Weeks 5-6 · harmony · resting-tone identification
Find the tonic without anyone playing it for you.
The rule
pass: tonic held within ±50¢ for 2.0s · 8/10
You hear I-IV-V-I — the cadence that firmly stamps the key — followed by a phrase that ends on the 3rd. The cadence makes the tonic pull obvious; the off-tonic ending forces you to find it, not echo it. Emerald dot lands inside the ±50¢ band on the tonic. Grey ghost on the dominant is the failure mode: echoing the last note instead of resolving down to home.
Hear it first
Three references so the ear is trained before the voice tries. The clean rest is what “home” sounds like — the cadence ends, the tonic appears, the tension closes. The dominant echo is the most common miss: the singer matches the last sound they heard. The third lands on the 3rd, also wrong but more musical.
What’s happening. Tonal hearing is the ability to feel a key without a reference pitch. When a I-IV-V-I cadence plays, your brain builds a hierarchy: I is home, V wants to resolve to I, IV decorates. Most listeners pick this up implicitly from a lifetime of pop music, but reproducing the tonic with the voice instead of pointing at it on a keyboard is a separate skill. Untrained singers find the tonic ~50% of the time on first try; trained ones run 80-90%.
Why octave-equivalent counts.The tonic is a pitch class, not a register — “do” in any octave still resolves. We accept any octave inside the band because your range may not include the literal pitched-out tonic, but you should still feel the same pull. The ±50¢ tolerance is the same one we use for single-note-match — once you know what to sing, hitting it is single-note-match again.
Why this is the harmony foundation. Every harmony-family lesson downstream — degree-prompts-from-tonic, harmony-over-drone, a-cappella-resolve-tonic — needs you to construct a key internally. If you can’t find home with your voice, you can’t sing the third above it or the fifth above that. This is the anchor for everything transpositional.
Session ahead
10 cadences · keys around your range center · 8/10 tonics in the ±50¢ band promotes.