Top 4 Free Apps for Sight-Singing and Ear Training
Voice teachers and performing singers alike, we all know that sight-singing is a vital skill to have in our toolkit. Not only can we improve our intonation and general music literacy, excellent sight-singing helps make a singer become more employable.
The great operatic soprano Maria Callas herself successfully secured a role as Isolde in an audition, even though she was sight-reading the aria for the very first time! If that doesn’t convince you, imagine this scenario: A producer is tight on time, and is choosing between two session singers. Would they select the singer who can sing the music right off the bat, or the one who needs to learn with a pre-recorded track? Or imagine you have are taking song requests at a wedding gig — imagine the freedom you will feel when you can pull up the score to any song, and be confident in that you’ve got absolutely all the notes and tricky intervals in the bag.
Gone are the days where we needed to purchase heavy, unwieldy tomes of sight-reading manuals. Here are my top 4 FREE apps that promise to help improve your (or your student’s!) sight-singing with zero to little fuss.
1. Sight Reading Factory
Sight Reading Factory comes highly recommended by many voice teachers, music teachers and students alike. The web and mobile-based app offers levels of increasing difficulty, perfect for the complete beginner or the performing musician. The best part is that the IOS app is free and incredibly user-friendly! You can customise sight-reading exercises based on your instrument and based on the concepts you’d like to reinforce, making it great for singers and instrumentalists alike. Here’s a link to the free Sight Reading Factory app on the iTunes Store.
For Android and Desktop users, Sight Reading Factory offers a free section within their site for you to practice your sight-singing.
For a more comprehensive suite of options, Sight Reading Factory also offers a paid subscriptions from $35 a year for educators. It does seem like the free app would be more than enough to get your students or yourself started on sight-singing.
2. ABRSM Aural Trainer Lite
ABRSM Aural Trainer 1–5 Lite is the free version to the full, paid app. The free app offers interval training, as well as limited audio tests within Grade 1 for you to try before you buy! You will have to purchase the premium app to access all grades and all app elements. This free app is perfect for those who are considering taking the Associated Boards of Royal Schools of Music grades, and for students to keep their practice up in between lessons.
Here’s a link to it on the iTunes Store.
3. Musicate
Musicate (formerly called Earpeggio) is a company that offers music education software for music learners. Musicate is available as a FREE app on the iTunes Store. The app is structured into 10 topics, including: Interval identification, chord identification, chord progressions, melody dictation, rhythm dictation, scale identification, and more!
Reviews of the app show that Musicate is one of the premier free apps around for aural skills. However, do note that the app is better for those who already know basic music theory (i.e. how to read a music stave) and just want to improve on ear-training and sight-reading.
For Android and Desktop users, the web-based app works perfectly fine in your browsers. Here is a quick link to the Sight-Reading section and the Ear Training section of the site.
4. MusicTheory.net
MusicTheory.net is an incredible resource for all musicians- I even used it during my time in university as a quick, easy to read and navigate reference. You may not know this, but MusicTheory.net offers a free interval training quiz section on their website, link here. This is perfect to train your ear to recognise (and be able to better sing) intervals from minor seconds to diminished 7ths. There is also an exercises to test your ability to pitch a note from a given reference note, link here. For teachers with younger singers, do note that this ear training exercises is based on the note names (C, D, E etc) rather than solfège (which the ABRSM and Trinity singing grades recommend), so consider if your student are ready to use these, or is able to switch between the two.
This would likely be a supplement to whatever sight-singing lessons a musician already has — there isn’t a section to exercise sight-singing a 4 bar phrase and to check if it is right.
We can all agree that these free apps make a musician’s (and their teacher’s!) life much easier! Do you have a favourite free sight-reading and aural training app that I haven’t listed above? Please feel free to share in the comments below.
