Ear training has often been half-jokingly, half-seriously referred to as “ear straining.” And I can understand why if it’s something that you feel forced to do, like doing sit ups. Why can’t washboard abs just come with the package?

But a listening practice isn’t something you have to motivate yourself to do every morning. It’s something you get to do all the time. It’s the equivalent of eating whatever you want, whenever you want… without gaining weight!

Your ears are always on. All you have to do is start paying attention. The world is filled with sounds for you to soak up. Your musical ears are hungry for stimulation. It’s time to give them what they want.

Here’s just a few things you can do to begin your listening practice.

First, just start listening unconditionally. We all daydream, so make these times of subconscious wandering into conscious sound expeditions. You’ll be amazed at all the different rhythms, counterpoints, and natural symphonies you will hear. If you can, close your eyes and just listen to the world around you and inside of you.

Second, think on media. Keep a few things with you at all times: music manuscript and a pen, a recording device, and a tuning fork of some kind. When you hear a note, figure out what it is. Teach yourself. Write a scale or a pattern and imagine what they sound like as you write them. Record rhythms and intervals and whatever else inspires you in the moment. Take a recess into the playground of sound. It will be fun and you’ll learn new things and reinforce what you already know.

Start a sound catalog. In a sound journal, begin to catalog all the different sounds and textures you hear. This will increase your “aural intelligence.” People who live bland lives have about a dozen different words that they use to describe their daily emotions. If you only have a dozen different words to describe what you hear, then it’s no wonder your musicianship is straining. But if you have a rich database of descriptive words in your musical vocabulary, then your experience of sound will be rich and abundant. Grab a thesaurus and your favorite album and have some fun.

Stop for a moment and think about these two musicians. One musician trains their ear for 15 minutes every day or so. The other musician actively listens all the time. Which is a better musician?

Answer: The musician with more aural experience. Go get some!

Table of contents for 2006 Celebrations and Reflections

1. Top Ear Training Articles for 2006
2. Top Songwriting Articles for 2006
3. Top Music Theory Articles for 2006
4. Top Music Hacks for 2006
5. Top Peak Performance Articles for 2006
6. Top Music Business Articles of 2006
7. Top Music Technology Articles for 2006
8. The Best of The Graham English Blog 2006

I hope your ear improved in 2006. I know mine did. Just in case you haven’t been reading my blog all year, here’s my favorite ear training articles for 2006.

• Is Your Ear Suspect?
• Why Singing What You Hear Is Important To Your Ear Training
• Understanding The Art And Craft Of Absolute Pitch Hearing
• Shaolin Ear Training
• Hearing and Consciousness
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 12-04-06
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 10-06-06
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 09-26-06
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 08-14-06
• Absolute Pitch Ear Training Podcast 07-30-06
• Naked Pitch
• Ear Training Software and Freeware for Mac and PC
• Why Is Absolute Pitch More Refined Than Relative Pitch?
• The Ear Training You Do Today…
• Quit On A High Point
• Portals Into Absolute Pitch: Silence
• How To Hear Interval Quality Distinctions
• Ear Training With Your Cell Phone Ringtone
• Some Important Absolute Pitch Distinctions
• How To Be An Expert
• Ear Training Hack #3
• Ear Training Hacks 1-2

In case you missed it, I’ve talked about ear training with your cell phone ringtone before.

And while I don’t like to go “off topic” in my blog too much, I felt I had to, given the significance this information could have on your ear training and musicianship — let alone your entire life.

So one the basic premises of accelerated learning is that your brain is in a state of peak performance when it’s vibrating at a certain frequency. And different frequencies get different results.

There are natural ways to achieve these states, like through meditation, relaxation, and controlled breathing exercises. And there are other ways to induce these brain states, like bio-feedback, hypnosis, and…

Brain Wave Entrainment

Bio-feedback can get pretty expensive. You either visit a bio-feedback lab, or buy costly equipment that can read your vital statistics. But even then, you need to learn *how* to get into these altered states.

