How to Identify Chord Progressions by Ear

A lot of confusion and false myths are growing around how to develop the ability to identify chord progressions by ear. Most of the things that I'm watching or reading online are totally nonsense, so I decided to make an article providing clarity and scientific evidence about what are the 2 main ways in which everyone can identify chord progressions by ear. Let me clarify that "by ear" in this case refers to the ability to understand a chord progression just by hearing it, without touching any instruments.

This is one of the most sought-after ear training skills ever and one of the most important aspects of musicianship.

Everything I say from now on, not only is based on my personal experience as a musician, ear training student, and ear-training teacher, there also are solid scientific foundations to everything you'll read. Farther on in this article, I'll give you a summary of what are the main scientific findings of our perception of chord progressions, from the last 40 years.

How to Identify Chord Progressions by Ear

There are 2 main ways in which we human can identify a chord progression by ear, I call these 2 ways the "Zoom in" and the "Zoom out" method:

• Zoom in method: this approach occurs when you try to listen carefully to each individual note that forms the chord (that's why I call it "zoom in" method) and after having recognized all the notes, you can understand what chord is it. For example, if you hear that a chord is formed by the notes C, E, and G, with a little music theory knowledge you can understand that it's a C major chord. Although this is one of the most common ways in which beginner musicians try to understand a chord progression by ear, in most cases this is not very convenient and for sure this isn't the fastest approach in recognizing chord progressions by ear.
• Zoom out method: this approach involves listening to each chord from a higher point of view (that's why it is called the "Zoom out" method) and recognizing them by the global sensation that each chord carries. Generally speaking, each chord assumes a specific sensation of tension, resolution, or something in between, depending on the role that it assumes inside the tonality of the song. In the major key, only 7 chords are possible and each one of them has its own specific feeling. For example, the 1st chord of the major key (the tonic chord) always carries the same feeling of resolution, the 5th chord of the major key (the dominant chord) carries a sensation of tension, the 4th chord of the major key (the subdominant chord) carries a sensation that is in between, I can say it sound suspended, like if it was floating in the air. Similarly, any other chord belonging to the major key assumes its own specific feeling. This is the most convenient and fastest way to recognize chord progressions by ear, it can be really instantaneous when your mind is properly trained.

It's worth mentioning that a mixture of these 2 approaches can be the best approach in some musical genres like classical music for example. If you want to understand why a mixture of these 2 approaches is the best option in some cases, you can find the answer in the more in-depth explanation of the 2 methods down below.

Zoom In Method

The "Zoom in" method can be applied mainly with 3 different strategies, here you can see them written from the slowest to the fastest:

• The Trial & Error Strategy.
• The Sing & Match Strategy.
• The Sing & Identify Strategy.

The Trial & Error Strategy

This is a very slow and painful way to understand chord progressions and it requires an instrument, so it doesn't really fell into the "recognize by ear" category but it's so common that it's worth mentioning.

The trial and error approach occurs when musicians try to identify the notes included in the chord by playing random notes on their instrument until they find the notes that match the one present in the chord.

That can be tremendously frustrating and its usually the way in which beginner musicians start recognizing chords by ear.

The Sing & Match Strategy

This is a bit faster than the previous strategy but it requires the ability to sing the notes included in a chord. By the way, singing is one of the most important habits to develop if you want to be successful in ear training, so don't be shy to sing.

Basically you sing the notes that are included in the chord and you find them on your instrument by understanding what note on your instrument matches the pitch of your voice.

So even this strategy doesn't really fell into the "recognize by ear" category since you need to help yourself with an instrument, but it's an important middle step in going from the "Trial & Error Strategy" to the "Sing & Identify Strategy" that I'm going to explain to you in the next paragraph.

The Sing & Identify Strategy

This is the fastest and most convenient strategy in which you can apply the "Zoom in" method and it doesn't require any instrument, so it can be considered a way to really recognize chords by ear.

