I started taking piano lessons this summer and as an added bonus they give you a free ear training seminar. So I just got back and all I could say is OMG. I started with the group that had never done ear training before, but then the teacher found out I'd done most of that stuff before, so he sugested I go with the advanced group. The first thing I did when I got there was transcribed rhythems. He clapped his hands and I had to transcribe 4 bars or 5 bars of the rhythem and put it in the right key signature. This wasn't to hard, but it did prove to be a little tricky since he only repeated each example 3 times. Then we moved on to melodies. He had us try to transcribe pitch this time using solfeg(sp). This proved to be a little harder. He sang quarter notes at about 90 bpm, which made it hard for me to remember the notes. Then he started taking to us about perfect pitch. He said that you can develop perfect pitch if you spend time trying. I know alot of people here said you can't, but he said he has know people who have and he himself has done it. He said he can identify the sound of buzzes, tapping and other noises. He mentioned the Burge method and implied that it worked, but he said he never used it. He didn't give us a demonstration of his skills, because we only had about 15 min left. From here things really started getting hard. He played chords and had us identify them as either major or minor. This was easy at first then he started playing them in weird inversions and really wide voicings. Last, but not least he played 6 chords. He gave us the bass note and the highest note of the first chord. Next he had us find the bottom note of each chord, followed by the top then the 2 middle notes. Figuring out chord voicing is hard. Here is the amazing part. He told us this story about when he went to Yale and flew out there to do a tryout. He said before he even touched a paino they gathered everyone into a large room, gave them pencil and staff paper and started playing music. They told everyone to transcribe the music playing, which was Mozart. After they got done with that they had to do the same thing with a song by Bartok(I think String quartet no3 or something like that). Needless to say alot of people just started yelling and threw their pencils in the air. They had to trtanscribe all the voices not just the melody and they only played it twice. No slow speed software, no looping. My teacher said he thinks he transcribed it 90% correctly :shocked: *I didn't think anyone was that good. He gave me some advice about ear training afterwords, but even if I'm only half as good as him I'll be happy
