Why Ear Training Plateaus: Your Ear Learns By Comparing
Nobody signs up for ear training to get good at ear training.You signed up to hear music.To sit in a rehearsal and know what just happened. To hear the line moving against yours.So you drilled a perfect fifth a hundred times and waited for the moment it settles and becomes usable.That moment doesn't come from repetition alone.It isn't that you're not working hard enough. Hard work is needed. It has to be pointed in the right direction.Your fingers learn by memorizing. Your ear learns by comparing.Two different mechanisms. Memorizing works by doing the same action again and again. Comparing works by judging one thing against many others.Play a fifth a hundred times and you learn what that particular fifth, on that particular instrument, at that particular speed, sounds like. You've memorized an artifact. You haven't learned an interval.Play a fifth and then a fourth, and something else is happening. You're not storing a sound. You're measuring a difference, and distance is the thing that transfers.Your ear was never the problem. Nobody trained you to hear. You did that as a baby, before you could hold a spoon.The fingers are the slow ones. Nobody comes out of the womb ready to cut a steak.This video's the argument. The next one's the demonstration: one interval, a perfect fifth, heard six ways in about six minutes.The first week of Flawless Ear Training is free. Seven days, one audio lesson a day, thirty minutes or less.https://www.uremusic.com/flawless-free-trialChapters0:00 Nobody Signs Up To Get Good At Ear Training0:35 Drilling The Fifth A Hundred Times1:16 Muscle Memory Is Real, And It's For Fingers2:04 Fingers Memorize, Ears Compare2:37 A Fifth, Then A Fourth3:32 Why People Plateau3:51 Your Ear Was Never The Problem4:48 Why The App Doesn't Transfer6:06 What Works Is Deliberate Variation6:40 Distance And Color7:37 Reading Music With Your Ears8:07 The Treadmill And The Refrigerator
20 Sept 2026
One Perfect Fifth, Six Ways: The Ear Training Your Drills Skipped
A perfect fifth, heard six ways in about six minutes.By the end you'll have made more comparisons than a week of drilling gives you.Last time I said your ear learns by comparison and not repetition. Watch that one first if you haven't.This is what that actually looks like. Play along or just listen.Six angles on one interval:melodic ascendingmelodic descendingharmonic, as a single colorharmonic split, attention on the bottom note and then the tophidden inside a triadinverted, where the fifth becomes a fourthMost people who can nail an ascending fifth stall completely on one going down. That's normal. It's also the proof that they memorized a shape instead of learning a distance.Halfway through you'll be moving a flashlight around inside a sound that isn't changing. That's a skill, it's trainable, and almost nothing teaches it.A drill gives you one of these and calls it ear training. Your ear needs all six and more, because music is going to hand you all six at once.Do this with a fourth tomorrow. A third the day after. Thirty minutes, then go live your life.The first week of Flawless Ear Training is free. Seven days, one audio lesson a day, thirty minutes or less.https://www.uremusic.com/flawless-free-trialChapters0:00 Last Time: Comparison, Not Repetition0:22 One. Melodic Ascending0:38 Two. Melodic Descending1:05 Three. Harmonic As A Single Color2:19 Four. Harmonic Split, Bottom Note Then Top3:58 Five. Hidden Inside A Triad5:10 Six. Inversion, Finding The Fourth6:35 Why Position Changes The Feeling8:01 Six Angles On One Interval8:43 Do This With A Fourth Tomorrow
20 Sept 2026
Audiation Versus Recall: Correcting Something I Say In My Courses
I'm going to correct something I say in my own two courses.What I call audiation in Flawless is recall, and I use the word anyway.Edwin Gordon coined audiation in 1975. It has a specific meaning: hearing sound in your mind that isn't coming from outside of you. Nothing in the room is producing it. Nothing you remember is producing it. It's generated internally.Here's what I actually do in Flawless. I play a C. I leave silence. I tell you to audiate it.That's recall. You heard the note two seconds ago and you're holding on to it, and I know that.Recall isn't audiation. Recall is a road to audiation, and there's no other road I know of that works.Before you can generate a pitch out of nothing, you have to be able to hold one. Most people can't do that on day one.It isn't pure recall even at the start, either. When you hold that C you're not holding an abstract pitch. You're holding a piano, the timbre, the room. Your ear is doing something constructive rather than replaying a recording.This is also where my two courses divide. Composing Hour is audiation, generating sound from the inside, which is what composers do. Flawless uses audiation principles to build recognition and internal hearing first, because you can't compose with an ear that can't hold a note for four seconds.Some people don't get internal sound at all. The mind's ear is silent. Anauralia is a name for it, and I'm not the expert to speak on it in depth. What I can say is that sound and relationship are two different things, and from what I understand, people who don't get internal sound still get relationship. The map is real even without the sound.Precision about what you're training is the difference between progress and four wasted months. If a program can't tell you whether it's building recognition, recall or audiation, it probably doesn't know either.The first week of Flawless Ear Training is free. Seven days, one audio lesson a day, thirty minutes or less.https://www.uremusic.com/flawless-free-trialChapters0:00 Correcting Something I Say In My Own Courses0:07 What Gordon Meant By Audiation0:25 What I Actually Do In Flawless Is Recall0:45 Why I Use The Word Anyway1:32 Comparison With Nothing Playing2:12 Where My Two Courses Divide2:41 When The Mind's Ear Is Silent3:52 Why Precision Matters Here
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