How to Play by Ear: Ear-Training Exercises for Notes, Intervals and Chords, and Six Steps to Work Out a Song

Sing the first line of Ode to Joy and stop on its last note. You just did the main thing playing by ear asks for: you heard where the tune was going, compared each note with the one before, and felt that the last note was not quite home yet. This guide turns that everyday skill into four short drills and then puts them to work. You'll practice matching and comparing notes, measuring the distance between them, telling chords apart and clapping rhythms back. Then you'll work out a real melody and its chords in six steps, on Ode to Joy, Twinkle, Twinkle and Amazing Grace.

Every drill comes from a free Tissimo worksheet with audio for each item, so you can practice alone. Near the end you'll find a 15-minute daily routine and the full list of sheets.

What playing by ear really runs on

Two different abilities hide behind the phrase "a good ear". Perfect pitch, which researchers call absolute pitch, is the ability to name a note with no reference note to compare it with. It is rare: a 2006 study of conservatory students called it "extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe". The same study found it more often in students who started lessons young, and far more often among Mandarin-speaking students at a Beijing conservatory than among American students, at every starting age. Mandarin uses pitch to tell words apart. Adults can learn some of it, but not easily. In a small 2019 University of Chicago study, six trained musicians chosen for strong auditory memory practiced for eight weeks. One passed every perfect-pitch test and still had the skill four months later; most improved only modestly.

Playing by ear starts with listening on purpose: one question at a time, with the music close. Photo: Shixart1985, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).

Playing by ear doesn't need perfect pitch. It runs on relative pitch: hearing each note against the one before it and, above all, against home, the note the music keeps coming back to. If you can hear that a tune went up a little and then landed on home, you can find it on the piano, starting from any key you like. Every drill below trains relative pitch.

Parents often ask whether a child is "tone deaf". True tone deafness, which researchers call congenital amusia, is uncommon. A 2017 study of 20,000 people found it in about 1.5% of them, well below the older 4% estimate, which rested on a single test from 1980. The same study found that musical training did not reduce the condition. Singing a little off the note is a different matter from not hearing pitch at all. Matching your voice to a played note is the very first drill, and it is a skill you practice like any other.

Drill 1: match and compare two notes

Start with your voice. Play one note that sits comfortably in your voice and sing it back on "loo". Hold it and listen: does your voice blend into the piano sound, or does it rub against it? Slide slowly up or down until the rub disappears. The Organization of American Kodály Educators says Zoltán Kodály called singing "the essence" of his approach. If you can sing a note, you can find it.

Then train your ears to compare with Ear Training: Set 1 (Exercise 21). Its first three rounds ask three questions about short examples, and its listening page plays every item twice. Turn away from the keyboard and let a friend play, or play the audio.

Round 1 of Ear Training: Set 1. Two short melodies each time; only item 2 changes, when its last note moves up a step from E to F.

Same or different comes first, because it only asks you to notice a change. Once you hear item 2's last note step up, ask the next two questions about every pair of notes: which way did it go, and how far?

Rounds 2 and 3 of the same sheet. Higher or lower: C up to G, A down to D, E up to A. Step or skip: C to D and F to G are steps (next-door letters), C to E is a skip (one letter jumped over).

If higher or lower is hard to judge, hum both notes and feel whether your voice climbed or dropped. For step or skip, the sheet's rule is simple: next-door letters, like E and F, make a step; jumping over one letter, like E to G, makes a skip. Intervals: steps & skips shows both shapes on the staff, and Half steps & whole steps explains why some next-door keys are closer together than others.

Drill 2: measure the distance

Two questions name any interval by ear, says the Hearing intervals handout (Handout 375): did the second note go up or down, and how far? Its four steps are worth memorizing. First, up or down? Second, near or far: next-door letters make a 2nd, a skipped letter a 3rd. Third, sing its song: start a song from the sheet's table on the first note and see if it lands on the second. Fourth, count to check by humming up the scale.

Six intervals going up from C, from the Intervals chart, each with a song whose opening uses it. The songs come from Handout 375 and the Intervals chart; Greensleeves starts on A, but A to C is a minor 3rd just like C to E♭.

