Meludia - Aural Training App

In the past year, I've reviewed a few different sight reading apps, because as we all know, I think sight reading is important. But today's app is a little different, Meludia is an Ear Training app that works on developing good aural skills in musicians.

 Aural skills are what we use to play a song by ear, to take a melody we've heard and translate it into keys, steps, skips, intervals & chords. It's what helps us learn a song by rote - when there isn't any sheet music and we're taught note by note. It's also what helps us catch when we've played a wrong note. And the more notes being played, the harder it can be to catch small mistakes within the chords or passages, so our ears have to be well trained to picking up each tone of a chord, or each note in a phrase or pattern. Ear Training is an essential skill to being a well-rounded musician.

And Meludia is a terrific way to build that skill. It is very easy to play and free to install with 150 exercises. After you try it out, and deem it is a worthy investment, you can purchase access all 700 exercises within the app. Game play consists of beginning a level & imitating back the phrase that is played for you. As you advance through a level, the phrases get longer & faster, if you mess up you lose a heart. When your out of hearts, your score is totaled. 

 A few features I really like are :
  • Option to use letter names or solfa (do-re-mi etc). 
  • Option to switch between piano, guitar or harp sounds to practice your ear training with different sound qualities.
  • Layout of the buttons imitates the half & whole steps, helping us connect the interval we are hearing with a visual one on the screen (much like a piano keyboard's linear layout does). 
Meludia is available on the App Store, Google Play and as a Web Based App for a monthly subscription. I've also thrown their promotional video in here at the end, for any who'd like to see what the app's creators have to say about it. 

If you try this app out in your practice at home or in your piano studio, please let me know how it goes & what you think!