The Trained Ear is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Welcome
Welcome to The Trained Ear, a free resource for music students, music teachers, and anyone else looking to develop their aural musicianship skills. In many musical traditions, strengthening the connection between sound and visual notation is a fundamental aspect of becoming a better listener, singer, and instrumentalist. And while this site was developed primarily with the student of Western art music in mind, it is hoped that musicians from a wide variety of other traditions will also find it useful.
The heart of this website is a collection of brief musical passages including rhythms, melodies, and chord progressions. Each of these has been prepared for use as a dictation exercise and includes audio recordings, information about how the passage begins (clef, time signature, starting, note, etc.), and optional hints with extra information. With over 5,000 exercises, the collection is quite large. To help with navigation—and to help students and teachers match exercise difficulty to skill level—the collection is easily filtered according to a variety of different categories.
To get started, click How to Use This Site or just follow the link to the Exercise List. (If you're looking for the old version of this site, click here.)
