EarMaster - Music Theory & Ear Training

EarMaster provides an excellent range of teaching and listening questions to develop any music learner from beginner topics to much more developed aural awareness. There are a range of products dependent on the type of student you are, and the EarMaster Cloud is ideal for students in a music class or school. Each student can have their own log in, which means the teacher can set up assignments for each student and view their results. It is an ideal opportunity to develop on ear training and sight-reading and sight-singing skills.

Related: Best Music Theory Apps

The app has a wide variety of platforms with the use of iPad, but also downloadable onto any PC or Mac, meaning that it is easily accessible for all students. There is also an opportunity to customise your own exercise so that you can focus on a clear personal target, to have demonstrable outcomes.

The Beginners Course starts with absolute basics in pitch, explaining high and low sounds, and links to more information if required before starting off with simple exercises. This just demonstrates the wide ability of the app, starting at the very basics, and moving to some of the most complex exercises and abilities available to any user. The exercises use the microphone for sight-singing, or a simple tap on the screen for clapping. Within each chapter, there is a brief tutorial before an exercise, which then progresses well from one level to the next. After the Beginners Course has been mastered, you are then able to move onto General Workshops, going through activities of Scale Identification, Rhythmic Sight-Reading, Imitation, Dictation and Error Dictation, and Melodic Sight-Singing, Melody Imitation and Melodic Dictation. A real positive from this app is the diversity into Jazz Workshops also, which can provide much complexity and range of styles compared to many other similar apps on the market. The same activities are given as chapters within the Jazz Workshops as are in the General Workshops, which helps to broaden the diversity of aural skills. The Customised Exercises again use the same chapter breakdowns, which helps the user to identify their weakest points as they have worked through the app, before selecting the more particular areas of focus.

A particular positive for this app is the analysis and identification of correct and incorrect answers. The app is able to accurately identify pitch and rhythm through the microphone or tapping. A real positive is that it is able to identify particular areas of weakness, such as late rhythmic clapping rather than purely incorrect. This can often be frustrating in interactive apps, and thankfully, is a great positive for EarMaster.

Due to the use of sight-singing, which could prove difficult due to users range, the settings offer a choice of ranges for each student, as well as a range of other settings for the user to personalise, which helps them to identify more personally with the app, helping them to be more successful.

There are also overall statistics that you are able to view, which helps the user to see their general progress in each area, in order to identify their weakest areas to focus on. There is also a help section which annotates each area of the app to helps the user to navigate through the exercises, although due to the simplicity of the design, this is fairly straightforward.

The design of the app is very easy to use and navigate around, with a mature design that is helpful to any student. Although this seems less exciting and colourful for the younger student, the ideal target audience would be from a teenager and older, and therefore the maturity of the app is helpful. The language is easy to understand from the beginning, and develops to become more complex as you progress through each section. It is also helpful to have the extra links, particularly in the earlier sections, to helps to differentiate for each user.

You can download EarMaster - Music Theory & Ear Training on your iOS devices from the Apple App Store.