If you major in music at most universities, you have to take several semesters of aural skills classes. These classes traditionally consist of two main activities: sight-singing and dictation, that is, hearing a melody or chord sequence a few times and then writing it out in notation. Aural skills class was the definite low point of my grad school education, and it helped deter me from studying music as an undergrad. I find sight-singing and dictation to be intensely stressful, because I’m terrible at them and because I have never had to do them in real musical life.
NYU’s new pop music theory sequence has its own aural skills classes, and I am pleasantly surprised to find myself teaching them. I can do it because these classes are very different from the ones that I took. Some of that is the repertoire: Stevie Wonder rather than Beethoven. The structure of the class is different too. The music we’re studying exists as recordings, not notated scores. It was substantially created by ear, and is substantially learned that way. So while we do work on notation-related skills, it can’t be the only thing on the menu. (Most of my students are better readers than I am anyway!) My job is to create classroom activities and assignments that are appropriate to pop music and its learning methods.
A lot of my own formative music learning came from jamming over repeated grooves, either with other people or over recordings. This is why I put improvisation at the center of my teaching practice. In my experience, the only lasting way to learn theory is to use it to solve problems in an authentic musical context. Jamming with a band is the ideal way to do this problem-solving, but it’s impractical in a class of 25 people, not all of whom play instruments. However, it is practical to have everyone jam over recordings, and in some ways, recordings are better than live instruments. I don’t know anyone who can play funk like James Brown’s band in 1970, but I don’t need to when James Brown’s band is right there on the computer.
Why do music students need to improvise if they aren’t playing jazz?
You might wonder why improvisation is such a big deal for pop musicians outside of jazz or jam bands. The answer is that improvisation is not just for solos. If you are creating or arranging music in any capacity, improvisation is usually the best way to do it. That’s true for songwriting, but it’s also true for lower-level, more background-y forms of creativity.
Say you’re a guitarist who’s backing a singer-songwriter. They might hand you a chord chart, and set out a basic tempo and feel. Maybe there will be some riffs or countermelodies for you to play too. But most likely, beyond the basic skeleton, whatever you play will be up to you. I guess you could work your ideas out on paper, but it’s vastly more likely that you will be making things up in the moment. This process is so natural that it might not even feel like creativity at all, but it is. The same goes for basslines, drum parts, keyboard parts, backing vocals, production choices, and so on: you might be told what to play in the broad strokes, but you will be inventing a lot of the time. The only time I have been asked to play something exact is when we were trying to do a soundalike cover. Otherwise, my musical life has been wall-to-wall improvising.
Not only do pop students need to learn improvisation as a skill unto itself, but they also benefit from improvisation as a method for learning other things. In their article “Situated Cognition and the Culture of Learning”, John Seely Brown, Allan Collins and Paul Duguid argue that education too often focuses on the content of learning while ignoring the context. Say you want to learn a foreign language. If you do it in a classroom, it will be a slow and painful process, and you will lose your knowledge quickly unless you keep up continual effort to maintain it. But if you learn a language through immersion among native speakers, you will pick it up quickly, and it will stick. Brown, Collins and Duguid point out that classroom content knowledge too often comes in the form of “algorithms, routines, and decontextualized definitions that [students] cannot use and that, therefore, lie inert.” You can’t necessarily do the equivalent of moving to a foreign country in a class that meets twice a week, but you can create experiences that inspire students to seek out immersion for themselves.
You can’t undervalue the emotional context of learning. It has to feel good if it’s going to stick. I took a great jazz theory and improv class in college, and I felt good studying the music and doing the improvising. Decades later, I’m still happily chasing down the threads of everything we learned there. Meanwhile, I had such an aversive experience trying to learn the classical counterpoint rules in grad school that I have to look them up all over again every semester, and I will probably never be able to retain them.
Here’s a collection of some of my favorite loops
I don’t know of a better way to learn improvisation than to simply do it. But you can’t just tell students to improvise, especially if they haven’t done it before; you need to give them some scaffolding. Looped grooves are perfect for that. Here are some of my best ones, which I call jam tracks. They will all loop perfectly if you play them on repeat, but I also put fadeouts on the ends if you want to listen to the playlist straight through.
