Welcome to Aural Skills: An Open Educational Resource. This resource is meant to accompany a typical first-year, undergraduate curriculum for Aural Skills. It is designed to be widely shared as an Open Educational Resource (OER). Each chapter includes key vocabulary, learning goals, relevant real-world challenges, and examples for students to work through. The author, Alex DiCicco, MM, is a musician-educator, with experience teaching undergraduate college courses in Aural Skills, Music Theory, Keyboard Harmony, Music Appreciation, and Music Technology.

What is an Open Education Resource (OER)?

This resource is an Open Educational Resource, or OER (pronounced “O – E – R”). OERs are low-cost or free resources, created for educational use, that can be freely modified, shared, distributed, or edited as long as the license criteria are followed. This OER has a CC BY-SA 4.0 license. That means anyone, including students, can use, reuse, or modify this resource as long as you attribute the original author (Alex DiCicco, except where otherwise noted) and make your creation accessible using the same license (CC BY-SA 4.0).

How is this OER organized?

This resource is organized by chapters. Each chapter focuses on a challenge that you would likely face in a career as a professional musician. The big challenge that we all face is working under deadlines. This is not unique to music in general, or art in particular. However, doing creative work under a deadline is a challenge for many artists. Aural Skills can help you work under deadlines by helping you save time and be more efficient.

What are aural skills?

Generally speaking, Aural Skills are the cognitive tools musicians develop to help them respond and talk about music, work with scores, create their own music, prepare notated music for performance, share their music with others, play in an ensemble, and lead an ensemble. Specifically, Aural Skills include the following:

• Hear and respond to musical sounds using terminology ( “I love the sound of that major seventh chord you’re playing”).
• Hear or imagine musical sounds and write them down (ex. humming a melody on the train and then writing it in a notebook).
• Convert musical notation to sound without hearing it first (ex. sight-reading a piece of music during an audition).
• Hear and process multiple musical parts all playing at the same time (ex. conducting an ensemble and noticing which parts need work).

Not every musician has strengths in every Aural Skill. It’s likely that you will find some Aural Skills easier to develop than others. Musicians and other artists often collaborate because they have different strengths or skillsets. Think about how a lyricist might team up with a composer to write a catchy song. Each person brings different skills to the collaboration. Don’t worry about being an expert in every Aural Skill, the process and practice of learning them will help you in your musical endeavors.

Organizing your knowledge

It is expected that you will be coming into this class with lots of prior knowledge about music. Whether you’re aware of it or not, you likely have prior knowledge related to Aural Skills as well. This text has been written from the perspective that students already have significant musical skills, experience and knowledge. One way that you can improve your learning in any subject is to activate your prior knowledge.

Your Listening Map

As an example of activating prior knowledge, try making a a list of some of your favorite bands, composers, or music. It can be as specific or general as you want. Maybe you want to write your favorite instruments or sounds or types of voices. The point is to record, in some fashion, the musical sounds you are already listening to. It can be a drawing, words, diagrams, whatever you want. As you read through the text, return to your listening map regularly and see if you can connect what you’re learning to this prior knowledge. How do you listen differently to these groups?

Questions and prior knowledge

You can also activate prior knowledge by generating questions before you read a chapter. On your own, write or record any questions that you have about the challenges listed. Then, write or record what you already know. As you read through the text, you can return to what you created and reflect about what you’ve learned.

How to practice

One of the biggest misconceptions about music is that a person is born with a magical ability called “talent”. In this misconception, “talent” is what helps that person achieve greatness, play with expression, and land career opportunities. Key to the idea of “talent” is that it’s bestowed on some individuals while others lack it. While there are factors beyond our control that influence musical ability, the truth is that practice is the magic that makes musicians great. Broadly speaking, practice is using your time wisely to develop musical growth. Practice requires time. It is important to mention that practice does not stand alone. Opportunity, good decision making, and the ability to play well with others also play key roles in your success as a musician.

Your current practice schedule

Start by documenting how many minutes you currently spend practicing Aural Skills each week. It’s ok if that number is 0. You can return to this page later and change it, or even make your own version to help you practice more effectively. The better you use your practice time, the more likely you’ll see improvements.

Connecting practice to progress

As you progress through this text and your musical career, try asking yourself how much your practice is impacting your progress. Are you practicing regularly? Are you using the time well? Is your practice approach helping you achieve your goals? Are you having fun during practice, keeping the joy and exploration of music at the forefront of your work? How could you change your practice to help you improve? What new practice strategies have you learned? Musicians are always learning, whether it’s new music or new stage partners or even things about themselves. Practice can be an exciting process of discovery.