Prosser’s Essential Ear Training for the Contemporary Musician (Berklee Press).
Then use the ear on something. Hum a short melody into Brumm and steer the harmony under it: choosing chords that fit a tune you sang is ear training with a track at the end.
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