It involves singing the individual notes that are included in the chord and understanding their place inside the tonality, then with a little theory knowledge, you can understand which chord is played. This requires the skill of recognizing what I call the "key's colors" which is the specific feeling that each note assumes in the context of the key (exactly as the 7 chords of the key assume a specific sensation, also the 7 note of the key assumes it). Talking about the key's colors is not the purpose of this post but at the time in which you will be reading this, there will probably be a specific post on that topic in this blog.

Let me show you a practical example of the "Sing & Identify" strategy in real life: if you find that a chord is formed by the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of the major key by relying on your knowledge of the key's colors, with a little theory knowledge you can easily understand that it is the 1st-degree chord (the tonic chord).

This is the most convenient way to apply the "Zoom in" method which, by the way, is not the most convenient and fastest method one can adopt in recognizing chord progressions by ear (with a few exceptions that will be discussed farther on in this article).

The most convenient approach is the "Zoom out" method, which you will deeply understand by reading the next chapter.

The Zoom Out Method

As I previously stated this is the fastest method to recognize chord progressions by ear and you can bring it to a level in which you recognize chords almost instantaneously with practically zero amount of mental effort or focus needed.

This method involves hearing the global sensation of each chord, so the right way to apply it is to think of each chord as a single element without trying to hear which notes are included in it.

Before approaching a progression using this method, it's useful to have 4 basic skills covered:

• Identifying the tonic note.
• Having a basic internalization of the key's colors.
• Distinguishing major chords from minor chords.
• Extracting the root note of a chord.

Identifying the Tonic Note

A good internalization of the sound of the tonic note, which is in part acquired when internalizing the key's colors, is crucial in order to be able to recognize chord progressions by ear using the "Zoom out" method.

The tonic note act as our north star, if we lose sight of it, we're totally lost. It is the reference point that serves us to hear and evaluate the global color of each chord properly and clearly, we need to have it always in the back of our mind. If not we will perceive the colors of the chords in a blurry, undefined, and distorted way and we won't be able to recognize them.

Having a Basic Internalization of the Key's Colors

A basic internalization of the key's colors (the sensation that each note assume inside the key) is a required starting point in recognizing chord progressions with the "Zoom out" method.

This is because the sound of the key's colors is closely related to the global sound of each chord. For example, the key's color of the 1st-degree note is very similar to the sound of the 1st-degree chord, the key's color of the 2nd-degree note is very similar to the sound of the 2nd-degree chord and so on.

That allows you to be able to feel these sensations more clearly when listening to the global sound of a chord.

Distinguishing Major from Minor

Distinguishing major from minor helps a lot in recognizing chord progressions by ear because by having a basic knowledge in music theory you know that in the major key there are 3 major chords, 3 minor chords, and 1 diminished chord:

• The major chords are the 1st, 4th, and 5th.
• The minor chords are the 6th, 2nd, and 3rd.
• The diminished is the 7th.

So just by distinguishing if a chord is major or minor, you can restrict a lot the available option for that chord. For example, if you hear a minor chord you would never think about it as a probable 4th-degree chord of the major key because you know that a minor chord could only be a 6th, 2nd, or 3rd-degree chord in the major key.

A similar logic can be applied to other tonalities (natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor, etc.), even though the distribution of the major and minor chord inside these keys is different.

Extracting The Root Note

Another useful thing when you begin to apply this method is to develop the skill to extract the root note from the global sound of the chord. Let me clarify that you can do that without focusing on hearing the individual notes; with adequate training, you can understand the root of the chord just by listening to its global sound. In fact, the root of the chord is the most important note of the chord, the one that has more weight in the chord, and you can learn to identify it in a similar way in which you learn to identify the tonic note of a song.

The skill of extracting the root from the global sound of each chord is important because:

• It helps in hearing the chord as a global unit.
• It allows you to sing the melodic movement of the progression. In other words, by singing each root of the chords included in the progression you can identify their position inside the key, so you can easily understand which chords they're.

The "Zoom out" method is the more convenient approach in recognizing chord progressions by ear and it's the best method for recognizing chord progressions in most musical genres. It shines especially for those genres in which chords are clearly separated from one another and they appear as distinct blocks. Most Pop, Rock, Folk, and mainstream songs, in general, fell into this category, and also some Jazz songs too.

