Enhance Your Aural Abilities: Discover Top 8 Apps to Sharpen Your Hearing Competence
Ear training is an essential skill for musicians and audio engineers, as it helps break down the elements of music and connect them with the way we physically hear sound. In this article, we'll explore some of the best ear training apps and resources available to help you sharpen your listening skills.
EarPlugins offers a free VST plugin for frequency training, making it an ideal choice for those looking to improve their audio engineering skills. For those seeking a comprehensive music production platform, Good-Ears.com provides end-to-end music production, including unlimited mastering and distribution, 30+ plugins worth over $2,000, and more.
For musicians, Sonofield Ear Trainer (SET) is a versatile app that trains you to identify scale degrees by their feeling using sustained drones. It's popular for its intuitive, feeling-based musical fluency approach, offering exercises for melody recognition, singing, and hands-free practice[1].
Quiztones is another highly recommended app, focusing on training your ear to recognize frequencies quickly and accurately, a crucial skill for mixing, EQ adjustments, and feedback elimination. Available on iOS, macOS, and Android, Quiztones offers quizzes featuring sine waves, pink noise, and common instrument sounds to develop frequency recall[2][3].
Functional Ear Trainer uses an approach that teaches tone recognition within the context of a musical key, helping users understand the function of each tone rather than just isolated intervals. It's well-regarded for helping musicians learn to transcribe or play melodies by ear and is popular for its practical, context-based method[5].
For beginners and students, Perfect Ear 2 is a free Android app focusing on fundamental music theory and ear training. It includes exercises that strengthen music theory knowledge and ear skills in a structured way[4].
Soundgym offers a variety of ear training resources for engineers, while NetworkConnect is a platform to find help for music projects, from session musicians to marketing experts.
Ear Master is a popular ear training tool, particularly for music students, and Tenuto is a useful tool for ear training, particularly for guitarists. The website "Teoria" is a free resource for ear training, including a tutorial and reference section, and "musictheory.net" offers ear training tools, with Tenuto being the app version.
TrainYourEars allows users to learn to make EQ corrections and design custom training programs, and the jazz ear training tests on Teoria are particularly useful for learning to identify extended chords.
Regardless of your chosen app, remember that every time you listen with ear training, you learn. Ear training can boost confidence in trusting one's ears and shaping one's own sound, helping musicians and engineers learn to play melodies by ear, recognize chord progressions, and identify EQ ranges quickly.
In the words of Michael Hahn, an engineer and producer at Autoland and a member of the indie rock trio Slight, "Ear training can help you develop a more natural and intuitive understanding of music, allowing you to make more informed decisions when it comes to shaping your sound."
In the realm of online education and self-development, music production platforms like Good-Ears.com offer a comprehensive solution for musicians, providing unlimited mastering and distribution, a suite of high-quality plugins, and more. For those seeking specialized ear training, apps such as Sonofield Ear Trainer (SET) offer an intuitive, feeling-based approach to help musicians develop their listening skills. Meanwhile, for those learning the fundamentals of music theory and ear training, Perfect Ear 2, a free Android app, is a useful resource for beginners and students. Additionally, platforms like Soundgym and NetworkConnect provide resources and connections for engineers and musicians, catering to various aspects of education-and-self-development and online-education.
