Interval Ear Trainer
Two notes, three choices, ten questions. It starts friendly and tightens up as you go — by the end you're splitting neighbours. New questions every single run.
You'll hear two notes, bottom note first. Name the distance between them — that distance is the interval, and hearing it is the whole trick to playing what's in your head.
Fresh questions every time — no two runs match.
Listen…
1 2 3 answer · R replays the notes · Enter next
Your score
How to use it
Press start and listen. Two notes play, always bottom note first, and three interval names appear — one of them is the truth. Replay as many times as you like; this is practice, not an exam. At the end you get a score and, more usefully, a note on which intervals your ear already owns and which ones need the work.
It sharpens as you go. The first questions keep the choices far apart — a semitone against a perfect 5th is chalk and cheese. By question ten the wrong answers are the right answer's next-door neighbours, which is where real ears are made. And every run deals fresh questions, fresh starting notes and fresh options, so there's nothing to memorise — only listening.
Then change the voice. The toggle swaps the piano for a plain sustained synth tone, and it is not decoration — it is a harder version of the same question. A piano note announces itself and then dies away, so the ear gets a sharp moment to measure from and a fading tail to measure against. The synth gives it neither: the note arrives gently and then simply sits there, unchanging, until it stops. Take those edges away and you find out how much of your ear was leaning on them. Clear the starter seven on the piano first, then switch and feel the ground move. The second toggle adds the tritone, the sixths and the sevenths for the full twelve.
There is a practical reason for it too. An ear trained on exactly one sound is narrower than it feels from the inside, and sustained notes are what you meet when you sing, or play with other people, or listen to almost anything with a voice or a held chord in it. This is deliberately not an imitation of a real instrument — it is a bare tone with the clues stripped out, which is the point.
Steal the song trick. The fastest way to name an interval is to hang a tune on it — the Jaws semitone, a major 2nd in “Strangers in the Night”, a minor 3rd in “Mad World”, a perfect 4th in “Amazing Grace”. Miss a question and the trainer hands you the matching song on the spot. It is also, not coincidentally, how I teach intervals in the room: the name goes on last, once you have already heard the thing a thousand times.
Practice tip
Sing before you name. When the two notes land, hum the bottom one, then step your voice up to the top one — slowly, like climbing stairs in the dark. An interval your voice can find is an interval your ear has genuinely got, and that's the version that turns up under your hands when you need it.
New to intervals altogether? They are one of the five things Grade 5 theory tests, and that article sets out the order to meet them in — along with the counting rule that stops most of the mistakes.
Keep it in your pocket
The Interval Ear Trainer installs as an app: its own icon on your home screen, full-screen with no browser around it, and — once installed — it works with no signal at all. Ten questions on the bus, in the practice room, in the dressing room: your ear doesn't need the internet.
To install: look for “Install” or “Add to Home Screen” in your browser’s menu.
Installed — look for the Intervals icon on your home screen. This tab is still the website.
You’re in the app
This is the installed Interval Ear Trainer, not the website — it works even with no connection. Everything else — the articles, the other tools, the lessons — lives at tdashton.co.uk.
Named it by ear? Now find it under your hands
An interval you can name is an interval you can play on purpose — and turning heard distances into fingered ones is exactly what lessons are for.
Also in the free tools: the tuner, the metronome and the Groove Trainer.