The songs are the quickest ruler. Twinkle, Twinkle gives you the perfect 5th, but only between its second and third notes: "twin-kle TWIN" goes C, C, then up to G. For the octave, the Intervals chart names "Some-where over the rainbow", which leaps up an octave on its first two notes. Coming down, turn it around: sing the second note first, so the interval climbs, and its up-song works again. That reference chart shows every interval from a unison to an octave, and Ear Training: Intervals (Exercise 65) tests you on up or down, how far, and major or minor.

To play a tune, you need something bigger than song hooks: hearing every note as a number counted from home. Call home 1 and count up the scale. In C major, home is C, so D is 2, E is 3, and so on up to the next C, which is 8.

Home is 1. On the white keys from middle C, the numbers 1 to 8 are the C major scale. The black keys come in a group of two and a group of three.

How do you know which note is home? The Melodic Dictation handout (Handout 376) answers that with three chords, I–V–I. The last chord is home: hum its lowest note, hold it, and call it 1. The handout adds that most tunes start on 1, 3 or 5 and end on 1, so when you're lost, hum your way back down to home and count the steps.

Handout 376's plan. I–V–I sets home, then each note of its little tune gets a number from home first (1 2 3 1, 5 3 1) and a letter second (C D E C, G E C).

Naming notes by their place in the key is an old teaching idea. In the 1800s John Curwen spread tonic sol-fa, building on Sarah Ann Glover's Norwich sol-fa. In tonic sol-fa the syllables do, re, mi and the rest name each note's relationship to the key, not a fixed pitch, and Curwen's Standard Course, shown below, gave each note a hand sign. Kodály teachers today use the movable do system, which OAKE says "was advocated by Kodály as a tool for teaching musical literacy".

"Mental effects and manual signs of tones in key," page viii of Curwen's Standard Course (London, 1884): one hand shape for each note of the key, from doh (home) to te. Image: John Curwen, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Numbers do the same job, and they move with you to any key. Scale Degree Names gives each number its formal name, and Tonic & dominant explains why 1 and 5 are the scale's two anchors. To test yourself, use round 2 of Ear Training: Set 2, which measures leaps against song hooks, and rounds 1 and 2 of Ear Training: Set 4, which compare major and minor 2nds and 3rds, then perfect 4ths, perfect 5ths and the tritone.

Drill 3: chord colors and the three-chord family

A chord is three or more notes sounding together, and the first thing to hear is its color. Major and minor differ by one note: lower the middle note, the 3rd, by a half step and a bright chord turns darker (Major & minor, Triads & their inversions). Two more colors complete the set. The diminished triad stacks two small 3rds and sounds squeezed and restless (The diminished triad). The augmented triad stacks two big 3rds and sounds stretched and unsettled (The augmented triad).

The four triad colors on C, blocked and then broken upward. Only the 3rd and the 5th move: major has 4 + 3 half steps, minor 3 + 4, diminished 3 + 3, augmented 4 + 4. The symbol over the third bar reads Cdim, another way to write C°.

The worksheets give each color a nickname: sunshine for major, rain cloud for minor, spooky for diminished, dream for augmented. Treat them as memory aids, not facts about emotion. Ear Training: Set 3 (Exercise 32) plays each triad blocked, broken upward and blocked again while you circle its color. For the same skill on paper, Chord quality review (Exercise 43) mixes twenty chords, sus chords included, to name.

Next, hear what chords do. Round 2 of Set 3 asks a single question: does the music sound finished? Play C major and then G major, and the music hangs in the air. Play them the other way around and it lands.

Item 7 of Ear Training: Set 3 (left) and the same two chords reversed (right). I–V stops on V, a half cadence; V–I lands on home, an authentic cadence.

The sheet's hint sums it up: V–I is finished, I–V is unfinished. Cadences explains the half, authentic and plagal endings, and Ear Training: Cadences & Progressions (Exercise 66) adds the deceptive one.

To name chords in a song, use one trick from Exercise 66: sing the lowest note of each chord. In round 3 of that sheet, "1 is I, 4 is IV, 5 is V". Those three chords, built on degrees 1, 4 and 5, are The primary chords: I, IV & V, and they carry a great many folk songs, hymns and blues.

