Earmaster Pro 5: E-Learning Software for Ear Training

Screenshot: Earmaster Pro 5

Earmaster Pro is an e-learning program for musical ear training. It is supposed to help you perceive intervals, accords and rhythms more accurately.

It is purely a training program, so there aren’t much explanations or background information. Instead, there are numerous exercises for various topics. Difficulty levels range from very easy to freakin’ hard.

“EarMaster includes exercises in identifying intervals, chords, chord inversions, chord progressions, scales and modes. You will also find exercises in transcribing melodies and rhythms and in sight-reading or imitation of rhythms. The broad range of exercise areas covers all your needs for training pitch, harmonies and rhythms!”

Personally, I like the rhythm exercises most. You can use a microphone as input device. So basically you can enter rhythms by clapping in your hands or hitting your desk (or anything else) with drum sticks. 🙂

Price / Demo

Unfortunately, Earmaster Pro is not freeware. The full version costs 79 Euros.

Fortunately, there is a free demo version available. It runs for 21 days and is fully functional in this time.

Conclusion

Earmaster Pro is a very simple program, but this simpleness is his charm. It is well suited to make listening and rhythm exercises without making a fuss about it. Especially when you enter the answers over the microphone with your own instruments, training is fun.

There is still room for improvement in Earmaster Pro, though. More help when you get stuck would be nice for example. On the other hand, I guess the development effort for this would probably quite high so the price would probably rise.

Still, Earmaster Pro is a very solid and useful e-learning program for musical ear training. It’s best suite to be used as an addition to “real world” lessons, but it can also be used alone.

» Earmaster Pro (official website)

More

For those of you, who understand German, there is some more information available.

For a lecture called “Multimediales Lernen” (multimedia learning), I wrote a “small” document about Earmaster Pro. It describes the program more detailed and discusses the learning theory behind it as well as strengths and weaknesses. Unfortunately, it is completely written in German.

» Earmaster Pro 5: Lernsoftware zur musikalischen Gehörbildung (PDF, 39 Seiten, ~3MB)
» zugehörige Präsentationsfolien (PDF, 17 Folien, ~340KB)