Weeks 3-4 · ear · arbitrary two-note pattern echo
Hear two notes. Sing them back — both in tune, in order.
The rule
pass: PAT-A on 8 of 10 (each note ≤ 45¢, contour exact)
Each trial produces a vertical pair — top dot is note 1, bottom is note 2. Both dots must land in their emerald ±45¢ band and the order direction must match. A pair where one dot is grey is a half-success that still counts as a miss — PAT-A is all-or-nothing on the trial.
Hear it first
Three reference shapes: a stepwise rise (do-re, the smallest scale step), a stepwise fall (re-do), and a small leap (do-mi, a major third). The drill mixes all of these — your ear has to recognize each from cold.
What’s happening. Single-note matching (single-note-match) trains the audio-motor loop on one tone. Two-note echo trains relativehearing — can you reproduce an interval you’ve never been told the name of? Untrained singers can usually reproduce the first note within 50¢ but drift on the second; the second note is when motor planning catches up to short-term memory. This drill makes that handoff visible.
Why on a neutral syllable, why 45 cents. Singing on /a/ removes the lyric — you can’t lean on syllable rhythm or consonant cues. The 45¢ tolerance (≈half a semitone) is the threshold where most listeners stop hearing “close” and start hearing “wrong note”. Contour-exact rules out singing “close” in the wrong direction — if note 2 was meant to be higher and you went lower, the trial fails even if your cent errors were small.
Why this is the bridge from one note to many. Two notes is the smallest unit of melody. Everything downstream — so-mi solfège (labeled two-note), so-mi-la solfège (three notes), interval echoes (m3, M3, P4, P5), and full melodies — assumes you can reliably echo an arbitrary two-note pair. This is the gate.
Session ahead
10 patterns · 2 notes each on /a/ · hold each note inside ±45¢ for 2.0s · 8/10 with contour exact promotes.