Hypnosis scares most people. Not only that, you either need to spend many hours learning how to use self-hypnosis or spend lots of money on a trained hypnotherapist.

But brain wave entrainment is simple and affordable. You simply pop in a CD and your brain will synchronize to the entrainment frequency.

Using binaural beats was all the rage for a while. Lots of people were selling binaural beat CDs and some audio editors would even create them for you. But new research has shown a technique called “Isochronic Tones” to be even better.

Well, being into accelerated learning and brain/mind research, I was blown away when I got an email from one of my trusted mentors, Stephen Pierce. Whenever he sends me an email, I drop everything and read it. But this one got me more excited than usual.

I could repeat everything he said, but I’ll just let you find out for yourself why I’m so excited about Optimindzation. And, why I think it’s going to be an indispensable tool to you, the musician.

Believe me, this changes everything. Find out more here: Optimindzation

The following exercise is a Shaolin Kung Fu eye focus exercise. This exercise is designed to keep your eyes honed and sharp. I will teach it to you and then we will apply what you have learned to your ear focus. Read the instruction closely and do the exercise.

Stand fully extended and relaxed, hands at sides, facing forward.

Snap your head quickly to the right, turning a full 90 degrees, so that your chin is over your shoulder, and focus your eyes as far into the distance as possible. Snap your head back straight. Now snap it to the left, look far, and snap your head straight again. Do this one quickly. Boom–right. Bam–straight. Boom–left. Bam–straight. Don’t turn your body. Stand fully extended, with your feet planted firmly on the ground and your chest forward.

Even if you’re standing in your bedroom and can only see the wall a few feet away, project your vision farther than that. See as far as Iceland and its polar bears in one direction, and as far as Miami and its dolphins in the other. Fully extend your sight, just as you fully extend your mind, your body, and your whole life.

Do it 10 times quick.

Now imagine the first 5 notes of Bach’s Invention in F.

Imagine each of those notes are like the spots you were looking at in the eye focus exercise. Now imagine increasing your hearing speed to focus on each individual note. It’s different with the eye focus exercise because your eye muscles are at work focusing and moving. Your ears don’t have to do anything. It’s all in the mind and brain. We have to exercise our focus, giving it precision, speed, and accuracy.

Listen to a fugue and pay attention to one voice at a time. Hear each and every single note. Add voices. Hear everything. Work with sequencers, metronomes, and audio editors to slow things down and speed things up. And keep practicing the eye focusing exercises. It will help your sight reading and provide a perfect metaphor to remind you to hear with focus.

Strong senses are of utmost importance to the warrior.

Hearing is the first sense we develop in the womb. The regions of the brain that deal with hearing are the first to finish the developmental process called myelination, in which the connecting “wires” of neurons are finished off with fatty sheaths that insulate the neurons, speeding up their electrical signals. In contrast, the visual system doesn’t complete this last step of myelination until a few months after birth.

Hearing is the last sense to go as we lose consciousness (when you’re dropping off to sleep, your other senses drop away and sounds seem to swell up) and the first to return when we make it back to consciousness.

Every morning I consciously wake up my ears. And I wake up my sense of pitch by picking any note, imagining it, and playing it on the piano. These days, I’m always right. But sometimes on a drowsy day, I’ll be a little flat. Not a full quarter tone. Never am I sharp. I blame my energy level. I’m not “up” yet.

I still carry a tuning fork with me. All I have to do is look at it and I hear an A. I don’t even need it but I bring it along anyway for a couple of reasons.

The first is a symbol. A symbol of absolute pitch. It reminds me to be aware of pitch. The more aware I am of pitch, with time, the more refined my sense of pitch becomes.

Second is a reminder to listen. Strike a tuning fork and put it up to your ear, concentrate only on the sound of it vibrating and listen. Close your eyes. No inner dialogue. Just follow the sound as it fades into silence. Notice how you can’t determine exactly when the sound ends. There’s no clear perceivable line between sound and silence. They live inversely. So I’m reminded of silence and I’m reminded to listen unconditionally.

