Singing Intervals?

[ccc123]

I started using ear master pro 5 last march 2010 and I am making good progress on the exercises in the program.

The only category that I am not making an adequate amount of progress on the program is the 'singing intervals' exercise.

I am not much of a singer and I am not intending to be. But I want to develop my relative pitch and hearing the notes on my head while reading a music sheet.

But it's hard for me to practice singing intervals on a regular basis because there about 11 people in the house (2 families). The other ones are our relatives and I don't know how long they are staying.

I can't practice at Fridays and the weekends because everybody is around the house. Practicing singing intervals on the weekdays is sparse also.

I can practice the other exercises daily because I am using headphones. Nobody minds me clapping rhythm. But I find practicing singing even just solfege with people around to be a bit awkward. :hiding:

So my question is, do I really have to use my voice in order to develop a
good ear for music, is it really necessary?

If it is really that necessary then is there a way to fix the settings, where I can just hum at a low volume on the microphone without anyone hearing me that much?

Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank You.

[Quentin]

Singing is quite important in ear training, as it lets you externalize your ability to match pitches. By using your voice, you are actually training your brain to memorize pitch values, so it would be best if you could add some singing to your practice.

Notice however that you don't necessarily need to run the interval singing exercise to do that. You could try to hum your answers before answering questions to any other exercise for example, and then hum the correct answer (if you were wrong of course).

I am not sure you can set up the microphone to identify a low humming, but I think you should try. Try to run the Microphone Tuning wizard and set it up while humming instead of singing.

FYI, most of the other exercises can also be used with a microphone to sing the answers (chord ID, Scale ID, interval ID).