So what do we do with these tracks in class? Sometimes we use them for structured exercises, but more often the loop itself creates all the structure we need, and everyone just takes turns scatting for four or eight bars in a continual cypher. Sometimes I shout out comments in the moment, but I prefer to not interrupt the flow. We talk afterwards about what we noticed, what we were thinking, what we were feeling. The students come up with plenty of interesting ideas on the fly that we can talk about, like when someone intuitively sings a chromatic embellishment or finds a nice riff. It’s also illuminating to have them fail in certain ways: when the classical kids sing Ti instead of Te over the Mixolydian grooves, or when the rock kids have trouble hearing Ti resolving to Do in a V7-I cadence.
Sometimes we use loops to work on a specific concept. I use “Soul Power” for practicing Dorian mode, especially for internalizing the tritone between b3 and 6. Along with open-ended scatting, I also have the students learn and sing along with elements of the track: the guitar part, the horn part, the bassline, the drums. If the backing track has some clear harmonic progression or voice leading, then scat-singing is an excellent way to internalize it. Alternatively, students can (and often do) find blues-based melodies that are independent of the harmony. Scat-singing also gets them listening to the microrhythms, the timbres, the stylistic signifiers, the instrumentation, the mixing and production. You listen differently when you’re hearing an eight bar loop repeated fifty or a hundred times, especially if you have to participate in it musically.
Students are understandably reluctant to scat in front of their peers at the beginning of the semester, so I break the ice by doing it first. I don’t have a very strong singing voice, but I’m uninhibited, and I improvise goofy lyrics about what I’m doing: “This is the thirrrrd of the chorrrrd, check out howwwww it moooooves to the roooooot of the neeeext choooord.” Occasionally students will make up their own goofy lyrics, which I love.
How did I make the loops?
The jam tracks come out of my collection of listening examples.
I use Ableton Live to play the examples in class. The first job is to warp the recording to the grid so that playback follows the performed tempo. Having a song on the grid makes it easy to jump to or repeat sections of the audio precisely. I can also have MIDI clips and the metronome follow the tempo.
Once everything is warped out, I split the audio into song sections, which I color-code and label. Then I add a couple of tracks filled with empty MIDI clips, and I label them to show chord changes, key centers, hypermeter, melodic phrasing, and other interesting features. Here’s a screencap of my session for “Dear Prudence” by the Beatles.
Getting a song annotated like this takes time, but it’s worth it. I can open one of these sessions and effortlessly identify, play and loop segments of any length, from a single beat to a full song. I can align multiple versions of the same song. I can change tempos and keys, and can also address audio production quirks. Sometimes recordings are pitched up or down in post-production, intentionally or not, so I use Live to tune them back to A440. Also, many 1960s recordings have extreme stereo panning, and I like to put things in near-mono to keep the vocals or drums from being only audible on one side of the classroom.
William O’Hara wrote about my DAW visualizations in his article ““Let’s Think in Layers”: On Twenty-First-Century Instruments of Public Music Theory.” He describes Ableton Live as an example of a “music theoretical instrument”, a physical manifestation of theory concepts. He points out that staff notation and the piano keyboard are theoretical instruments too, and they have constraints in what they can and can’t illustrate. For example, they aren’t much use for pitch bends. The DAW has constraints of its own, but it opens up many new possibilities too.
As I have been using my Live sessions in class over the past few semesters, I find particular sections that make good loops, and I have started marking them with a special pink MIDI clips so they are easier to find. The next step has been to make new Ableton sessions containing the loops only. I want to be able to run the loops continuously, without having to break up the flow by stopping and starting playback, or by jumping around within the track arrhythmically. I also edit them to remove awkward discontinuities at the beginnings and ends of the looped segments, or in transitions from one loop to another. These special loop sessions are my jam tracks.
