How to Improve Your Aural Skills

Aural skills are the abilities musicians have that pertain to hearing. It’s important for musicians to be able to hear and assess accurately the properties of music, including: pitch; the intervals between those pitches; harmony and the characteristics imparted by different chords; rhythm; and vocal and instrumental timbre and intonation, meaning the variety of sounds that can be made by the same instrument.

The usefulness of good ear training skills can manifest itself in a number of ways. Musicians who listen well can easily transcribe and play music by ear. Singers with good ear training skills can sight-sing effectively. Violinists’ aural skills help them play accurately and adapt to different musical environments. Aural skills also make a big difference for any musician in terms of composition ability, improvisation, and simply adjusting to and playing in any musical setting with confidence and competence

How can you improve your aural skills? There are all kinds of popular exercises. Essentially, targeting any of the areas encompassed by ear training skills individually will have good results if you put in the necessary time. Working on singing accurate pitches will help improve your ears, regardless of whether you consider yourself a vocalist or not. This can include sight-singing unfamiliar pieces of music. You can also take some time to improvise over a loop or other recorded harmonic structure, which will develop your sense of the interaction between different notes and chords. Once you feel up to it, you can practice transcribing music, which will put all of your ear training skills to the test.

Most importantly, though, if you want to improve your aural skills, you should seriously consider an ear training program. Ear training will incorporate many of the aforementioned methods and activities, as well as zeroing in on every aspect of aural skills in order to give you the complete musical toolset. Ear training will usually also include simple, effective exercises, such as having you listen to the different intervals until you can readily differentiate between them, and repeating rhythms and series of notes, getting more complex over time, until they become second nature.

Fast fingers might be nice, but aural skills are the skills musicians really depend on. No matter what your musical goals may be, it’s worth considering taking the time to develop your aural skills, including an ear training program. With good aural skills, you’ll find that anything in the realm of music is possible.