Ear Trainer

How to practise

Hum the first note, then sing up until you land on the second. If you can sing the gap, you already know it — naming it is just matching what you sang to one of the buttons. Keys 1–9 answer without the mouse.

Anchor intervals that many people know by ear: a major 2nd is the first leap of “Happy Birthday”, the minor 2nd is the two-note shark motif from “Jaws”, the perfect 4th is “Here Comes the Bride”, the perfect 5th opens “Twinkle, Twinkle”, and the octave is the first leap of “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”.

In chord mode all tones sound at once — listen for a colour, not a melody. Start from the bottom: hum what you think the lowest note is, then judge the rest against it. Major sounds settled and bright, minor darker, diminished tense and unstable, augmented floating and ambiguous. The 7th chords stack one more tone on a major or minor triad, which adds a gentle pull toward a chord that never arrives — the dominant 7th is the “blues” flavour. If a quality eludes you, compare it directly: press next a few times and vote major/minor on every chord before you widen the difficulty.

The playback select changes how a question sounds. Intervals can play ascending, descending, or harmonically with both notes ringing together — the harmonic setting is the bridge to chord hearing, since a chord is just several intervals stacked at once. Chords can sound as a blocked chord or arpeggiated, one tone after another from the bottom up. Changing the playback never changes what is being asked, so use it to make a question easier — and to check yourself by replaying the same question in a harder setting.

Your best streak for the current drill and difficulty is kept between visits, stored only in your own browser. Be patient with the classic confusions: minor vs. major 2nd, and the 6th/7th pairs, feel identical at first, and almost everyone scores near chance on the tritone for a while. A few minutes daily beats one long session — and accuracy on the intervals you drill most moves within days, not weeks.

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