Comprehensive Ear Training with Auralia

by Peter Lee: Rising Software

Auralia is the most comprehensive ear training software available for Mac or Windows. Auralia is suitable for students of all ages, from 10 years to adult, and has been especially designed for use in a school and college lab environment. Auralia covers a very broad range of topics, and the sophisticated reporting and testing features will allow teachers and parents to spend more time instructing their students and less time playing examples.

Auralia contains 26 different topic areas, divided into four sub catagories; Intervals & Scales, Chords, Rhythm and Pitch and Melody. Because Auralia has been designed for any level of ability, each topic has been given a series of structed levels. For example, in the Chord Recognition topic, the first level is extremely simple, with only major and minor chords being tested. In the second level, inversions of these chords are covered. This type of cumulative approach allows students to progress at a rate which suits their own ability. A list of Auralia’s topics is shown below:

Auralia now has a new bright and colourful interface, making the program even easier to use than previous versions. When students ‘submit’ their answer, a sound will be played and a picture shown. This helps to keep their interest, and makes Auralia accessible to younger students. The ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ sounds can be turned off, if need be. Auralia keeps extensive record of students activities. All student results are securely stored on the computers hard disk. Obviously, a single copy can only be installed on one computer, but there is no limit to the number of students that are allowed to use the program on a single computer. There are no student disks to keep track of or maintain. All of Auralia’s record keeping facilities are fully networkable. If your school or college has 50 computers, you will not have 50 separate sets of results to reconcile at the end of the semester. Instead, you will have one database, with each students results individually recorded within. Report writing and assessment is no longer the chord it used to be!

As well as being a fantasic practice tool for students, Auralia has the facility for teachers to set a specific set of tasks for the student to attempt. It is as simple as giving the test a name (eg. Start of Semester Test) and then clicking in the topics and levels that you wish your students to attempt. When students of the selected class next log on, they will be asked to do the test that you have set. The integration of Sound2MIDI, the worlds most accurate pitch to midi software, has resulted in Auralia being able to accept input from a microphone connected to your sound card. Topics such as Interval Singing and Scale Singing now ‘listen’ to you singing or playing into the microphone. Auralia will tell you if you were correct or incorrect. If your answer was incorrect, Auralia will inform you of which notes were wrong. Auralia’s comprehensive list of graded exercises enable you to use it with students of all ages. The record keeping and administrative features allow easy monitoring of all your students progress. You will find that students who use Auralia will accelerate rapidly, and will also greatly benefit from the increased time you will have to focus on their individual problems.