Singing an Interval: Finding a Note You Have Never Heard

The last exercise played one note and asked you to sing it. This one plays two, at the same instant — and then asks for them one at a time, the lower one first.

Nothing is hidden here. Both notes are sounding, and you may hear them as often as you like. The difficulty is of a completely different kind: two pitches arriving together do not present themselves as two. They fuse. What you hear first is a colour — bright, hollow, sweet, harsh — and finding the two separate notes inside that colour is the skill this exercise trains.

It is the skill behind everything that happens once music has more than one line in it. A singer holding an inner part against three others, a guitarist picking the third out of a chord someone else is playing, anyone transcribing a record: all of them are doing this, and none of it is possible while two notes still arrive as one sound.

First, the microphone

This exercise needs to hear you, so your browser will ask permission. It is the only thing on this site that does.

What happens to the sound: it is analysed in your browser to work out what pitch you are singing. It is never recorded, never stored, and never sent anywhere. What comes out of the analysis is a single number — a frequency — which is compared against the note being asked for and then forgotten. The microphone is released the moment the exercise ends, and your browser’s recording indicator going out is the visible proof.

If you would rather not, refuse. The exercise still plays the two notes and you can check yourself by ear; nothing is scored either way.

The lower note first, and why that order

The bottom of an interval is easier to find than the top, reliably and for everybody. Two reasons, and they compound.

The lower note is usually the one your ear takes as the root — the note the sound seems to be about, with the upper one heard as colour laid over it. That is not a rule of physics but it is how most people hear most intervals, and it means the lower note is already the one you have half-identified without trying.

And a low note’s harmonics reinforce the notes above it. The upper note of a perfect fifth is sitting almost exactly where the lower note’s third harmonic already is, which is why the two blend so completely — and why hunting for the top one first means hunting inside a sound that is partly the bottom one’s own overtones.

You are allowed to sing in your own octave. A bass cannot reach a soprano’s octave and a soprano cannot reach a bass’s, and an exercise demanding one particular octave would be scoring range instead of ear.

That freedom is also why the two notes are asked for in order rather than judged separately: the distance is measured between your two notes, from wherever you put the first one. Sing the pair an octave down and the interval between them is unchanged, which is the whole point.

How to actually do it

Do not try to hear both at once. Almost nobody can, and trying is how the sound stays a single colour.

There are two microphones, one for each note, and they are there in that shape on purpose: the whole task is visible before you start any of it, either note can be attempted first, and each is answered on its own. Missing one does not cost you the other.

1. Listen for the bottom. Play it as many times as you need. The keyboard above is a real piano — press any key to hear it, exactly as you would play a note on the instrument beside you to check yourself.
2. Hum quietly along with it, under the sound, until your voice locks onto the bottom. This is allowed and it is how everyone does it.
3. Press the left microphone and sing that note, held. That is the first answer, and you get told straight away whether it was right.
4. Now the right one. With the bottom note in your voice, the top usually appears — you have taken half the sound away by identifying the other half.

Step two feels like cheating and is not. Humming under a sounding interval is exactly how the two halves separate, and it drops away on its own once your ear starts doing it silently.

Pressing keys to find the answer is a different matter: it works, and what it practises is reading a keyboard rather than hearing an interval. The piano is there to check yourself against, which is what it is for in a practice room.

Anchoring on songs

The other way in, and one most people already have without knowing it: every interval is the opening of a song you know.

• Perfect fifth — Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, first two notes. Also the Star Wars theme.
• Perfect fourth — Here Comes the Bride. Also Amazing Grace.
• Major third — When the Saints Go Marching In, first two notes.
• Minor third — Greensleeves, or the two notes of a doorbell.

Pick anchors from songs you actually know rather than these — the ones in your head from childhood work far better than the ones on a list, because you can start singing them without thinking. The anchor is a starting handle, not the destination: you will stop needing it, the same way you stopped counting lines on the staff.

What counts as a hit

The same two conditions as before, and both notes have to meet them.

Close enough, meaning within fifty cents. A cent is a hundredth of a semitone, so fifty is exactly half of one — the point past which you would be nearer some other note than the one asked for.

Held, for about half a second. A voice sliding up to a note passes through the right one on the way, and crediting that would credit an accident. Landing on a note and staying there is the skill.

Expect this to be harder than either of the drills before it. Expect the fifth and the octave to come apart most easily — they are the most consonant, which here means the most fused, but they are also the ones your ear has heard most — and expect the seconds and sevenths to feel harsh and be surprisingly easy, because two notes that clash refuse to blend into one colour in the first place.

The genuinely hard ones are the thirds and sixths. They blend sweetly and sit close together, which is the worst combination for pulling apart.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Guessing, then correcting. Sliding around until the bar goes green trains hunting, not hearing. Decide on the note, sing it, and find out — a wrong note sung with commitment teaches you more than a right one arrived at by search.
• Reaching for the top note first. It is the one that stands out, so it is the one people chase — and it is the one sitting inside the lower note’s own overtones. Take the bottom first, every time.
• Rushing the first note. Everything else is measured from it: land it badly and a correctly-sung interval reads as wrong, because it was correct from the wrong place.
• Blaming your ear for your range. If the target keeps landing somewhere uncomfortable, change the octave setting. Nothing about your ear is revealed by a note your voice cannot reach.

Now play

The exercise below plays two notes together and gives you a microphone for each.

The first few will be worse than you expect, including for people who found the earlier drills easy — hearing a note and taking a sound apart are not the same skill, and the second one arrives later. It closes with practice rather than with understanding.

When ascending intervals stop being a fight, build your own — the builder takes any set of intervals, and it will send you downward as well, which is a genuinely different skill and the one most people are worse at.