I–IV–V7–I in C, the chords of item 12 of Exercise 66. Sing only the bass, C–F–G–C, and its numbers, 1–4–5–1, name the chords.

Once I, IV and V feel familiar, listen for the loops of pop music. Round 3 of Set 4 tells I–IV–V–I apart from I–V–vi–IV, the loop that dips to the minor vi chord. Common Chord Progressions in Popular Music Genres shows where those loops turn up.

Drill 4: rhythm by ear

Pitch is half of a tune; the other half is when each note starts and how long it lasts. Ear Training: Rhythm Dictation (Exercise 64) works in three stages: clap it back, fill in a missing beat, write it down. Clap it back out loud before you look at the choices, so you commit to what you heard.

Item 3 of Exercise 64. The teacher counts "1 2 3 4" and claps on 1, holds through 2, stays silent on 3 and claps on 4: that is B.

The sheet's hint is the method: keep your foot tapping, mark where each clap lands, then pick the note that lasts until the next clap. If the sound stops early, the leftover time is a rest. To practice writing the counts under each note, use Write the Counts (Exercise 17). Two more games train the beat itself: round 3 of Set 2 (steady, speeding up or slowing down?) and round 4 of Set 4 (3/4, 6/8 or 2/4?). Tempo & the Metronome explains tempo words and metronome marks, and Understanding the Difference Between Rhythm and Meter in Music explains meter.

Work out a melody in six steps

Now put the four drills to work. Don't try to hear everything at once: answer one small question at a time, as Handout 376 recommends, and listen again for each one.

The six steps. Each one answers one question before you move to the next.

1. Choose a tune you can sing. If you can't sing it from memory, you can't check your notes against it.
2. Find home. Sing the last note and hold it. Does it sound finished? That is usually 1. Find it on the piano by humming and trying keys until one matches your voice.
3. Find the first note. Sing from home to the first note and count the steps up or down. Ode to Joy starts two steps above home, on 3.
4. Trace the shape. Sing slowly and draw the tune in the air: up or down, repeated note, step or skip.
5. Numbers, then letters, then rhythm. Write the numbers, turn them into letters in your key, and only then listen for which notes are long and which are short.
6. Check by playing along. Play with the recording or with your own singing. A wrong note jumps out; fix just that one.

Here is step 4 on the first line of Ode to Joy. Drawn as a line, it climbs from E to G, walks down to C and climbs back to E, then settles on D. Every move is either a repeated note or a step.

The shape of Ode to Joy, bars 1–4, drawn from the notes of the Transposition sheet's C version. Nine steps, five repeated notes and not a single skip, which is why it's a good first tune to work out.

For step 5, give every note its number from home, as the Transposition sheet (Handout 231) does. With home on C, Ode to Joy's first line is 3 3 4 5 | 5 4 3 2 | 1 1 2 3 | 3 2 2. That last 2 is the "not quite home" feeling you noticed at the start: the first phrase stops one step above home, and the second phrase finishes the job.

Ode to Joy, bars 1–4, as on the Transposition sheet (Handout 231), with home on C: numbers first, letters second.

Then listen again just for the rhythm. The Transposition sheet says "rhythm simplified", and bar 4 shows it: in Beethoven's melody, as the Mutopia Project's hymn setting and the score in Wikipedia's Ode to Joy article both write it, the E is long and the first D short.

Bars 3–4 two ways. Top: the sheet's simplified rhythm, quarter, quarter, half. Bottom: Beethoven's, a dotted quarter E, an eighth-note D and a half-note D. The notes and numbers are the same; only the rhythm changes.

Clap bar 4 while you sing it, and you'll feel the long-short pattern that is easy to miss while you're busy with the notes.

Numbers also let you move a tune. Put home on G instead of C and play the same numbers: 3 3 4 5 becomes B B C D. The key of G has an F♯, but this tune never lands on F, so nothing else changes.

The same tune with home on G (G position on the Transposition sheet). The numbers stay 3 3 4 5 | 5 4 3 2 | 1 1 2 3 | 3 2 2; only the letters change.

