Ear Training Fundamentals: Associative Ear Training

How to use Associative Ear Training to quickly build a massive library of stock musical ideas for performance… by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle…

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Lesson Goal

To understand the utter simplicity of associative ear training and to be inspired to use it to build an enormous library of stock musical ideas that enable you to speak the language of music with the same ease that you can read and speak these written words.

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Prerequisites

LOVE of music and the discipline to study and practice the right things the right way.

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How Associative Ear Training Works

The process of association is utterly simple…

1. Pay Attention (listen) to a chunk of music and be receptive to the overall sound-feeling.
2. Associate (connect) that particular sound-feeling with knowledge already stored or able to be stored in your long-term memory. Such knowledge includes your knowledge of scales, chords, chord progressions, solfege, rhythms, as well as the music notation, visuospatial arrangement of notes on the keyboard, and physical choreography that expresses that chunk of music.

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What Associative Ear Training Is Not

Associative Ear Training is not Absolute Pitch ear training.

Associative Ear Training is not Interval ear training, although you may intervals incidentally.

Associative Ear Training works because the phenomenon of Relative Pitch Generalization enables us to instantly and effortlessly recognize a familiar sequence of sounds, as illustrated in the examples below.

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Examples of Associative Ear Training in Action

Listen to Frank demonstrate the association process using a famous chunk of music…

Please let Frank know if you’d like to hear other examples of associative ear training in action.

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Using Associative Ear Training to Build Your Repertoire

Associative ear training works just like learning new words and phrases in a second language.

Associative ear training turns music from something you merely recognize by into something you can perform.

And the process goes like this: Take a musical chunk that you’d like to add to your repertoire (a melody, comping pattern, bass line, chord voicing, lick, riff, intro, ending, embellishment, etc.) and associate (connect) the sound-feeling of that musical chunk to something you already know about music. Of course, this requires that you understand the building blocks of music (meter, rhythm, form, scales, solfege, chords, chord progressions, roman numeral analysis, etc.), can map that musical understanding to the visuospatial layout and sequence of keys on the keyboard, and the physical choreography required to perform it.

If you commit yourself to making a few such connections every day you’ll quickly internalize tens, hundreds, thousands of such associations–by ear, intellect, eye, and muscle… each new association expanding your capacity to understand and speak the language of music!!!

Learning how to speak the language of music is the inevitable reward for internalizing lots of musically-useful patterns… by ear, intellect, eye, & muscle.

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