Module 19 mini-test

1. Why is finding the tonic more useful than immediately finding every absolute note?

2. Does the first melody note have to be the tonic?

3. What is relative pitch?

4. Why are scale degrees useful?

5. What does degree 7 tend to do?

6. What does degree 4 often do?

7. Why should you sing a note before searching for it on piano?

8. What are good first questions after hearing two successive melody notes?

9. Why should you transcribe ornaments after structural notes?

10. If a melody is 1-1-5-5-6-6-5 in C, what is it in G?

Answers

1. Because once the tonal center is known, other notes can be understood as relationships to it instead of isolated pitches.
2. No.
3. The ability to recognize and reproduce pitch relationships relative to a reference/tonic rather than knowing absolute pitch names automatically.
4. They make tonal relationships and transposition explicit.
5. 7 → 1
6. 4 → 3
7. It forces your ear to predict rather than letting your fingers randomly search.
8. Same/higher/lower? Step or leap?
9. Because ornamentation can obscure the underlying melody; structural notes establish the real phrase first.
10. G-G-D-D-E-E-D

The main lesson of Module 19 is:

Playing by ear becomes much easier when you stop hearing “mystery notes” and start hearing “3, then 4, then 5, resolving to 1.”

Module 20 will complete the other half of playing by ear: finding the chords underneath a melody—how to hear bass movement, recognize tonic/predominant/dominant function, use the melody to narrow chord choices, detect chord changes, and reconstruct a song's harmony without a chord chart.