This was achieved thanks to the invaluable help of 132 students enrolled on General and Specific Auditory Perception courses at the ESMUC during 11, as well as 14 postgraduate students of choral conductorship at the Universidad Blanquerna-Conservatorio del Bruc.
To do so, not only were the client-based and web-based programmes currently on the market checked and catalogued – by completing each one of the proposed exercises – but it was also possible to try them out in different situations and on different types of musical ear, in order to offer an objective discussion of the results presented here today. 1īetween November 2009 and December 2012, I carried out a study with the aim of providing an answer to four questions: What were these materials created for, and why? How were they created? In what ways are they suitable and effective? Can they really take the place of a teacher?
It seemed to me that Maconie’s proposed concept of music as a means of communication, its similarities and differences to language, together with the incomplete answer I had given my colleagues were a good starting point for serious investigation into the advantages and disadvantages of online ear training programmes and/or software offering self-study for ear training unsupervised by a teacher. Furthermore, because a musical impression is articulated by physical gesture and tonal inflexion, it is capable of communicating in the same manner as a body language, while remaining subject to interpretations and analysis in terms of its written expression. It comunicates across national and cultural boundaries. From such a viewpoint, music is therefore, arguably, language-like. From one vantage point, music can be seen as operating in the same auditory domain as speeech, being processed by the same sensory mechanisms, capable of arousing a predictable response and can be examined in written form. It is an information process simultaneously working on many different levels, generating a complex of responses from the most basic and physical to the most elusive and abstract. “… Music is a field of human expression which has successfully resisted analysis in terms of conventional theory. One of Maconie’s paragraphs provided the clue: I began reading the first chapter, but I couldn’t get beyond page 19, partly because I couldn’t stop thinking about the question my colleagues had just put to me, and partly because the book’s initial content got me thinking about the need for more in-depth knowledge of the new material available for online ear training. I planned to spend the four-hour return flight from Helsinki to Barcelona in the company of Robin Maconie’s book The Concept of Music.
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