The only musical genre in which it can be tricky to apply the "Zoom out" method alone is classical music. That's because in classical music often chords aren't very clearly separated from one another, the bass line usually moves more quickly and there is a more common use of chord inversions. That's why I think the best approach in these scenarios would be a mixture of the "Zoom in" and "Zoom out" methods, you can better understand how it works in the next chapter.

The Mixed Method

The concept behind the mixed method is very simple, it works like this:

1. You begin by facing the progression with the "Zoom out" method at first and you try to recognize the most obvious chord changes that are in the progression. They can be for example the tonic chord at the start or at the end of the progression, the dominant chord coming before the tonic chord, etc.
2. You use the "Zoom in" method to refine your understanding of the progression and recognize any missed detail. For example, you analyze the bass movement in order to understand which inversion of a chord is playing, or you analyze a particular chord that you weren't able to understand, etc.

What if a progression contains a chord that is outside of the main key of the song?

That could be a legit question, my answer is simply that you can use the same 2 methods explained above.

Let me premise that almost in every case a non-diatonic chord included in a progression comes from a somewhat familiar harmonic substitution/modulation (secondary dominant, tritone substitution, borrowed chord from a parallel mode, etc.) and they all have their specific sound, their specific color so you can train your mind to recognize it.

Also supposing that the non-diatonic chord doesn't belong to a familiar harmonic substitution/modulation, for sure it has its own specific sound and you can internalize it and recognize it later.

Scientific Findings on the Perception of Chord Progressions

Down below you can find some of the scientific works that are at the basis of the 2 methods that I've explained to you in this post.

Chord recognition skills are strongly context-dependent

There is an almost endless scientific literature that supports the fact that both chord and melodic recognition skills are strongly context-dependent. One of the main works is for sure contained in "Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch" by Carol Krumhansl and published by the Oxford University Press, which is an essay derived from a significant amount of experimental researches conducted by her and other professors on the topic of human perception of musical pitch.

In a more practical way, saying that chord recognition skills are strongly context-dependent means that the same chord sounds extremely different to our ears when it is included in 2 different keys. For example, the same C major chord sounds totally different if we include it in the C major key, in which it would carry a resolution feeling (the tonic chord feeling) than if we include it in an F major key, in which it would carry a sensation of tension or incompleteness (the dominant chord feeling).

These findings strongly support the validity of what I call the "Zoom out" method as the most effective way to recognize chord progressions by ear.

Intervals are inadequate for the understanding of chord sequences

This finding comes from research done by Don Gibson Jr. from Baylor University in 1986.

They made 198 musicians listen to multiple sets of 2 pairs of chords, pair A and pair B.

The chords included were all 4 notes chords, and, in order to avoid any eventual tonal memory to be recalled by musicians and influence their judgment, they excluded the more familiar types like the major 7th, minor 7th, dominant 7th, half-diminished 7th, diminished 7th, etc.

So basically they ended up with atonal sounding chords for creating the pairs that were listened by musicians during the experiment.

Chords were classified based upon the intervals included in them. Here it is a simple example, a major triad contains:

• 1 major 3rd interval
• 1 minor 3rd interval
• 1 5th interval

Musicians were only asked to judge if the 2 chords contained in "pair A" were more similar-sounding than the ones contained in "pair B" or vice-versa.

The results show that chords containing the same interval classes aren’t the ones that sound more alike. This is evidence that the understanding of chords, in both tonal and atonal contexts, can’t rely on our perception of intervals.

In other words, the interval method is not applicable to the recognition of chord progressions, so practicing on the identification of harmonic intervals won't allow you to understand chord progressions by ear.

Here it is a very simple example, a major and a minor triad are both built by the same intervals (a major 3rd, a minor 3rd, and a 5th), the only thing that changes is that in the minor triad the position of the major and minor 3rd intervals are reversed (see picture below). So even though they are built by the same intervals, they sound totally different just by shifting the order in which the intervals appear.

That's a very quick demonstration of the inadequacy of the interval method when applied to real music.

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You can also check out my youtube video on how to identify chord progressions by ear.