Interval Ear Trainer

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Minor 2nd Major 2nd Minor 3rd Major 3rd

Unison Perfect 4th Tritone Perfect 5th Octave

Minor 6th Major 6th Minor 7th Major 7th

Minor 9th Major 9th Minor 10th Major 10th

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Intervals

Interval Ear Trainer

Welcome to the interval ear trainer. This app will train your ability to recognize intervals by ear through repeatedly playing an interval and getting you to pick which interval has been played. Learning to identify intervals is a common first step in ear training and often precedes skills such as identifying chords or chord progressions by ear.

The app can test any interval from Unison up to a Major 10th. You can select any combination of these intervals to be tested at a time in the intervals table. A good use of this is to limit your tests to groups of only a few intervals when you’re first learning to identify them.

Another use I like here when you have a reasonable accuracy over the whole range is to start testing with say all intervals up to an octave. Once you’ve been doing this for a while you can look at your reported accuracy for each interval. I then turn off the ones I am getting a good accuracy on so I’m only being tested on my weaker intervals (say the 6th and 7ths). This way you can start to develop a more balanced ability across all intervals.

Intervals can be played melodically or harmonically, ascending and descending. Each of these options is quite a different skill so being able to identify say ascending melodic intervals will not necessarily mean you can pick harmonic intervals. This will typically take its own practice. Additionally you can make the first note constant all the time or vary it for each test which will be harder.

The app provides three modes of operation when you make a mistake. Probably the best mode when learning is to have your mistake played to you and then retest the interval again. This will allow you to hear the difference between your guess and the actual interval.

Once you’ve got some reasonable skills, you may simply want to try another pick rather than have the app play the options again. This will allow faster testing and will get you to correct yourself.

The app can also play your mistake then tell you the correct answer as another mode.

I hope you find the app useful and feel free to leave feedback in the comments.

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