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Ear Trainer

Short listening drills with instant feedback: hear an interval, a chord, a scale, a note in a key or a swara over a drone, then name it. All sound is made in your browser.

Drill
Level

Movable do: do is the key note of whatever key you hear, so the syllables move with the key. (In fixed do, do is always C; this tool does not use fixed do.) Keys are major. Notes between the steps are ra, me, fi, le, te; some books use ma, lo, ta instead.

Swara names
Drone
Tuning

Your answer

How it works

  • Intervals: two notes, going up, going down or together. Name the distance between them.
  • Chords: name the chord quality (major, minor, diminished, augmented, then seventh chords). Level 5 plays them in any inversion. Choose One by one first to hear the notes separately before the chord.
  • Scales: a scale or mode played going up, from its first note to the octave.
  • Degrees: chords set a major key, then one note plays. Name its degree (1 to 7, then the notes in between) or its movable-do syllable.
  • Swaras: a drone plays Sa (the home note), then one note. Name the swara. Hindustani names by default; Carnatic names (S, R1, R2 …) when you choose them. The drone is a tanpura (a plucked drone instrument of Indian music) sounding Sa and Pa, the fifth above Sa, or a held Sa alone.

Reading the buttons

Scale steps: W is a whole step (two half steps), H a half step (the very next key on a piano), W+H three half steps. Chord numbers count up a major scale from the chord’s root: 1 3 5 is the root, third and fifth; ♭ lowers a note by a half step and 𝄫 by two. Interval names: m minor, M major, P perfect, A augmented, d diminished, and the number counts letter names (C up to E is a third).

How questions are chosen

Each choice at your level starts with weight 2 until you have answered it once. After that its weight is 1, plus 1 for every wrong answer among its last five. The question you just had counts half. The next question is drawn at random by weight, so choices you miss come back a little more often.

Tuning

Every drill uses equal temperament, with A4 = 440 Hz taken from the tuner’s setting (change it there). In Swara mode you can also pick just intonation. It uses one published set of five-limit ratios (others exist), for example Ga = 5/4 and Ni = 15/8 above Sa. How musicians actually tune swaras may differ from these ratios, so treat it as one reference only.

If you cannot hear the drills

These drills are for listening, so they need sound and hearing. If that does not work for you, the Scale & Chord Explorer shows the same intervals, chords and scales on a keyboard, with no sound needed.

Keyboard shortcuts

  • Spaceplay or replay the question
  • 1 – 9 0 - =choose answer 1 to 12 with the number row (after answering: hear that choice). Keys count by position, so they work on any keyboard layout; the number pad is not used.
  • Enternext question (after answering)
  • Chear your answer again (after a wrong answer)
  • Escstop the sound

Shortcuts pause while you use a menu or type in a field.

With Keyboard shortcuts turned off in the footer (Display), the answer keys and C work only while focus is inside the drill (the Play button, the answers and Next question). Space, Enter and Esc keep working. Everything also works by tapping or clicking.

Your counts

The trainer counts how often you got each choice right, on this device only (browser storage). Clearing your browser data or pressing Reset counts removes them.