The process of identifying good improv loops is the same process that hip-hop and dance music producers use for finding samples. Any of my jam tracks could be the basis for a hip-hop instrumental. One thing you discover when digging the crates for samples is that there is a difference between a great song and a great groove. “Yesterday” is a beautiful song, but there’s no part of it you can loop into a satisfying groove. Meanwhile, the opening minute and a half of “God Make Me Funky” by the Headhunters is one of my most reliable in-class grooves, but I hardly ever listen to the complete recording, because the second half of the track goes in a strange and annoying direction.
I have a few go-to loops that I haven’t made into separate jam tracks because it hasn’t been necessary. For example, I like the intro to “Back to Black” by Amy Winehouse for practicing minor-key leading tones. It doesn’t require any editing; all I have to do is click the intro clip and activate looping. By contrast, “Boogie Chillen” by John Lee Hooker is a brilliant groove all the way through, but it took me a substantial amount of editing to create seamless loops.
Some of my loops have vocals in them, but I try not to have too many specific lyrics or famous melodies, because I don’t want students having to compete with them. I could use AI stem separation to remove vocals, but so far, I haven’t done that. It’s not because I have a principled objection to stem separation; I just don’t like the muffled and artifacted audio it produces. I made my vocal-less loop of “Dear Prudence” from the song’s original multitracks.
What about copyright? So far, no one has ever come after me for any of this. If they did, I could make a good educational Fair Use argument, but it’s a grey area for sure. I’m not trying to teach my students to ignore copyright law, but I do want them to understand that you’re allowed to do whatever experiments you want to in the privacy of your own room. If you are jamming over a James Brown loop and you come up with a good idea, that is your idea. You can always record it without the James Brown loop later.
It’s important to me to use actual recordings of James Brown rather than playing soundalike grooves on guitar or piano, or programming soundalikes in Ableton. I have made a bunch of self-created practice tracks for various specific purposes, and sometimes we use them, but I find myself reaching for the jam tracks more, and the students show a lot more enthusiasm for them. The students like my contrived tracks okay, but they can’t create the feeling in the room that half an hour of “Soul Power” does. Everyone walks out glowing after that, and it’s the exact opposite of the vibe in the aural skills classes I took as a grad student.
The academic literature on improvisation as an aural skills method
Improvisation is not a widespread practice in aural skills classes, so far as I know, but there are people doing it. Most of the literature on the subject is about teaching in traditional Western classical settings. In the 18th and 19th centuries, improvisation was a common practice for composers and performers, and some educators think it was a mistake to abandon it.
In The Routledge Companion to Aural Skills Pedagogy, Jena Root argues that improvisation is valuable even for classical musicians because it “allows each student to explore musical space on his or her own terms and at his or her own pace” (p. 403). However, assessing improvisation is difficult, and one might wonder whether it is even worth doing at all. Root believes that we do need to grade improvisation exercises, because doing so communicates to students that we consider the exercises to be important. She also recognizes, however, that grading creates anxiety, which is inimical to the creativity and playfulness we hope to foster through improvisation in the first place. Root therefore recommends that we make improvisation assignments low-stakes, worth only a few points.
Root also suggests that we not force students to improvise on the spot in class. Instead, we should allow them to do it one on one, or by submitting recordings outside of class time. That allows them to record multiple takes, which is a good thing, because it’s a valuable form of practice. I think it’s fine to expect pop students to be able to improvise in front of their classmates, but I agree that it’s a lot to ask of classical students.
Also in the Routledge Companion, Susan Piagentini talks about using improvisation to reinforce solfège skills. She creates a “solfège menu”, a vertical list of syllables written on the board. At the beginning of the term, the menu is limited to diatonic pitches, but it grows to include chromatic pitches as the class progresses. The instructor points to syllables on the menu as students sing along. The instructor can then tap out a sequence, which students have to sing back in tempo. Finally, the menu can be a format for improvised composition; students can compose a melody in real time by pointing to syllables while the rest of the class sings along. I haven’t tried this exercise yet, but it’s on my list.
