Voces: Ear Training & Pitch

Every ear trainer teaches you to hear chords. None of them teaches you to hear a line.

Voces trains horizontal listening — locking onto one voice inside a polyphonic texture and holding it while three others move around it. It is the skill a choir singer needs to keep the alto part, and the one that turns a Bach fugue from a wash of notes into four separate arguments.

FOUR WAYS TO PRACTISE

Identify — hear the full texture, then one voice alone. Name which line it was.
Isolate — all voices play. Sing the highlighted one, with the staff and note names to help.
Strip — all voices play. Reproduce the named voice from memory. No staff, no note names, no guidance.
Track — a whole fugue plays. Tap every time you hear the subject enter, in any voice.

IT KNOWS WHEN YOU DRIFT

Sing into the microphone and Voces scores your line note by note against the voice you were asked for. It also matches you against every other voice — so when you slide onto the soprano without noticing, it says so. That drift is the exact habit this app exists to break.

57 PIECES BY BACH

15 two-voice inventions, 15 three-voice sinfonias, 15 fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier and 12 preludes. 23 pieces in two voices, 18 in three, 16 in four — the texture thickens as your ear does.

A PATH, NOT A PILE OF EXERCISES

An eight-week course — forty lessons, from two outer voices to a subject in stretto. It answers "where will I be in two months?", which a shuffled drill never can.

Or learn one work. Any piece divides into sections and you walk it end to end, voice by voice, at a tempo you climb rather than one you are handed. And any stretch of it can be put on a loop with your own line taken out: the other voices keep going, a bar of clicks counts you in each time round, and nothing is scored.

ALSO

• Mute or solo any voice — study a line on its own, then put it back into the texture
• Live pitch indicator: on pitch, too high, too low
• Sing it, play it into the microphone, or connect a MIDI keyboard
• Octave-tolerant scoring — take the line where your voice actually sits
• Daily sessions that adjust difficulty as you improve, or free practice
• Progress broken down by voice, so you can see which line you keep losing
• A Learn section covering the theory behind what you are hearing
• Twelve languages: English, German, Russian, French, Spanish, Italian, S