How to play the ocarina by ear

Contrary to popular belief, you do not have to be born with the ability to play by ear. It is like hearing a foreign language: you may notice some patterns in the sound, but nothing will make sense unless you learn the words and grammar.

A melody is a series of notes of different pitches that together form larger structures called figures, phrases, and parts. Playing the ocarina by ear means recognising these patterns and reproducing them on your instrument.

Melodies have two key elements: rhythm and pitch. This article focuses on teaching you to recognise pitches, as many people can copy rhythms by ear intuitively. The process of learning rhythms by ear is discussed in the article Getting rhythm.

Let's start with some introductory notions. When you hear a melody, the notes will be a mixture of low and high pitches.

High pitches sound like this:

And low pitches sound like this:

Ocarinas sound higher pitches when more holes are open or if you blow harder. They sound lower pitches when more holes are covered or less air is used.

Pitch is also distinct from another property of sound called 'timbre', which is what makes an ocarina sound like an ocarina and a piano like a piano. Sounds may have the same pitch, but differ in timbre.

Higher, lower, or the same?

When two notes are played one after another, they may relate to each other in several ways: the second note could have a higher pitch than the first, but it could also have a lower pitch, or the two pitches could be the same.

This is how two notes sound when the second note is higher than the previous one.

This is how it sounds when the pitch of the second note is lower than the first.

And this is how it sounds when the pitch of both notes is the same, which is called a 'unison'.

The tool below can be used to practice hearing these relationships. It plays two notes to you, and you can identify whether the second note was higher, lower, or the same as the first one.

The skill of recognising if a note is higher, lower, or the same as the note before it is an aspect of a larger skill called relative pitch.

Pitches on the ocarina

Now that you know what it sounds like when a note is higher or lower than another, we can take it a step further and try playing some melodies by ear. To get started, let's begin with the three notes below.

The note letters assume an alto C ocarina, but the same fingerings can be used on ocarinas in other keys.

So that you can follow the exercise even without a physical instrument, the tool below sounds these pitches when you click the buttons.

If you spend some time experimenting with these notes and play them in various orders, you may notice a few things:

• Playing a sequence like 'low, medium, high' sounds different to 'high, medium, low'.
• A sequence like 'low, high', or 'high, low' also has a distinctive character.
• The same applies to 'low, medium, low', vs 'low, high, low'.

It is helpful to begin by learning how to perform some short two- or three-note sequences. First, let's try a three-note ascending and descending scale fragment:

Second, a two-note sequence moving in leaps, directly from the low note to high, or high to low. The distance between two notes is called an 'interval', and larger intervals sound different to smaller ones.

Finally, here is a three-note figure moving up by one step, then down again (or the reverse). These patterns may fit in the three-note range in two positions.

Practice playing each of these patterns repeatedly on your ocarina until they have entered your muscle memory. Doing so will help you achieve two things: firstly, it obviously teaches your fingers what to do, and secondly, you're hearing the pattern and how that sound corresponds to the actions needed to perform it.

It is easy to assume that playing by ear is a matter of identifying a series of random notes and being able to associate these with your instrument. It is possible to develop that skill, but starting with recognising melodic figures is easier because, in addition to pitch, you can use the sound of the figure's shape to recognise what you're hearing.

The notes in music are not random, and there are numerous common melodic patterns. The number of patterns you know is like your vocabulary of words in a language, and as you learn more patterns, you're able to play more complex music.

Playing a simple melody by ear

Now let's put these patterns to use. By recognising them in what you're hearing, you can start playing music by ear on the ocarina. The tool below generates short random melodies for you to play by ear and uses pitch detection to tell you when you got it right.

The tool is set up to generate melodies using the notes mentioned previously. However, it can be configured to sound in other ranges if you're playing an ocarina in a different key.

It is also straightforward to practice the same thing with a friend or teacher instead of the tool. Ask them to make up a short melody using the three notes that you were previously using. Either use the notes at random or build melodies by assembling the melodic figure patterns in different orders.

They play this melody to you while you're looking away, and you repeat it by ear. Start with melodies only three or four notes long and expand the range as you gain experience.

