Golden Ears

Golden Ears is a term used to describe someone who has 'perfect pitch', that is, they can recognise and identify a musical note by simply hearing it. It is a skill that few are blessed with and it does seem to be partially genetic, but all is not lost for the rest of us! As with anything, practice makes perfect, and if you dedicate a small amount of time while commuting or whenever you have a spare 5 minutes, you can greatly improve your ability to perceive pitch.

Golden Ears is a simple, fun app which can help you work on those skills. Aside from simply being a one or two octave piano playable for fun, you can choose to press 'Play'. A note will then be played and you have to guess which it is, then play it back. If you are incorrect you lose a life. If you are correct, you gain a point and the next note will play. See how high you can score, and monitor your progress.

As you get better, you can change some of the settings. You can change the octave to focus your practice elsewhere on the keyboard. You can also change the range within which the notes will be played. For instance you could hear C1, followed by D2 if you had the range set to 2 or more octaves. The number of points scored per correct answer matches the number of octaves set as this greatly improves difficulty. Once you have improved some more you can choose longer sequence lengths, meaning you will hear more than one note played in sequence which you have to play back in order.

It is also possible to select from some of the most popular and widely used scales, so the notes you hear will only be within the chosen scale. This is great practice for eventually being able to hear a song and identify what key it is in just by listening.