Music is an integral part of many people's lives, but not every person is musical from birth. It happens that you hear your favorite song and you want to sing along with your favorite artist, but the fear of hearing disapproving comments destroys the desire in the bud. However, even ear for music is just a matter of practice and hard work.
What is a rumor?
The simplest explanation is that the 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 an absolute ear, it is a talent that lives with a person from birth, and one out of ten thousand people has a chance to have an absolute ear. Which suggests that many truly great musicians did not have absolute hearing. Absolute hearing is the ability to determine the exact pitch of any sound without the aid of standards. Simply put, it is an innate ability to capture the structure of music.
Relative or interval hearing
Allows you to determine the size of musical intervals, as well as play them. The pitch in this case is determined by comparison with the standard.
Inner ear
This type of hearing is associated with mental activity. Simply put, this is the ability to mentally represent music and its individual components. Often this happens on musical notes or just from memory.
Intonation hearing
It allows you to perceive music, determining its nature, expression, tone. The most effective way is a specialized solfeggio training course. It is important that he focuses on aesthetic education, not technical.
Rhythmic hearing
This is the ability to feel the emotional expressiveness of the rhythm. Everyone can learn to hear and feel the rhythm.
And this is not a complete list of the types of hearing known to mankind , however, these are the important components on which the classical understanding of musical hearing is based. By training them, a person gains the ability to hear and understand the melody. However, the question of whether a particular person has musical taste remains open.
The human brain has certain sections, which are precisely responsible exclusively for musical hearing. This site is located in the auditory area, and the more nerve endings it contains, the better the hearing in a person is developed. You can determine how things stand with hearing in a particular person at home, without resorting to magnetic tomography. To do this, you can just try to repeat the melody you heard, even if it is a chorus from your favorite song. The main thing is to keep the rhythm. And even if the first time was a failure, it’s definitely not worth the panic, it’s better to spend energy on hard work and train more.
How to start hearing music?
The development of musical hearing is a task that is much easier to cope with than it seems. The ideal option is to go to solfeggio lessons with 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 do it yourself. What is needed for this?
- The first way is any musical instrument. This option is one of the most affordable and effective. Develops all the above types of hearing. Want to train them to the maximum? Learn to play any instrument. Have you dreamed of learning to play the guitar since childhood? It is time to do it. Thanks to the lessons, you will not only remember by ear how each note should sound, but you will also perfectly train your sense of rhythm and finally begin to understand music. This option is suitable for especially patient and those who have enough time.
- The second way is singing. The easiest and most obvious method to develop ear for music. This will require the presence of a piano, but do not be alarmed if there isn’t one at home. Fortunately, we live in a modern world that gives us the opportunity to take advantage of free online versions, which are a dime a dozen on the Internet. Hearing development begins with scales, play and sing them daily with the piano. When the skill is honed and with the scales you will feel confident, proceed to the next stage - intervals, chords or melodies. It is important to overcome self-restraint, if you do not get rid of this feeling, then classes will be meaningless. Choose a time for classes so that no one is home.
- The third way is exercises that are very reminiscent of meditation. This method perfectly helps to develop attention to sounds, the ability to listen to the melodies and understand them. Are you used to wandering around the street with headphones? It's time to stop this activity. Leave the headphones at home, take a walk without them, trying to listen to all the sounds coming in. It doesn’t matter what it is, fragments of dialogues, sounds of a big city, the noise of forest trees, a crunch of snow or a rustle of leaves. Only paying attention to all the surrounding sounds will you realize how many are around them. Such an exercise can be carried out at home, do not be too lazy to spend five minutes a day to listen to how the water is noisy, how the refrigerator is buzzing, the noise from the street, the neighbor's dog barking.
- The fourth way is to listen to the voices. Even a normal conversation with a person will become an exercise. Listen to the voice of your interlocutor, try to remember his sound. Such a manipulation can be cranked up while watching movies, remembering the voices of the actors. After you can conduct a small exam, try to guess the actor only by voice.
- The fifth way - think when listening to music, learn to hear it. Almost every modern person will say that he listens to music every day, on the way to work / study / to the store. For many, this is a way to get distracted, and it's great that you can listen to music and not think about anything. But we set a goal to develop musical ear, so now you need to not just listen to music, but try to hear it, to understand the essence and structure. Practice distinguishing musical instruments from each other. Such an exercise not only promotes the development of hearing, but also teaches you to hear the music more subtly, noting all the details, which will give even greater 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.
- Sixth way - learn to feel the rhythm. For this purpose, such a device as a metronome does an excellent job. Work with this device is extremely simple - tap with your finger or hand the rhythm that sets the metronome. As soon as you begin to cope with this exercise perfectly, you should proceed to the recognition of the rhythm in the melodies. You should start with the compositions in which the drums are present; by this musical instrument it is much easier to recognize the rhythm. The most difficult level in rhythm recognition is classical music. An equally effective answer to the question of how to develop musical ear is dancing. You can practice as in the classroom with a trainer, and at home on your own. During the dance, try to catch the rhythm and move to the beat of the music.
- Seventh way - look for the source of the sound. In this exercise, you can ask someone from the household to participate. The essence of the exercise is as follows: close your eyes and ask your assistant to make sounds from different parts of the room. Your task is to guess where the sound is coming from. Such a simple task is more like a children's game, but the task is complicated at times if you ask an assistant to go outside the room and move around the apartment. If there is no assistant, you can simply go outside, sit on a bench in a busy place, listen to the surrounding sounds.
Hearing test
In order to reliably determine whether a person has musical ear, you should contact the teacher, it will not be easy to do this yourself. Hearing is diagnosed by the following criteria:
- Sense of rhythm.
- Assessment of intonation.
- The development of musical memory.
Exercises
Testing the musical ear and sense of rhythm consists in the following exercise: the teacher taps a certain rhythm with any object, and the subject must repeat it as reliably as possible. If the rhythm was played without complaints, this indicates the presence of hearing. Exercises can be complicated in order to determine the level of development of hearing.
Evaluation of intonation is that the teacher sings a familiar melody and asks the subject to repeat it. This exercise also reveals vocal abilities. But this exercise is not the main indicator in hearing testing. Even with a weak and not very clear voice, a person can develop excellent hearing, which will allow him to master the game on any instrument without any problems.
Still wondering how to test your ear for music? There is an answer: a musical memory or the so-called hide and seek game. The exercise is extremely simple: the test subject turns his back to the instrument, while the teacher presses any of the keys. The task of the testee is to find the same key from memory. If a person is able to accurately guess all the notes when you press a key and listen to the sound, he has an excellent ear for music.
Hearing training is a complex process, which is accompanied by the inclusion of the brain, rather than thoughtless exercises. This means that even obtaining basic knowledge of music already contributes to the development of musical abilities. Start with a simple musical notation, learn classical music. The richness of sounds, harmony, the sound of instruments - this is what is so necessary for those who wish to develop musical ear.