Irrespective of whether you're using the tool or working with another player, the process to understand what you're hearing is as follows:

Step 1: Listen to the notes used in the melody individually

Start by playing the three notes that you're using on your instrument and listen to how they sound. You may find it helpful to use a tuner to make sure you are playing them in tune.

Step 2: Listen to the melody (or to a part of it)

It can feel intuitive to play by ear in real time over what you are hearing, but this really isn't a good idea. Doing that, you're only giving yourself a fraction of a second to hear the note!

This is why the second step is to listen to the whole melody a few times without playing. Try to associate the sequence of sounds with the melodic figure patterns that you learned previously.

You may find it helpful to draw the shape of the melody on paper at first. For example, if the melody sounded like 'medium, low, high, low', you could draw it like this:

If listening to the whole melody at once is too much to deal with, it's fine to work with a smaller part of it at a time.

Step 3: Play what you heard on the ocarina

Play the notes you think you heard on the ocarina, and the tool or your assistant will tell you if it was correct.

The main point at this stage is to practice playing many simple but different melodies. As soon as you can play something, switch to a new melody because, after a few repetitions, you'll be playing from muscle memory instead of what you're hearing.

If you are struggling, try a lower tempo. Note that the process of elimination can also be used. If a sequence ascends by three notes, and the melody only uses three notes, then you know it starts on the lowest note.

A note about pitch instability

A challenge to be aware of when playing the ocarina by ear is that the instrument's unstable pitch can be misleading. On many ocarinas, it is possible to play a note of a given pitch both by raising a finger and by fingering a lower pitch and blowing harder. It's easy to subconsciously vary breath pressure when you actually need a different fingering.

I'd advise using a tuner at the start of your practice session to know how much pressure you need to use to sound each note at the intended pitch. Alternatively, if you're very new to the ocarina, it may be easier to practice using a different instrument with stable pitch.

The following tool generates random three-note melodies that can be answered by clicking on the buttons.

Another option is a piano or a similar instrument. Because all Western instruments play the same system of notes, it's straightforward to use them as learning tools. There are virtual pianos online and as apps, which are fine for the exercises discussed above.

Recognising individual notes

Another aspect of relative pitch is the ability to identify notes played alone in relation to reference notes held in your head. Imagine that you're working with a teacher: they initially play a sequence of three or four notes for you, which are the reference notes you memorise. They then play one of these notes individually, and your goal is to compare it to the references, identify what note was played, and perform it on your instrument.

The idea here is to play the individual pitches on your instrument and hold their sounds in short-term memory. Then, by comparing the sounds you hear with those in your memory, you can know which note was played. This game could be called 'match the pitch', and an implementation is available below.

• The tool plays a random note within the specified range. You then play the same note on your instrument as quickly as you can.
• The tool uses pitch detection to know when you have played the correct note, then plays a new random note.
• The more notes you find in the allotted time, the higher your score.

The same game can be played in person if you have a teacher or friend who plays an instrument. Just ask them to play notes for you to find on your ocarina within a given range, telling you if what you played was correct.

Congratulations

By this point, you should have played your first music by ear on the ocarina, so congratulations!

From here, it is just a matter of practice. Keep working on simple melodies in a three-note range until playing them by ear becomes effortless, then start increasing the range and working up the difficulty:

• Start increasing the range of notes being used, introducing one new note at a time. Practice memorising how that note sounds in the context of the others using the 'recognising individual notes' exercise.
• Experiment with the figure patterns that are possible within the new set of notes, play them and learn how they sound. The second article in this series, Using melodic patterns to play by ear, discusses this in more detail.
• As was observed, how two notes sound in sequence changes depending on how far apart they are. This distance is called an interval, and learning to identify intervals also enhances our understanding. See Identifying melodic intervals by ear.
• Finally, in your experimentation, there's a good chance you stumble upon some note sequences that sound like songs that you know. Try working out the rest of the melody. The article playing real music by ear shares some tips.

These skills can take time to develop, simply because closely listening to pitch is not a skill people commonly use in day-to-day life. It does get easier with practice.