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Ear training

Hear a reference, hear a note or a chord, play it back. Judged as you go, from single notes in a key to five together across the piano — on the screen keyboard, or on your real piano through the mic.

Open ear training free · no sign-up · works offline

What it does

Pitch training starts from three presets — beginner (one octave, single notes, a reference every time), intermediate (two notes at a time) and advanced (every pitch, three notes at a time, one reference at the start, twenty questions) — and a custom drawer where you set the key, the range, how many notes sound together, the mode, when the reference plays and how many questions a run has. Each question plays the reference (if you asked for one) and then the target; you answer on the keyboard. Right answers ring gold; a wrong one tells you what you played and how far off it was ("the right interval in the wrong octave", "a fourth instead of a fifth"), so every miss teaches something.

Runs are scored and land in your practice log by themselves, folded into one entry per day so a dozen short drills do not clutter the history.

Answer on the real piano

Turn on the mic in the drill and play the answer on your actual piano. The app listens for the note you strike, rounds to the nearest semitone with plenty of room for a piano that isn't perfectly in tune, and judges the pitch class — the right note in any octave counts. The app never hears itself: every reference tone and every question mutes the microphone for a moment, and pressing the on-screen keys does the same, so the piano is the only thing it listens to. Practising ear training at the instrument, rather than on a screen, is how the ear and the hands get wired together.

Why pianists need this in particular

Pianists learn to see music before they learn to hear it. The keyboard is a map, the score is a map, and it is possible to get quite far reading one map into the other with the ears switched off. Then comes the day you have to play something by ear, transpose on the spot, or catch your own wrong note in a fast passage, and the map runs out. Ear training is the repair. Ten minutes a day, at the piano, is enough.

There is a longer piece on this in the blog: ear training for pianists.

Details

• Runs in the browser; the microphone is optional and audio never leaves the device.
• Free, no ads, no account, no tracking. Your preset and mic preference are remembered on the device.
• Works offline once loaded.