Ranowa

Yet another music student reduced to tears by my sheer ineptitude at ear training.

I can play songs by ear. Give me my flute or a piano, and one or two listens for medium difficulty, one or two days for very hard ones, and I can hand you back sheet music. But god forbid you play a major third or perfect fifth and ask me to identify it back to you. Don't play a chord and ask me the quality and inversion- I can't even tell minor 6/4s and diminished/augmented apart. This is my second level course in ear training and I am not improving at ALL- I'm only passing by sitting in there for hours and clicking until sheer, dumb luck gets my score to passing. 2000 examples later, and my average score remains unchanged.

Applying these 'skills' to playing by ear, which everyone here says the main point of ear training is, seems impossible. How could you identify intervals in chords in something that's happening so fast- and why should I try it that way, when my flute and I could do without the mental effort and much quicker? I see some minor use in tuning chords with an ensemble; you'd need to be able to hear intervals and know which section was off, of course- but that's the only use I can think of for this torture. Sightsinging? Plenty of uses, and not that bad- but this business of identifying intervals and inversions.. any wiser and experienced musicians out there want to give me the motivation to back to that cursed building tomorrow? Or give advice on why I am just horrifically bad and not improving, but can play songs by ear fine?