Aural Training is seen as one of the cornerstones of musical development. It is therefore crucial for your career as a musician as all music is based on sounds that manifest in pitch, rhythm and timbre. In this constructivist teaching approach, the focus is not on what students can repeat, but on what they can generate, demonstrate, exhibit and apply in their lives as music students. These aural skills are necessary to hear, understand, interpret and organise these musical concepts and structures.

The Aural Training modules introduce students to the movable do solmisation system for sight-singing as an aid to establish pitch accuracy and fluency in hearing and reading music notation. The ability to read and sing music at sight is one of the most essential skills of a well-rounded musician. In all the modules students are exposed to all the elements of Aural Training in an integrated and holistic way.

During class meetings students actively take part in a solmisation programme in which different components of music, such as rhythm, pitch, scales, intervals, triads, chords, motifs, melodies, modes, harmonies, progressions, cadences, textures and timbres are recognised, registered, remembered and mastered. All these skills are needed for sight-singing, as well as for rhythmic and melodic dictation.

Listening, singing, playing the piano or other music instruments, clapping, tapping, dancing and writing are the most important activities in the Aural Training class meetings that contribute to motivational learning, social interaction and the construction and shaping of new skills and knowledge. Students are challenged to apply their solmisation skills to all segments of the Aural Training module, such as sight-singing, dictation and practical harmony, and other areas of the music curriculum such as music theory and music education.

Each Aural Training module comprises of two sections:

Theoretical:
In the theoretical part, students are guided to write rhythmic and melodic dictations, and recognise and name different scales, intervals, triads and chords. Rhythmic and melodic dictations are some of the most important exercises in developing the inner ear. Dictations greatly improve your musical memory and develop your sense of tonality, and intervallic, metric and rhythmic relationships of musical tones. It also advances the ability to transform sound images into notation images on manuscript paper.

Practical:
The second part requires students to perform certain harmonic progressions on the piano, such as perfect, imperfect, plagal and interrupted cadences, modulations, figured bass practices, ABA-forms, folk-tunes and chorales. Sight-singing and rhythm reading exercises, and the singing of scales, intervals, triads and chords are also a major part of these individual practical tests.

For further information about Aural Training at the School of Music, please contact Prof Albi Odendaal.