Aural Skills: Listening, Identifying and Transcribing
Aural skills test what you can hear accurately and describe in musical language. Tasks typically involve identifying intervals, chords, scales and cadences; recognising rhythm, metre and melodic contour; detecting texture, instrumentation and timbral change; and notating short excerpts. The core skill is focused listening: knowing in advance which element you are listening for, then reporting it precisely.
Concepts to command
- Intervals and pitch: recognising ascending and descending intervals, including compound and harmonic forms.
- Tonality and harmony: major, minor, modal and pentatonic scales; triads and sevenths; perfect, imperfect, plagal and interrupted cadences.
- Rhythm and metre: simple, compound and irregular metres; syncopation; dotted and tied figures; tempo change.
- Melody: contour, sequence, repetition, range, ornamentation.
- Texture and timbre: monophonic, homophonic, polyphonic; identifying instruments and voices by register and tone colour.
- Structure: counting bars, spotting phrase boundaries and repeats.
Traps in questions
Candidates commonly confuse major and minor thirds by ear, mislabel compound metre as simple, or mistake a sequence for a repeat. In dictation, students notate the rhythm but ignore the metre, or forget the key signature. Another trap is answering with a vague description ("it sounded happy") when the question demands a technical term.
Worked example
For a cadence question, listen to the final two chords: if the bass moves to the tonic and the melody ends on the tonic, it is perfect; if the melody ends on the third or fifth, it is imperfect; if the progression is subdominant to tonic, it is plagal. Rule of thumb: identify the bass motion and the final melody note before naming the cadence.