Try the method on Twinkle, Twinkle next. Its home is C if you start on C, it begins on home (1 1 5 5 6 6 5), and its one leap, from the second note to the third, is the perfect 5th from Drill 2. For more practice, Ear Training: Melodic Dictation (Exercise 68) gives you steps, skips, leaps and two tunes you know, with audio; its item 9 asks for bar 2 of Ode to Joy.

Check by playing along: hum the phrase, play it, and fix only the note that sounds wrong. Photo: nayukim, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr (cropped).

With a recording, two tricks help. Slow it down without changing the pitch, and loop one phrase until you've answered your question. YouTube's own player can do the first: Google's help page puts the setting under Settings, then Playback speed on a phone or Speed on a computer. Dedicated programs do both, and some are listed under Tools below.

Ear-first teaching has a long history. The Suzuki Association says "we teach students by ear first", and Musical Futures, building on Lucy Green's research into how popular musicians learn, lists "Learn by listening and copying" among its principles. These are teaching approaches, not proof that one method beats another.

Find the chords

Once you can play the melody, add chords under it. Choosing chords for a melody (Handout 358) gives the rule: the notes on the strong beats, 1 and 3 in 4/4, choose the chord, and the chord must contain them. Start with I, IV and V. Plan the ends of phrases first: a phrase that sounds finished usually closes V–I, and one that pauses stops on V.

Twinkle, Twinkle, bars 1–4, with the chords of Exercise 46. Each letter under a strong beat belongs to the chord above it: A is in F (F–A–C), D is in G7 (G–B–D–F), and the phrase ends G7–C.

Test it bar by bar. In bar 2 the strong-beat notes are A and G. A belongs to F (and to Am and Dm), G to C, so the bar goes F then C. In bar 4, D on beat 1 fits G7 and C on beat 3 fits C: that is the V–I that makes bar 4 sound finished. Here the notes between the strong beats just repeat them, so they fit the same chord. In other tunes, a note between strong beats may simply step through without belonging to the chord. Realize a lead sheet (Exercise 46) has all twelve bars with these chords and asks you to write the left hand: roots, then root and 5th, then full chords.

Amazing Grace, in 3/4, shows the same method with one strong beat per bar, and one surprise. Here is the version from Reading a lead sheet (Handout 229).

Amazing Grace in C, the pickup and bars 1–8, from Handout 229. Under the words: the melody note where each chord starts. Every chord contains it; C/E means a C chord with E in the bass.

Most bars need only I and V7. Bar 3 is the surprise: its first note, C, belongs to C, F and Am, and the lead sheet picks Am, the minor chord on 6, before moving to F under the A on beat 3. A plain C chord would also fit that first C, as would F. Songs can be harmonized more than one way, so treat any set of chords you find as one good answer, not the only one. Handout 229 also explains the slash in C/E: play a C chord with E as its lowest note.

Your ear makes the final call. When a chord fights the melody, the strong-beat note probably isn't in it. Try the next chord in the family.

Tools, free and paid

Everything below was checked on its maker's own page on October 16, 2026. Prices change, so check again before you buy.

Free:

• The Tissimo ear-training sheets. Ear Training Sets 1–4 (Exercises 21, 31, 32, 33), Exercises 64, 65, 66 and 68, and Handouts 375 and 376 play every item on their worksheet pages.
• musictheory.net. Its free online exercises include Keyboard, Note, Interval, Scale and Chord Ear Training. Tenuto, the site's app for iPhone and iPad, costs $4.99 and works offline.
• Functional Ear Trainer, Alain Benbassat's method. It trains exactly the skill in Drill 2, recognizing each note in a major or minor key. Start with the free iPhone/iPad and Android apps, built on his program by Sergiy Korchan; both offer optional in-app purchases. The free desktop version needs an old version of Adobe AIR.
• YouTube's playback speed setting, for slowing a recording down.

Paid, or free with paid extras:

• EarMaster (Windows, Mac, iOS, Android). The free version includes the first four modules of its Beginner's Course, the Interval Identification and Chord Identification exercises and its "Call of the Notes" call-and-response course. The rest needs a paid subscription for all platforms or a permanent license for one platform; the price shown in October 2026 was an anniversary offer.
• Transcribe! (Windows, Mac, Linux), built to help you work out music from a recording: slow-down without changing pitch, loops and a spectrum display. Free for 30 days, then $39.
• The Amazing Slow Downer. Slows music down without changing its pitch: $39.95 for Mac or Windows, $14.95 for iPhone/iPad and $9.95 for Android. Each platform needs its own license, and trial versions are available.

