Foundations · 20 lessonsThe Composer's Path · 37 lessons
Lesson 22 of 57 · The Ear

The Composer's Path → Module 1 of 9

The Ear

Five lessons of listening and transcription. No composing yet, by design: the source course spends its first five lessons the same way.

5 lessons · 10 weeks · source course lessons 1 to 5

The Ear illustration
L1

Hearing as a composer hears

Modern listening protocols applied to one Radiohead track and one Meshuggah track.

2 weeks
L2

The interval as expressive force

Minor seconds and tritones in riffs, wide-interval voicings, Radiohead's chord colors.

2 weeks
L3

The motive: three or four notes that generate a world

The riff as motive, and the Bach subject set next to the riff cell.

2 weeks
L4

Horizontal and vertical: polyphonic hearing

Polyphonic hearing in multi-guitar textures and in piano-trio textures.

2 weeks
L5

Consonance, dissonance, and tension

Meyer's expectation applied to metric dissonance in rock and to tension in art rock.

2 weeks