Interval ear training

Interval songs: the cheat sheet

Each song starts on its interval unless the line names other notes. When you're unsure in a round, sing the opening in your head and compare. The second song is for when the first isn't yours.

• Minor secondJaws, the shark's two notes; The Pink Panther, the first two notes
• Major secondHappy Birthday, “-py BIRTH-” (notes two and three); Frère Jacques, “Frè-re”
• Minor thirdSmoke on the Water, the riff's first two notes; Greensleeves, “A-las”
• Major thirdWhen the Saints Go Marching In, “Oh when”; Kumbaya, “Kum-ba-”
• FourthHere Comes the Bride, “Here comes”; Amazing Grace, “A-ma-”
• TritoneMaria from West Side Story, “Ma-ri-”; The Simpsons theme, “The Simp-”
• FifthTwinkle Twinkle Little Star, “twin-kle, TWIN-”; Star Wars, the two long notes after the opening triplet (from the triplet up to the first long note is a fourth)
• Minor sixthThe Entertainer, notes three and four, the jump after the opening run; Go Down Moses, “When Is-”
• Major sixthMy Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, “My Bon-”; Jingle Bells, the verse's “Dash-ing”
• Minor seventhStar Trek, the original theme's first two notes; Somewhere from West Side Story, “There's a”
• Major seventhTake On Me, the chorus's “take on”. Few songs open on it; most people hear it as an octave a half step short
• OctaveSomewhere Over the Rainbow, “Some-where”; When You Wish Upon a Star, “When you”

Falling intervals need songs of their own: a fifth going down doesn't sound like a fifth going up played backwards. They join once all twelve rising ones are in, and the songs get less famous; jazz supplies several.

• Minor second downFür Elise, the first two notes; Joy to the World, “Joy to”
• Major second downYesterday (the Beatles), “Yes-ter-”; Mary Had a Little Lamb, “Ma-ry”
• Minor third downHey Jude, “Hey Jude”; The Star-Spangled Banner, the first two notes, “O-oh”
• Major third downBeethoven's Fifth, “da-da-da-DUM”; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, “Swing low”
• Fourth downMozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik, the first two notes
• Tritone downBlue Seven, Sonny Rollins's opening; YYZ (Rush), the intro
• Fifth downThe Flintstones, “Flint-stones”
• Minor sixth downLove Story, the theme's opening leap
• Major sixth downNobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen, “No-bo-”; The Music of the Night, “Night-time”
• Minor seventh downWatermelon Man, the riff's first leap
• Major seventh downI Love You (Cole Porter), “I love”
• Octave downWillow Weep for Me, “Wil-low”

Why intervals, and why they feel impossible at first

Naming one note with nothing to compare it to is perfect pitch, and it is rare: the usual estimate is about one person in 10,000 (Takeuchi and Hulse's review, 1993). Hearing the distance from one note to the next is relative pitch, the skill musicians use to play a tune by ear, sing a harmony, sight-sing or find a bass line. It starts out rough in almost everyone. In a small 2010 lab study by McDermott and colleagues (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America), non-musicians needed two intervals to differ by one to three semitones before they could tell them apart, and only the most experienced musicians managed less than a semitone. So if every gap sounds alike in week one, that is the normal start. Relative pitch grows with practice in almost everyone; perfect pitch, trained in adulthood, comes to only a few (Van Hedger and colleagues, 2019).

How the trainer picks your intervals

A round is ten intervals from the ones you know, each from a new random starting note (between E3 and E4 for rising ones, E4 and E5 for falling ones), so you learn the distance and not two particular notes. Eight of ten brings in the next one, in this order: octave, fifth, major third, fourth, major second, minor third, major sixth, minor second, minor seventh, minor sixth, major seventh, tritone; then the same twelve falling. A new interval comes three times in its first round. A wrong answer names the right one with its song and plays it again, and “Hear what you picked” plays yours beside it. Level and day streak stay in this browser on this phone; nothing is sent. The tones are made by your browser, in equal temperament from A = 440 Hz.

The twelve intervals in one table

An interval is the distance between two notes, counted in semitones (half steps). On a piano a semitone is the next key, black or white; on a guitar, the next fret. “Flipped” is the inversion: put the lower note an octave up, and the two sizes always add up to twelve.

