Ear Training — Free Quiz
Listen to the interval and identify it below
About Ear Training
Ear training is the part of music education that turns you from someone who reads music into someone who hears it. The free quiz above is a sample. The full curriculum that follows breaks ear training into its parts so you know what to practice and why.
What Ear Training Is
Ear training is the practice of building a reliable connection between what you hear and what you know about music theory. A well-trained ear can listen to a song once and tell you the key, the chord progression, the time signature, and the scale being used over each chord. None of that is magic — it is the result of structured, daily practice on a handful of specific skills.
Most musicians who "have a great ear" simply spent two years drilling intervals, chords, and progressions for ten minutes a day. The skill is learnable. This page is a map of what to learn and which RITHM games train each piece.
The Five Pillars of Ear Training
- Pitch — naming a single note when you hear it. Train this with Pitch Identification.
- Intervals — recognizing the distance between two notes. This is the skill the quiz above drills. The full game with all options is Interval Training.
- Chords — identifying whether a chord is major, minor, diminished, or augmented (and which seventh chord) by ear. Train this with Chord Identification.
- Scales — recognizing major, minor, modal, and pentatonic scales from their sound. Train this with Scale Identification.
- Progressions — hearing how chords move in relation to a key. This is the highest-level skill on this list. Train it with Chord Progressions.
Rhythm has its own family: Duration Hearing trains identifying note lengths by ear, and Duration Reading trains the visual side.
A Suggested Order
If you are starting from scratch, work the games in roughly this order. Each builds on the previous.
- Intervals first. Master ascending intervals on Beginner before anything else. This is the foundation of every other ear skill.
- Chord qualities next. Major vs. minor in arpeggio mode, then in block-chord mode. This is the single most useful skill for playing along with songs.
- Pitch identification in parallel. Even ten minutes a day, with a reference pitch, will start building anchors.
- Scale identification after you can hear chord qualities. Many scale flavors are easier to hear once you can identify the chords built from them.
- Chord progressions last. This is where everything comes together — recognizing not just individual chords, but how they relate to a tonal center.
The Daily Practice Habit
Ear training works on the same logic as language learning: short, daily, consistent. Five focused minutes a day will outpace an hour once a week. Three sessions of two minutes will outpace one session of six minutes. The ear consolidates between sessions, especially during sleep.
Pick one game and one difficulty. Play until your accuracy on that combination is above 90% across multiple sessions. Then move to the next combination. Do not try to drill everything at once; you will spread your attention thin and progress on nothing.
Tips That Help Almost Everyone
- Use headphones. Especially for pitch and scale identification, headphones reveal far more than laptop speakers.
- Sing along. Even silently. Singing back what you heard is the single highest-leverage ear-training technique.
- Pair with the synthesizer. When you miss something, play it on the Synthesizer. Hearing it under your own fingers cements the memory.
- Track your progress over weeks, not minutes. Within a session you might feel stuck. Over a month the gains are obvious.
- Make an account. Your scores are saved across devices and you can see your accuracy graph improve. Sign-up is free.
Tip: Practice when you are tired. Ear training is one of the few music skills that benefits from a relaxed, low-pressure state. Five minutes before bed is one of the most effective time slots in the day.