Perfect Ear

Perfect Ear

New singers often have dif­fi­cul­ty match­ing pitches—that is, accu­rate­ly singing a pitch imme­di­ate­ly after hear­ing it.  This does not mean you’re “tone deaf”!  In most cas­es, dif­fi­cul­ty with pitch-match­ing is eas­i­ly over­come in a mat­ter of weeks or even days through effec­tive train­ing.

The most effec­tive tool I’ve found for stu­dents seek­ing to train their pitch-match­ing skills between lessons is an app called “Per­fect Ear,” which is avail­able for Android and (with some­what lim­it­ed func­tion­al­i­ty*) iOS devices.  (Note that while Per­fect Ear pro­vides assis­tance with a mul­ti­tude of musi­cal skills, these instruc­tions focus sim­ply on pitch-match­ing.)

*If you’re an iOS user and have dif­fi­cul­ty with Per­fectEar, you may find Singing Car­rots eas­i­er to use.

Getting started

  1. Vis­it perfectear.app and click the appro­pri­ate but­ton to install the app to your Android or iOS device.
  2. Open the app on your device and nav­i­gate to the main Set­tings page.
  3. In the “Singing Exer­cis­es” sec­tion of the set­tings, tab Adjust singing range and drag the green dots to indi­cate your pre­ferred singing range.  (Unless I’ve giv­en you oth­er rec­om­men­da­tions, start with A3-A4 if you tend to sing tra­di­tion­al wom­en’s roles, or C3-C4 if you tend toward tra­di­tion­al men’s roles.)
  4. Return to the set­tings page and make sure Ignore sung note octave is turned OFF.  (I.e., you do NOT want the app to ignore the octave you sing.)
  5. Tap Singing exer­cis­es dif­fi­cul­ty and set this to Relaxed.  (Just trust me on this one. 😜)

Feel free to adjust any of the oth­er set­tings to suit your own per­son­al pref­er­ences.

Perfect Ear Vocal Exercise settings

Launching the exercise

From the app land­ing page, tap “Ear Train­ing,” then “Inter­val Singing,” then “Uni­son singing.”

Make sure the vol­ume is turned up on your device, then tap “Start Exer­cise.”

 

The Ear Training button on the Perfect Ear landing screen
The Interval Singing button in the Ear Training options
The Unison singing button in the Interval Singing options

How it works

The app will play a ran­dom note with­in the singing range you select­ed ear­li­er, and show you a visu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tion of the note both on the grand staff and on a piano key­board.

Sing the pitch back to the app on a sus­tained vow­el (some­thing like “doo,” “doh,” or “dah”) and hold the pitch until the dark green cir­cle around the micro­phone icon com­plete­ly dis­ap­pears and you hear either a cel­e­bra­to­ry “ba-ding!” (indi­cat­ing that you were accu­rate in tyour pitch-match­ing) or a per­cus­sive “dig-a-dum” (indi­cat­ing that the note you sang was either above or below the indi­cat­ed pitch).

The Perfect Ear Unison Singing screen

Pointers

  • As you’re hold­ing your pitch, you may find it help­ful to watch the slid­ing pitch scale at the bot­tom of the screen, which will indi­cate where your pitch is com­pared to the tar­get pitch.  (The small­er the red bar, the bet­ter!) 
  • If the dark green cir­cle does­n’t dis­ap­pear, it’s a sign that your pitch is waver­ing up and down—try to hold your pitch con­stant.
  • If you get more “dig-a-dums” than “ba-dings,” don’t wor­ry!  Just note your score at the end of the exer­cise, and see if you can do bet­ter tomor­row!