Chapter 12:Transcribing What You Hear 159
Hearing Intervals
Lesson 2, Track 11If you can hear and reproduce a single note, what about two of them?
That’s right: The next step is to develop your tonal memory to decipher and
reproduce pitch intervals.
Before you begin your exercises, you need to develop an internal database of rel-
ative interval relationships. That means internalizing all the different intervals
within a given object—remembering what each interval sounds like.
The best way to do this is to sit down at your instrument and play each interval
until it’s burned into your brain. Play a minor second, and a major second, and a
minor third, and a major third, and so on, until you have each interval committed
to memory. Can you sing a minor third? If not, you need to study some more.
Of course, there are shortcuts you can take. If you can remember specific
snatches of melody, you can associate those melodies with particular intervals.
The following table provides some melodic shortcuts for your interval training:
Intervals Found in Popular Melodies
Interval Song-Specific PhraseASCENDINGMinor second Theme from Jaws Dum-dum ... (bass line)
“As Time Goes By” YOU MUST remember this ...
(from Casablanca)
Major second “Frere Jacques” FRE-REJacques ...
“Happy Birthday” Hap-PY BIRTH-day to you ...
Minor third “To Dream the TO DREAMthe impossible dream ...
Impossible Dream”
Brahm’s Lullaby LULLA-BYand goodnight ...Interestingly, about 5 percent of musicians (just musicians—not the general popu-
lation) have something called absolute pitchorperfect pitch,which means they
can wake up in the morning and, with no prompting or assistance, correctly sing
or identify any given pitch in the scale. Some people claim to be able to help
you develop this skill, but in general it is virtually impossible for anyone over the
age of five or so to learn perfect pitch. (Not 100 percent impossible, but almost.)
In any case, you don’t really need this kind of long-term pitch memory to tran-
scribe music. You can get along fine with the short-term pitch memory that we all
possess, along with a good interval memory, which we’ll discuss next.Notecontinues