In his book Aural Awareness, George Pratt recommends that students begin by improvising on a single note. Limiting the pitch content frees their attention for other musical parameters. As their skill and confidence grow, you can open the restrictions up wider. Pratt suggests that instructors should record students’ in-class improvisation so we can play it back and analyze it. I see the wisdom of that, but I don’t want my students feeling too inhibited; some of them find the process to be challenging enough without being recorded on top of that.
Later this semester, I am going to assign my aural skills class to record themselves scat-singing over a loop and then transcribe it. They can do as many takes as they want. This assignment is a warmup for the final project, which is to write a song and notate it. I want to get the students writing by recording improvisation rather than by composing onto the page. Creating in notation is fine if you are extremely fluent with it, but for most of my students, notation constrains them too much rhythmically. Anyone who listens to pop will intuitively come up with sixteenth note syncopations, but those are a pain to write, so there’s an incentive to sand down your rhythmic subtleties. Conversely, notation doesn’t constrain you enough pitch-wise. It’s too easy to write complex angular melodies full of awkward interval jumps. Vocal improvisation enforces a level of good taste.
In their article “A Critical Review of Current Aural Skill Materials and Pedagogical Practices”, Timothy Chenette, Stacey Davis and Stanley Kleppinger observe that “unlike sight singing, improvisation activities benefit from repetition, since the same melodic or rhythmic prompts can yield multiple effective and imaginative ‘solutions’” (p. 156). They also suggest basing improvisation on aural stimuli, rather than only using notated prompts. It would never have occurred to me to use notated improvisation prompts to begin with, but classical teachers don’t usually work from recordings or by ear.
I was expecting to find useful ideas for improvisation-based aural skills in the jazz pedagogy literature. However, I can’t find any mention of a jazz-specific aural skills class at all. In the departments I’m familiar with, jazz majors have to take the classical aural skills classes. Besides, jazz players work on their aural skills constantly through their regular playing, so having a separate class for it seems beside the point.
What is aural skills class for?
When I asked a class of music education majors whether there should be some baseline body of knowledge shared by all college music majors, they all agreed that there should be. When I asked them what that knowledge should consist of, they couldn’t agree at all. That makes sense! A future dance music producer does not need to learn the same things as a future symphony cellist. This is only a problem if we need there to be a single standard music theory curriculum for everyone. But most institutions want a single standard curriculum, at least implicitly. When I was a grad student, NYU made every music major do the same classical theory and aural skills sequence, regardless of our specialties, and that didn’t make much sense. But I don’t think that every music major needs to scat-sing over James Brown either.
In their article “Signals and Noise: How Higher Music Education Institutions Define Popular Music”, Thomas Calkins, Wessel Coppes and Pauwke Berkers point out that “popular music education and Western high art may coexist in much the same way that very divergent disciplines do within the typical university setting (e.g., physics and literature)” (p. 12). I like this idea: there can be pop musicians and classical musicians, just like there are physics majors and English majors. In a liberal arts institution, we would hope that the classical and pop musicians would take some of each others’ classes, the same way we expect English majors to take some science and physics majors to read some literature.
My motivation for making loops isn’t entirely professional. I make them because I love to make them. I have a friend who keeps asking me if I’m writing anything original these days, and yeah, I am, but I feel like the jam tracks are the truest expression of my musical self. You might not think that just looping audio would be much of a creative act, but it changes the musical meaning of the material that you’re looping. Joseph Schloss explains in his book, Making Beats:
[L]ooping automatically recasts any musical material it touches, insofar as the end of a phrase is repeatedly juxtaposed with its beginning in a way that was not intended by the original musician. After only a few repetitions, this juxtaposition… begins to take on an air of inevitability. It begins to gather a compositional weight that far exceeds its original significance (p. 137).
Making loops and using them as the basis for my own ideas transformed my musical life, and has brought me immeasurable joy. It’s a gift that I want to pass on. I don’t think you can meaningfully impact someone’s musical understanding very much in a single semester, but you can definitely help students develop better learning habits, you can light a fire of curiosity in them, and you can point them in new directions.
Your students are lucky people. i get lots of ideas for my own learning from these posts…