Use an app to test yourself, and your voice to find the notes.

A 15-minute daily routine

Short and daily beats long and rare, at least by EarMaster's own advice: its tips suggest 5 to 10 minutes of practice every day rather than one hour once a week. Fifteen minutes covers every drill in this guide:

Fifteen minutes, five drills. Add one new worksheet a week.

1. 2 minutes: sing and match. Play a note, sing it back, then sing up and down the first five notes of the scale.
2. 3 minutes: one interval song. Handout 375's "Try it" is "One song a day": pick a row of its table, play the two notes, then sing the song going up and coming down.
3. 3 minutes: chord colors. Major or minor, then I–IV–V–I. Sing the bass notes, 1–4–5–1.
4. 2 minutes: clap it back. Clap one item from Exercise 64 or Set 2 before you look at the answers.
5. 5 minutes: work out a tune. One phrase of a song you can sing, using the six steps.

For a weekly plan, take one ear-training set a week in order: Set 1, then Sets 2, 3 and 4, then the four focused sets on rhythm, intervals, cadences and melodic dictation. Log your minutes in the practice-week table at the bottom of How to practice. Parents of young children will find more ideas for singing and listening at home in The Best Way to Introduce Children to Music.

The free worksheets for this article

• Ear Training: Set 1 — same or different, higher or lower, step or skip, major or minor, with audio
• Ear Training: Set 2 — clap-backs, leap sizes with song hooks, steady or changing tempo
• Ear Training: Set 3 — four triad colors, finished or unfinished, missing notes
• Ear Training: Set 4 — major and minor 2nds and 3rds, the tritone, two progressions, meter
• Ear Training: Rhythm Dictation — clap it back, fill the missing beat, write it down
• Ear Training: Intervals — up or down, how far, major or minor
• Ear Training: Cadences & Progressions — four cadences, four loops, writing I, IV and V
• Ear Training: Melodic Dictation — steps, skips, leaps and two tunes you know
• Hearing intervals — four steps and a song or a trick for every interval
• Melodic Dictation — find home, trace the shape, write numbers, letters and rhythm
• Intervals — every interval from a unison to an octave, with half steps
• Scale Degree Names — the names behind the numbers 1 to 8
• Major & minor — one lowered note changes the color
• The primary chords: I, IV & V — the three-chord family
• Cadences — the period, the amen and the comma
• Chord quality review — name twenty chords on paper
• Choosing chords for a melody — strong beats choose the chord
• Reading a lead sheet — Amazing Grace with chord symbols, and how to play them
• Realize a lead sheet — write the left hand under Twinkle, Twinkle
• Transposition — Ode to Joy in C, G and F with the same numbers
• How to practice — a five-step session and a practice-week log

Keep listening

Playing by ear is a set of small, trainable questions: same or different, up or down, how far, which chord, how long. Ask them one at a time, every day, on tunes you love, and the answers come faster than you'd expect. If you'd like someone to play the items for you, check whether your sung note matches the piano, or confirm the chords you found, a Tissimo piano teacher can do all three in a live lesson.

Sources

• Prevalence of congenital amusia (Peretz & Vuvan, 2017) — European Journal of Human Genetics, via PubMed
• Absolute pitch among American and Chinese conservatory students (Deutsch et al., 2006) — Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, via PubMed
• Absolute pitch can be learned by some adults (Van Hedger et al., 2019) — PLoS One, via PubMed
• The Kodály Concept — Organization of American Kodály Educators
• About the Suzuki Method — Suzuki Association of the Americas
• Our approach: Informal Learning — Musical Futures
• John Curwen — Wikipedia
• Solfège: Hand symbols — Wikipedia
• Ode to Joy (hymn setting, entered by Peter Chubb) — Mutopia Project
• Ode to Joy — Wikipedia
• Exercises — musictheory.net
• Functional Ear Trainer v2 — Miles.be
• Download EarMaster: free content — EarMaster
• Buy Transcribe! — Seventh String Software