Hearing and Distinguishing Simultaneous Notes

You are preparing for an aptitude test for a conservatoire, fine arts faculty or music education department. Where should you begin? Naturally, with pitch-repetition exercises. Similar tasks will follow, including repeating two, three or four notes.

How should you practise these questions? You may be taking professional aural-training lessons for an aptitude test but still find it difficult to answer correctly. Perhaps several notes sound like a single note to you.

First listen for the piano register in which the interval of two notes or chord of three or four notes sounds. Is it low, middle or high? When the question is played, spend a second simply listening and identifying that register. Suppose it is high: prepare your voice accordingly. Searching from a low pitch will not help if both notes are high; you need to explore the upper register. Conversely, one note may be very low and the other high, so begin by locating the lower one. If both are low, do not mistakenly look for the second in the high register; search the low or middle area instead. This may seem difficult at first, but learning to prepare your voice for the register makes producing and repeating the notes easier. Before singing them on “na”, listen briefly and analyse where the sounds lie.

Next comes distinguishing the notes. Here is a tip: when two or more notes sound together, you tend to hear the highest first. Begin by repeating only that higher note for a few lessons until you become familiar with hearing two notes. Then move to the second stage: focus only on the lower note and try to repeat it. Even when two or three notes are played, spend several lessons identifying just the lowest. Once you can find the lower notes easily in groups of two, three or four, you have made excellent progress.

Now comes the difficult part: joining the notes by singing them one after another. For two notes, try humming the lower one first and then the higher. By humming, we mean producing a sound with the mouth and lips closed, feeling the resonance in the chest: “hmmm”. This helps form the sound internally before opening into a sung vowel, making the notes easier to search for and find.

The rest is up to you: plenty of repetition and practice. Practice keeps your skills sharp and helps you pass exams. I wish every candidate taking the exam this year success.

Pelin Aşkın Kumova
Rekor Sanat – Piano and Aural Skills Teacher