Tag: intervals

The Interval-Singing Project

The Interval-Singing Project is a database of popular song and theme titles, collected as an aid to teaching intervals.

The songs are well-known within their category and genre and feature a specific musical interval as the first interval in the melody.

Instead of a student having to learn the sound of each interval from scratch, they will be able to tap into their own knowledge by simply remembering the start of a well-known song within their lived experience and musical interests.

I have set up a survey to collect suggestions. Please share the link below with your music teacher or fellow musicians so we can build a rich resource.

The resulting database will be available free of charge to anyone by subscribing to my blog and will be updated regularly. A selection of results will be publicly posted here.

Being able to recognise and name intervals is one of the cornerstones of both music theory and musicianship and I hope that the resulting database will become a handy, free resource for anyone who learns or teaches music.

Erik Kowarski 

Click Here To Go To The Survey

Survey Results (coming soon…)

A selection of results will be publicly posted in this category.

Subscribers will receive a link to the full database, including the ability to sort by interval, title, genre, nationality and more.

A Story Of Tones And Semitones

In kindergarten and early primary school, children are taught scales as having steps and half-steps, or tones and semitones (T and S). This naming conveys that between one scale note and the next is always “one” something (tone or semitone, step or half step), indicating that these notes are consecutive in the scale despite their different size.

This is great for very young minds but doesn’t reflect how intervals are measured and described in general use.

The smallest unit of musical pitch (in Western culture) is 1 semitone. The semitone is a basic unit, like a millimetre. (Smaller units exist but they measure expression such as vibrato or micro-tuning rather than musical notes). Larger intervals are measured in semitones, not tones and semitones. We say an octave is 12 semitones, not 6 tones or 5 tones and 2 semitones.

(Personally I find that calling 2 semitones a tone is confusing, given that a “tone” is also the American name for a note as well as a word for timbre.)

I never refer to “tones” as an interval size in any of my writing. For scales, I write 2 or 1 (semitones) instead of T or S.

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