Aural and Musicianship Skills: Hearing What Is Written
What aural musicianship tests
Aural skills assess your ability to translate sound into musical understanding and back again. The core competencies are interval and chord recognition, rhythmic dictation, melodic dictation and transcription, harmonic dictation, error detection and inner hearing (reading music silently and hearing it accurately). These skills are cumulative: accuracy in a simple task underpins success in a complex one.
Concepts to command
- Intervals: recognising size and quality, including compound intervals and inversion.
- Chords and harmony: triads, sevenths, inversions, cadences, common progressions such as I–V–vi–IV and ii–V–I.
- Rhythm: subdivision, syncopation, metre identification, hemiola.
- Melody: contour, scale degrees, chromatic alteration, sequencing.
- Error detection: comparing a heard performance to a notated score.
- Inner hearing: audiating a score without an instrument.
Traps in questions
A common trap is guessing the key before establishing the tonic; students then mislabel every interval by scale degree. Another is confusing interval size with quality: a major sixth and a minor seventh can sound close in isolation. In rhythmic dictation, students often notate the perceived grouping rather than the notated metre, so syncopations are written incorrectly. In error detection, examiners often plant a single altered note or rhythmic value; listen for the discrepancy rather than assuming the whole passage is wrong.
Worked example and rule of thumb
When identifying a chord by ear, use a fixed procedure: (1) find the bass note, (2) identify the quality of the triad above it, (3) check whether a seventh is present, (4) test for inversion by singing the bass against the upper voices. The rule of thumb: establish the tonic, then measure everything from it. Anchor listening in a known reference (a familiar song for a perfect fourth, a hymn for a plagal cadence) and practise singing back what you hear before writing it.