Magic Ear Trainer

Why study ear training? Improve your musical ear with Magic Ear Trainer (MagicET). Enhance your improvistational skills, sing better. Tune your instrument better and faster. Hear musical ideas in your mind and translate them into notes or musical performance. Learning to recognize musical intervals can you help achieve these goals. MagicET will almost "magically" teach you to recognize musical intervals using a special method not found in other programs.. (An interval is the distance between two notes.)

How does it work? MagicET randomly picks two tones from a wide range of pitches and then plays them for you using your computer's MIDI (music instrument digital interface). MagicET then asks you to name the interval. You can ask MagicET to repeat the interval or play a hint before you answer.

How does MagicET teach me? MagicET teachs you to recognize intervals by offering hints -- the hints are short melodies you can associate with the various intervals. If you don't immediately recognize an interval, you can ask for a hint before giving your answer. MagicET automatically transposes the hint to the same key center as the interval. This makes the hint easy to relate to the interval you just heard. By not just giving you the answer, but leading you to it, MagicET conditions you to respond correctly. After a while you will associate the interval with the melodic fragment. So when you hear the interval, you will immediately recognize the quality of that interval and be able to name it and reproduce it on your own music instrument.

One user noticed that he had a lot of trouble hearing a minor sixth and asked for help. I explained to him that he should make more use of the hint feature. He wrote back with this happy comment: "That did the trick. I can now hear the minor sixth and now it is so obvious!. My son caught on to the idea and is now coming up with his own hints for learning the intervals." You will find that the use of hints in this way makes MagicET especially effective.

Welcoming Menu

Here's what the welcoming menu looks like for MagicET.

You can practice with all intervals, focus on your difficult intervals, and build a custom lesson with specific intervals. You can also track your progress. Here's a sample progress report:

Unison. Minor Second. Major Second Minor Third Major Third Perfect Fourth Tritone Perfect Fifth Minor Sixth Major Sixth Minor Seventh Major Seventh Octave Descending Intervals ========== Unison Minor Second Major Second Minor Third. Major Third. Perfect Fourth Tritone Perfect Fifth Minor Sixth Major Sixth Minor Seventh Major Seventh Octave

100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 100.00 77.78 100.00 91.67 Descending Intervals ======== -- 90.91 100.00 100.00 62.50 100.00 87.50 100.00 92.31 60.00 77.78 60.00 87.50

After reviewing a like this report, you might decide to build a custom lesson for yourself that focuses on descending Major Thirds, Sixths, and Sevenths, and ascending Minor Sevenths.

Ascending and Descending Intervals. A common mistake is to practice only ascending intervals and assume that you can then recognize descending intervals. An interval can sound quite differently when descending. For example, a perfect fourth may sound like the first few notes of the familiar wedding march. But when played backwards -- so that the interval is descending -- it doesn't sound that way at all. MagicET mixes up ascending and descending intervals to ensure you learn to recognize both. And the program also generates appropriate hints for both ascending and descending intervals.

Customized Lessons. As explained earlier, MagicET watches as you learn and keeps track of intervals that you have difficulty identifying. At your option, MagicET will automatically prepare special ear training practice that focuses on those difficult intervals. This will help you master those difficult intervals more quickly..

Make your own lessons. As you've seen, MagicET also lets you specify which intervals you want to study. You focus on any group of intervals or just a single one. You can specify that you want to work just on descending intervals if you like. Or you can work on ascending intervals or a mixture of both. Even though you tell MagicET which intervals you want to focus on, she is smart enough to throw in a different interval from time to time to keep you on your toes.

Relative pitch. MagicET focuses on teaching you relative pitch. It keeps playing intervals at random pitch levels, some very low and some very high and some in the middle register. This ensures that you focus on the quality of intervals rather than exact pitches. But you can still use MagicET to work on absolute pitch, if you like.

Absolute pitch. You never know what notes MagicET will throw at you. So you can also use MagicET to study absolute pitch. When MagicET plays the tones, see how quickly you can find them on your musical instrument.

Sound Quality. The sound quality produced by MagicEt will be very good because it uses your computer's MIDI system and "magically" creates new MIDI instructions on the fly during the ear training lesson. In this way an unlimited number of unique lessons are available to you. A soundcard such as "SoundBlaster" or another MIDI device is required. Most PC's these days have excellent sound cards or other MIDI devices.

NOTE: After ordering MagicEar Trainer, you will receive email that explains how you may download it. After downloading the setup file, run it by clicking or doubleclicking on it in the usual way.. The setup file will install the program to:

Run the program from this location the first time. After that.you can run it by picking it from your Programs menu. (Click Start/Programs and look for MagicET)

If you have any questions about MagicET, please send me a note by clicking here.

Better Together -- NEW! Magic Ear Trainer is now better together with the Hip Hop Ear Training CD