Weeks 1-2 · ear · direction discrimination
Hear two notes. Say which way the second one moved.
The rule
pass: 17 of 20 correct
Three buckets — same, higher, lower. Each dot is one trial; emerald is a correct call, grey is a wrong one. We score across all three so neither “always-higher” guessing nor a blind spot on the samecolumn can sneak through. The classic failure mode is calling unisons “higher” — your ear hears the second tone as new, so it must have moved.
Hear it first
Three reference contours so the categories settle before any trial begins. The same-note pair is the trickiest — listen for two identical attacks, not for the second tone going somewhere.
What’s happening. Direction discrimination is the lowest-level pitch judgement the auditory cortex makes — it precedes interval naming and even pitch matching. A typical untrained adult is ~85–90% accurate on intervals of a whole step or larger; below a semitone the curve collapses fast. We use 1-7 semitones so the contour is unmistakable — this drill is about category, not resolution.
Why three categories, not two. Most ear-training drills are binary (up / down) and let learners coast by ignoring unisons. Forcing sameas its own bucket exposes the “new tone = movement” misread: roughly a third of self-rated “tone-deaf” adults fail unison trials specifically. Catching that here means it can’t poison every interval lesson downstream.
Why this is the foundation.Every ear lesson that follows — two-note echo, third-echo, fourth-fifth echo, solfège, degrees-against-drone — assumes the contour direction is unambiguous before pitch accuracy is measured. If you can’t reliably say which way the second note moved, no interval drill upstream of that will produce a stable judgement.
Session ahead
20 two-note prompts · 1-7 semitones apart · 17/20 correct promotes.