Audiation for Beginners: How to Start Ear Training From Scratch

Think about a note you want to sing. Maybe the note C. Then, feel around in your range until it feels like you have landed on the correct note. Then, grab your instrument and see how close you were.

Most people find they sing closer than they expect. The gap between where you aimed and where you landed is the part that is worth training, and you've just measured yours in about four seconds.

This article is for the person who wants to start closing that gap and doesn't know how or where to begin. No prerequisites. If you can hum and you have access to any instrument, including a free tuner app, you have what you need.

What you're actually training

The skill is called audiation. It means hearing and understanding music in your mind when no external sound is present.

That's different from remembering a recording, which many people can do without any musical training. Audiation is what lets you imagine a melody before playing your instrument, follow a harmony instead of guessing, or conceptualize the form of a work.

Nearly everything else in musicianship relies on audiation. Sight-reading gets easier when you can hear internally before you sing. Improvising gets easier when you can hear an idea before you play. Composing stops being a 'hunt and peck' technique.

An important group of people who can't hear anything in their mind does exist. Anauralia is the complete absence of auditory imagery, coined by Tony Lambert at the University of Auckland in 2021. An estimated one percent of people have this condition. If you've genuinely never heard anything internally, including a person's voice, a familiar song, or even your own thoughts, audiation may not be possible for you. But, there are other solutions. Musicians with anauralia often hold music as structure rather than as sound, and that's real musical understanding rather than a consolation prize.

Why beginners usually start in the wrong place

The standard entry point is interval recognition. Somebody hands you a chart of songs to remember, and you learn that a perfect fourth is the start of a particular film theme.

That approach isn't useless, but it's a strange place to begin, for two reasons.

1. It trains recognition rather than hearing. You end up able to identify an interval when it's played, but you are no better at imagining one. Those are different abilities, and only the second one shows up in your playing.

2. The method itself creates more problems later on down the road. The relationship between two notes is more than most beginners can hear. So, people work at it for weeks and never get any better. Then, they are left wondering what is wrong with their ears.

Start with a more simple technique. There's no prize for diving into the deep end, and the experience in the shallow end prepares you better.

Four first steps, in order

Do these in sequence. Each one assumes you completed the previous step.

1. Hold one note

Play a single note. Listen to it for several seconds without doing anything else. Then, play it again and sing the note.

That's the entire exercise, and it's more profound than it seems. Most musicians have never given a single pitch their full attention. You're building the ability to pay attention to one sound, which is one of the most important foundations.

Try this for two minutes for five consecutive days.

2. Listen to silence

Play a note. Stop the sound. Hold it in your mind for five seconds. Then sing it back and see if you maintained the pitch and intonation.

This trains long term pitch memory, and it's noticeably absent from most ear training. Most methods ask whether you can identify a sound as it plays or immediately after. This technique tests and trains whether you can continue to hold it when it goes away, which is the skill that really matters.

Lengthen the gap by a second or two each week. When you can remember the tone after one minute, you've trained something really substantial.

3. Step or leap?

Now add a second note, but don't try to name the interval. This is important, do not name the interval.

Play two notes and ask one question: step or leap?

A step is small, right next door. A leap jumps over notes to get somewhere else. For this context, we can consider a skip a leap as well. A skip is smaller than a leap, but bigger than a step. But for now, only identify how far the note went, by step or farther. That's it. You're not identifying a minor third or perfect fifth. You're noticing the size of a motion.

Once you can do that, try singing. Singing is one of the best ways to train your ear. Next time a song is stuck in your head, don't just hum along. Ask yourself whether the melody is moving by step or by leap. Do that in the car, in line at the grocery store, anywhere. This is the exercise that converts idle listening into training, and it carries with it a low cognitive load.

4. Listen. Sing. Play

Take a very short phrase. Three or four notes from a piece you like.

Listen to it. Sing it back. Find it on your instrument. Then listen again to check.

Singing is the step people skip, and skipping it is why ear training so often fails to transfer. When you find a note on your instrument you can locate it by shape and muscle memory, with your ear uninvolved. When you sing it, there is a bit of muscle memory and physical sensation there too, but singing is one of the best tools to verify you're getting the correct note. You don't need a good voice and nobody's listening.

How long this takes

Ten minutes a day on most days.

Ten minutes is not a motivational number, it's a practical one. This skill builds through frequency rather than duration, so ten minutes daily does considerably more than seventy minutes once a week. Short sessions also keep your attention intact, and attention is what activates deeper learning.

Don't worry much about progress day to day. You won't be able to see it at that scale and watching for it will make you miserable. Work the current step until it feels solid, then move on.

Give it a month, then go back to a piece of music you know well and listen thoughtfully. That's where the change shows up, and it's a better progress report than any quiz.

What to expect

Early on, this feels fuzzy. You'll sing something back and be wrong. You'll try to hold a note in your mind and find it drifting after two seconds.

That fuzziness is normal. It's not a sign that you started too late or should abandon your dream of pursuing music. It's the first accurate reading of where your ear currently is, and you can't train from anywhere else.

Start with one note. Everything in this article grows out of that.

Check out the Audiation Essentials course to learn more about how audiation works.

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Audiation – Inner Ear Training is free. Sixteen short lessons on hearing music in your mind. No card, no call.