In the absolute sense, sound is neither good nor bad. All judgments are created by our thinking. In the relative sense, loud sounds can hurt your ears. Sounds can be familiar or unfamiliar, consonant or dissonant, strong or weak. All of that “mental noise” can create distance from our own experience of sound.

If you want refined hearing, refine your thinking.

It’s not easy to tighten the leaky faucet of thought. But a listening practice is good training.

Wired Magazine interviews Bart Kosko, author of Noise, a book that argues that adding noise to our signals can actually make them clearer.

Can background music make you smarter?

The more you can concentrate with background noise, the more it strengthens the brain. Isaac Asimov used to set his typewriter up in stores and other loud places to work. His claim was that you get really good at writing when you’re in a crowd. You want to be energized by that background noise, rather than distracted.

How can you use background noise to strengthen and improve your practicing or ear training?

Full article: Noise can make you smarter

APU is an Absolute Pitch Master Mind (a coordination of knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, between two or more people, for the attainment of a definite purpose) PLUS a whole lot more. But deeper than that, it is a learning environment that delves into the reasons why you play music in the first place. This is only for people who want to make each moment at your instrument—and possibly away from your instrument—a work of art and a moment to remember.

If you’re ready, this is the opportunity for that hands-on “music-hacking” that will change everything for you…

=> Absolute Pitch University

These days, transcribing is easy. There are many great freeware programs that will allow you to rip a song from your favorite CD and load it into an audio editor where you can define regions for quick playback or looping and even slow a section down–without changing pitch for more difficult parts.

Some of my greatest musical epiphanies occurred while transcribing and realizing, “Oh, that’s what the hell they were doing!” I strongly encourage you to put pen to paper and internalize and eternalize the music.

As you learn new skills or behaviors, neurons connect into new groups of cognitrons, where the connecting synapses are reinforced with repeated use. In other words, these new ideas need to “shake hands” a number of times before they can become good friends. So practice, practice, and practice some more!

Instead of quitting according to the time you give yourself to ear train or after completing a particular exercise, quit on a high point.

Silence

Absolute pitch is so well disguised that almost everybody misses it completely. If you know how to listen, you’ll hear it. A portal opens up through silence.

Do you hear any sounds now? Can you feel the presence of a distinct and precise pitch of those sounds? Listen carefully.

Listen for it in the silence out of which the sounds come and into which they return. Begin by paying more attention to the silence than to the sounds. When you pay attention to the outer silence you create inner silence: the mind becomes still. A portal is opening up.

Every sound is born out of silence, dies back into silence, and during its existence is surrounded by silence. Silence enables the sound to exist. Become conscious of the gaps between sounds. As you do that, the dimension of stillness grows within you. You have entered the silence portal.

Imagine that you are vibrating right now with thought (which you are). Picture yourself buzzing with mental energy just like the buzzing of a trumpet mouthpiece. Now add another vibration to the mix, the sound of a middle C (261.626 kHz). Now what you have is two vibrations occurring at the same time, the vibration of your inner mind (which can be measured using an EEG machine) and the vibration of the external sound. And we know that when we add two vibrations or pitches together we are also creating even more overtones. The fundamental pitch becomes even harder to hear. Thus, creating confusion to an untrained ear.

Now contrast that with a still mind. A pitch enters your awareness. It comes to you. A single drop of water falling on a still pond. The quiet mind recognizes its fundamental nature immediately. Absolute pitch.

What happens when you hear a single pitch? Does the mind scramble to figure it out by talking to itself? “What note is that? Is it a C? Damn! I can’t figure it out.” Or does it silently recognize the distinct vibration with no mental chatter?

So what disguises absolute pitch? Mental noise.

Practice being still. When you listen to a pitch, notice what happens with your mind. Try to create stillness with no attachment to results. This is how it will feel when you demonstrate absolute pitch. Slow your breathing down. Still the mind. Allow the gradual process of absolute hearing to come to you. Don’t force it or try to think it into existence. Let your hearing be born out of the silence portal.

