9: Need Help Recognizing Intervals?

 As you listen to more music and try intentionally to find these intervals in what you are hearing, you will at first develop your own references, and then not need them at all, in pursuit of being able to recognize these intervals. 

In the meantime, however, here is a chart of where you can find them:

Interval

Size

Going up sounds like

Going down sounds like

Unison

0 half-steps

“Happy” in “Happy Birthday to you…”

“Happy” in “Happy Birthday to you…”

Minor second

1 half-step

JAWS theme

The first two notes of Fur Elise

Major second

2 half-steps

Happy birth”—the distance from “happy” to “birth”

“birthday” in “Happy Birthday”

Minor third

3 half-steps

Brahms’s Lullaby

“name I” in “Me, a name I call myself” from “Doe, A Deer”

Major third

4 half-steps

The beginning of Vivalid’s Spring

Brahms’s Waltz in A-flat Op. 39 No 15

Perfect fourth

5 half-steps

“Here comes” in Wagner’s “Here Comes the Bride”

The opening figure of the third movement of Beethoven 9

Augmented fourth/diminished fifth/tritone

6 half-steps

“The Simp…” in The Simpsons’ Theme

Literally no one does this

Perfect Fifth

7 half-steps

The distance between the first and second “Twinkles” in “Twinkle, twinkle little star”

The first two notes of the cello part in the Game of Thrones theme”

Minor sixth

8 half-steps

Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem

The second and third notes from the guitar riff from “In my life” by the Beatles

Major sixth

9 half-steps

“Dashing” as in “Dashing through the snow…”

The first 2 notes of Mozart’s K391

Minor seventh

10 half-steps

“There's a” in “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”

“The Hut on Fowl's Legs” from Mussgorsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition

Major seventh

11 half-steps

“Take on” as in “Take On Me” by A-ha

Herbie Hancock’s “Watermelon Man”

Octave

12 half-steps

“Somewhere” as in “Somewhere over the rainbow…”

The opening figure of the second movement of Beethoven 9

 


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