Practicing recognition of individual notes

[Notes]

Hi,

I just downloaded a trial of Earmaster Essential. Thank you.

The first ear exercise I wanted to do was ear recognition of individual notes, C, D etc. - across octaves perhaps. I am new to music so this is where I wished to begin.

Earmaster takes me to Interval comparison/identification and Chords and Rhythms exercises. I am new to music so I am not at a place to do these exercises.

Does the software assume prior knowledge/ear for individual notes?

Is there something I am missing - in the software, or in my approach to learning music with the software?

Thanks for your help.

[Quentin]

Hi,

EarMaster is not really for complete beginners indeed, it requires a little bit of music theory (just the very basics) to get the most out of it. We have recently published a complete and free music theory course on this page: http://www.earmaster.com/music-theory-o ... ction.html. You can refer to it any time you are in doubt of something covered by EarMaster.

Identifying individual notes by ear out of nothing is what perfect pitch training aims at. It is possible to customize the Pro version to train that via the Melodic Dictation exercise by setting the program to play one single note without any prior reference tone, but it's not a practice routine you would encounter in a music school. Perfect pitch is indeed not really improving your musicianship, and its learnability is still debated in academic circles.

EarMaster focuses primarily on relative pitch training, which consists in recognizing the relations between tones. The easiest exercise for that is interval comparison, where you compare the distance between two sets of two notes (i.e. between two intervals). For example, C-->D and C-->F are played, and you are asked to find out by ear which one of the two sets of tones covers the largest distance.