Past the octave the names go on (a ninth is an octave plus a second, a tenth an octave plus a third). This trainer stays inside one octave, where almost every melody moves.

Tell the look-alikes apart

Most wrong answers come from a few pairs. Sort what you hear by its sound first, then by size:

• Open and hollow: octave, fifth, fourth. The two notes almost melt into one. The fifth sounds settled, the fourth like the start of something (“Here comes…”). A fourth on top of a fifth makes an octave.
• Sweet: thirds and sixths. The major ones are bright, the minor ones darker, the same difference as between a major and a minor chord (Major or minor? trains that on its own).
• Rubbing: seconds, sevenths and the tritone. A second is a step, a seventh is a leap that just misses the octave, and the tritone sits exactly halfway and wants to move on.

Sixths and sevenths

The big ones are where most people stall. Two ways in. Flip it: imagine the lower note an octave up, and a minor sixth turns into a major third, a minor seventh into a major second, which you already know. Or measure from a landmark: a minor sixth is a fifth plus a half step, a major sixth a fifth plus a whole step, a minor seventh an octave minus a whole step, a major seventh an octave minus a half step. If a leap sounds like an octave that went slightly wrong, it's a major seventh.

Do interval songs help?

At the start, yes; later, less. A song gives a new interval a face in seconds, which is why every answer here comes with one. The limit is that a song carries its interval between particular notes of a key, and in real music there's no time to sing a nursery rhyme in your head. Michael Rogers made the case in 1983 (“Beyond Intervals”, Indiana Theory Review): a falling minor third from the fifth note of the key to the third (sol to mi, the start of Hey Jude) sounds different from the same size from the fourth to the second (fa to re). Use the songs for the first weeks. Once an interval comes on its own, stop singing the song and listen for the colour. The next skill after intervals is hearing each note as a step of the key (do, re, mi), which is how most trained musicians follow a melody.

How to practise intervals: ten minutes a day

1. One round here: ten intervals, about two minutes (three if you sing each pair back).
2. Sing each pair back before you tap. Humming counts. An interval you can sing away from the screen is one you know.
3. Sing them on your own: play a note on the tone generator or an instrument, sing a fifth above it, then check the note you landed on with What note am I singing?
4. Once a set is safe, hear the same intervals with both notes at once (below).

Most melodies move by steps and small leaps (seconds, thirds, the fourth and fifth), so those pay off first in real music; the trainer starts with the octave, fifth and major third because they are the easiest to tell apart. Short days in a row beat one long sitting. A review of 317 memory experiments (Cepeda and colleagues, Psychological Bulletin, 2006) found that spreading practice out beats cramming it; the same habit suits ear training. As a rough guide, the first three intervals settle in a few days and the twelve rising ones take weeks. Falling intervals feel like starting over for a few rounds; that passes faster than the first time.

Harmonic intervals: both notes at once

This trainer plays intervals melodically, one note after the other, rising or falling. Music also stacks them: two notes sounding together, a harmonic interval, which is harder because the notes fuse. To practise, play both on a keyboard, then sing the lower note and the upper one separately until you can pull them apart. The sorting above works best here: a fifth heard together is almost one sound, a second buzzes.

Finding intervals on guitar and piano

On a piano, count keys including the black ones: C up to E is four semitones, a major third. On a guitar every fret is a semitone, and in standard tuning the shapes repeat across the strings: the same fret on the next higher string is a fourth, two frets higher on the next string a fifth (the power chord), two strings over and two frets up an octave. Any shape that crosses from the G string to the B string moves one fret higher, because that pair is tuned a major third apart instead of a fourth.

What this trainer doesn't do

It plays no harmonic intervals, nothing past the octave, and doesn't let you pick your own set: the order is fixed and the next interval comes when you've earned it. musictheory.net (up to two octaves) and teoria.com have drills where you choose the intervals and hear them together as well (as of October 2026). What you get here instead is the order, a song for every answer, a level that waits for you, and a round that turns into a tune.

Then make something of it

The intervals you just named are a tune: ten pairs of notes. Brumm plays them as an instrument inside a club track, and you can hum your own line over it. No account, no upload.

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