SoundGym Ear Training Workout

Are you a heavy lifter when judging tonal change, compression and delay? Find out with a workout!

These challenges ask you to evaluate the exact frequency value of a bell boost or cut. Two buttons – Original and After Gain – sit in the centre, and you click between them to instantly A/B between the unprocessed and EQ’d signal. Once you’ve made your mind up, you click on the main frequency graph at the point you judge. As with all the tasks, they seem fairly easy at first, but the values become more subtle as you progress. Here’s another challenge that appears to be incredibly simple on the surface, but requires skill and focus to master. A sound source is played at a position from left to right within the stereo field, and your task is to identify exactly where the sound is panned, by clicking as close as you can to that pan position on the main left-to-right strip. Here, you’re asked to switch between two copies of an identical FX sound, but one has a delay effect applied. As you might have guessed by now, your task is to judge by how many milliseconds the copy has been delayed by. Being completely honest, we struggled to guess the delay times on our first session, but we passed first time on our second go – proving the exercise works. This training session is all about evaluating subtle amplitude change. A song is played, and two different dB values are displayed on either side of the screen (eg, -1dB and +1dB). Now punch between the Original and After Gain settings to compare, as you try and assess which of the two dB changes has been applied. This task seems pretty easy when the dB variations are large, but it gets much tougher as the value variations become more subtle. This exercise is also extremely straightforward. You’re presented with two different versions of the same sound source, one more heavily compressed than the other. Your job is to assess which sound is the more compressed version. It’s pretty easy to judge between the two versions when one is obviously more squashed than the other, but sometimes the difference is so subtle that you really have to listen carefully. This workout presents you with two different filter settings – for example the left option might be a band-pass, while the right is a low-pass. After you’ve A/Bed between the dry and processed signals, you simply have to choose which of the two filter options has been applied. Although we were sceptical at first, all of these SoundGym challenges genuinely help you improve your hearing skills with a few days’ practice – and also expose issues with inaccurate monitoring!