Ear Training: Two Note Volume One

Rating:
Summary: Difficult, but very worthwhile.
Review: This CD has markedly improved my ear. I've been using this and the Key Note Recognition CD on alternating nights, 20 minutes a night, 4-5 nights a week. I found these exercises much harder than those on the one-note CDs: at first, the two notes sounding together would establish a new key center and obliterate my memory of the reference pitch. Even with the reference pitch in mind, it was difficult to isolate and thereby identify each of the two notes. However, with practice, I'm now able to identify about three-quarters of the two-note pairs on the CD. In contrast, during my initial attempts 4 months ago, I had much less success, identifying less than one-quarter correctly.

One strength of this method is that it emphasizes all twelve notes equally. (When I tried to improve my ear using the more traditional method of transcribing music, I got better with the diatonic notes and common chords, but got little practice and saw little improvement with the chromatic notes and more unusual chords.) Furthermore, by using the `random play' feature of my CD player, the order of the exercises keeps changing, which prevents me from inadvertently memorizing their order, which would effectively halt my progress.

A skeptic might ask whether my ear is really improving as a result of this CD, or whether I am getting better only at the (admittedly esoteric) exercises on this particular CD. I think my ear really has improved, since I'm listening to music with greater awareness of pitch. Also, I just started with Vol 2 of the two-note series, and the improvement resulting from Vol 1 seems to have carried over. Instead of starting with a one out of four success rate (as in my initial attempts with Vol 1), I typically get around half correct.

So far, I've had great results with Vol 1 and the Keynote Recognition exercises, and I'm looking forward to seeing improvement in Vol 2.