Music is the silence between the notes.
-Claude Debussy

ToneTester tests your ears for differences in how they hear pitches (“binaural diplacusis” or “interaural pitch difference”). You adjust a slider until your ears hear the same pitch, and then ToneTester tells you the actual pitch difference.

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Want to know more? Read the details here: Absolute Pitch Accelerators TeleSeries

[tag]TeleSeries[/tag] Details:

• Understand the difference between Active and Passive Absolute Pitch — and how to develop both of them.
• Learn how to use the Absolute Pitch Accelerators — you might find that you already have either Active or Passive AP!
• Get password protected access to the call replay — if you can’t make the live calls, don’t worry. We record them.
• Get password protected access to the call discussion — group participation can give you the motivation and tools to learn faster.
• Only $27 for the entire two-part TeleSeries — that’s almost twice as cheap as a single private lesson!

Register Now To Get Your Passcode!

There are only 90 spots available. So hurry!

To get your Passcode for our LIVE two-part teleseries (Thursday, April 20 and Thursday, April 27 at 5:30pm PDT, 8:30pm EDT), please click here now.

I learned how to recognize pitch just like Graham said I would be able to. This program did exactly what is said it would. Thank you Graham.
Gabe Serifine

I bought this course to improve the speed of my transcriptions and compositions. And so far, I’ve been very pleased with the results. And it’s only been 3 weeks.
John Yamashiro

Hi, I’m an oboist and in just the 25 days I’ve been using this course the accuracy of my intonation and musicality has improve dramatically
Tony Burton

Reserve Your Spot Today

These days everyone has custom ringtones on their cell phones. My current ringtone is All Blues by Miles Davis. Well, one of the fastest ways to prove to yourself that you can have perfect pitch is with [tag]pitch triggers[/tag]. So learn the notes of your cell phone ringtone and use it as a pitch trigger.

If you know that your ringtone is a B, then every time you hear it you’ll be conditioning yourself to memorize that tone. Within a week or two you’ll recognize that tone whenever you hear it. It’s a great way to develop your [tag]passive absolute pitch[/tag].

Share your results in the comments area.

If you’re interested in “hacking” your ear, i.e. finding creative solutions to common ear training problems, you’ll find this [tag]EarTrainingHacks[/tag] tag useful.

From: 18 Tricks to Teach Your Body:

2. Experience supersonic hearing!

If you’re stuck chatting up a mumbler at a cocktail party, lean in with your right ear. It’s better than your left at following the rapid rhythms of speech, according to researchers at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to identify that song playing softly in the elevator, turn your left ear toward the sound. The left ear is better at picking up music tones.

Accuracy is necessary to demonstrate absolute pitch. But before you demonstrate absolute pitch, relative improvements of pitch recognition can be demonstrated–but only if they are measured.

If you test at 10% pitch recognition, you might say to yourself, “I have a long way to go.” But if you test at 80% pitch recognition, you’ll probably say to yourself, “I’m almost there.” Which leads us to Ear Training Hack #2.

Ear Training Hack #2. Absolute pitch is intertwined with an “enabling belief” that can also be measured.

In Ear Training Hack #1, you followed the internal dialogue of a musician at 10% pitch accuracy and a musician at 80% accuracy. Both musicians don’t have absolute pitch, but their internal beliefs are different. And you can see which musician–and which belief–is closer to the goal of possessing absolute pitch.

There’s a natural order to pitch recognition improvement, not only at the skill level, but also at the belief level.

Let’s say that you don’t test yourself and you think that you have a long way to go before you will have absolute pitch. But–if you were to test–you would actually test at 45% accuracy. If you knew this, then your belief would probably change to something like, “I’m almost at the half-way point.” How does your experience change when you say to yourself, “I’m almost half-way there” instead of “I’ve got a long way to go.” One belief is a 10% accurate belief while the other is a 45% accurate belief.

Take away:
You can probably see how hacking your beliefs can improve your ear training now. And the fastest way to change your beliefs about absolute pitch is with regular testing.