What is the best way to improve your ear?

Question

Are there specific exercises or things that I can do that will improve my ear and allow me to "hear" more in my head?

Answer 1

There are so many ways. It really depends on your personality, learning styles, goals, experiences, etc.

Personally, here's what's helped me a huge amount:

1. Learning to think in terms of scale degrees. Melodies aren't just random series of notes; at least in tonal music, each note of the scale has its own function, its own feel, its own relationship with other notes in the scale. So it's been immensely helpful to start hearing/singing the functions of notes. It's also a lot more meaningful than just singing a bunch of random notes.
2. Learning to *not* think in terms of intervals, but rather in terms of patterns. Yes, intervals are important. But unless we're dealing with serial / atonal music (which is what the founders of the academic field of music theory were all into, hence the emphasis on intervals in music theory classes), music is not a note followed by a note followed by a note followed by a note. That's like trying to read a book letter by letter by letter by letter by letter. When we read a book, we read entire words and phrases; music is the same way. Music is about patterns. So learning to recognize patterns has been immensely useful to me. I don't have to think "what's this note, ok what's this note, ok what's the next note, and what's the note after that" because I'm thinking of the notes in chunks.
3. Learning to think of music in terms of gestures. Think about how the ways we move our arms when we talk, or the ways we move our eyes/nose/mouth when we talk, communicate meaning. Same thing with music. Upwards gestures often indicate hope. Downward gestures often indicate loss. There are cadential gestures, opening gestures, triumphant gestures, transitional gestures, etc. Learning to recognize not only patterns, but the functions and meanings of these patterns, has been very useful to me. Again, it means that rather than trying to connect random dots on the page, I'm reading meaningful patterns and understanding how they connect to each other in meaningful ways.

The other major thing that helped me was really becoming obsessed. Seriously. It got to the point where every time I heard something, my mind was trying to figure out the scale degrees. Every time I heard something, my mind was trying to recognize patterns or discover new ones. It became a part of how I listen to music, how I play music, how I sing, how I compose. Not an academic exercise, but simply part of my fluency in music.

Of course that's all easier said than done. :-)

But enough of me.

What approaches have you already tried out? What have you found to be (or absolutely not be) helpful?

Answer 2

Improving your ear is like training a muscle—it takes consistent, focused practice, but it’s definitely possible! The best way to get better is to combine listening, singing, and active practice.

Here are some practical things you can do:

1. Sing everything you hear – even simple melodies. Match pitches exactly and use solfege syllables. Your voice is the fastest way to connect your ears to your brain.
2. Interval training – practice recognizing and singing different intervals (steps, thirds, fifths, etc.) without an instrument. Start small and build up.
3. Play and sing scales and arpeggios – this helps your brain predict how notes relate to each other, so you can “hear” them internally.
4. Ear shadowing – listen to a short melody, pause, then try to sing it back from memory. Gradually, your inner hearing improves.
5. Active listening to music – pick out harmonies, bass lines, or melodies in songs you know. Try to sing or hum them in your head before playing them.

The key is consistency and patience. Even 10–15 minutes a day of focused ear training makes a huge difference over time. Eventually, you’ll find that you can “hear” music in your head before it even comes out of your instrument or voice.

Answer 3

Samantha Z gave a fantastic answer. You can improve your listening through many different methodologies, but one of the best ways is learning melodies, as if they are musical sentences. See if you can repeat half of a melody that you have heard once or twice as a gesture, then play it again, and try to add the second or third section. Think of melody the same way you think of a sentence in English. If you had to learn a long line of dialogue for a play, you would probably split it in half or thirds. Try doing that with a melody. Once you can sing the first half, try the second half, and then sing the whole thing. The other contributions to this question are also great ways of learning to improve your ear. Musicians are fantastically creative and obsessive. There is no one perfect way to improve your ear. There are many many ways to solve the same problem. The task for the student is to find the best way for themselves.

Answer 4

It is a really a plus that you are asking the question about how to improve your ear. That means you are interested. Good.

This is a key topic to me when teaching guitar students to learn to play by ear.

1) Lots of listening and concentrating and either singing or playing what you have heard. Pick out some songs with which you are very familiar and work through them repeatedly to learn how to feel and predict the chord changes. Also concentrate on the melody. Play the melody on the guitar note for note and concentrate on the sound.

2) Record and listen. Then shape up areas which my be a bit off-pitch.

3) Continue to listen to music with this heightened attention.

Hope this helps.

Andy

Answer 5

My fellow teachers provided a very nice and full in depth technical answer. I'd like to add on top of that something very practical that you can already try to do now, and that helped me a lot in that type of "connection" between our instrument -> voice -> brain. Do you play an instrument? Do you play an instrument that allows you to sing along to it? (would be a little hard with wind instruments :P )

Try SINGING ALONG to things you play. I'd start with:

1. simple scales that you know
2. simple arpeggios
3. then try to get the singing into your improvising or even noodling around in a scale. try to start by being led by your playing, and then start to try and lead your playing with your voice. it might be a little weird in the beginning, but as you go, you'll see that your inner voice starts dictating your playing. That's when you should try to keep thinking of it but minimize the actual voice "leading" you instrument. This should help you get this as naturally as possible.

Hope this helps! Here for any questions.

Yoel

Answer 6

Pretty much the best thing you can do to improve your ear is to sing. A lot. But not just random singing or songs on the radio, try to sing things that you previously would not have been able to sing. Make sure you are also as accurate as possible when you try to sing something, redo it 50 times if you need to to get it perfect. The more you connect what you're hearing to your voice the more you will be able to feel the music inside your head (also called "audiation"). There are also great ear training exercises on musictheory.net that allow you to connect your voice, your ears, and music theory labels so you can put a name to what you're hearing/playing.