Week 1 — Drill Studio · Ear Before Eye

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 1 of 15 (Week 1) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 3 · SLO 4 · SLO 5
Drill Studio 1 · 20 points · Drill-studio group · In session, both meetings (session 1 and session 2) · documented make-up path below, full credit, submit by the end of the week
Format: everything happens out loud, in the room. Nothing to read, nothing to buy, nothing to download. Bring your ears and your speaking voice — that's the whole equipment list.

Named in Music Theory I: the staff, clefs, letter names, octave numbers, half and whole steps, accidentals, enharmonic spelling — the map of what you already hear. An hour later we don't read the map; we train the territory.

Part 1 — The big picture

Here is the course's claim, and this week we prove it: you already hear this. You've tuned a guitar by ear, found a harmony in the car, known instantly when the band was dragging. This studio takes those instincts and drills them in the open: keep a pulse, feel how beats group, match a tone, echo a shape, and — the week's crown — find a song's home tone and hold it while the music argues with you.

Nothing this week asks you to read notation. That's deliberate. The names and the pages are arriving every morning in theory; here they'll attach to skills you've already demonstrated. One borrowed word, starting now, because we use it every day: musicians call the home tone do. Everything else gets sung on "loo."

Part 2 — What we do

The do ritual (every session, all semester). Professor Hemsworth plays a short chord pattern — the sound of a door opening onto a key — then sings the home tone. The whole room sings the home-tone shape back on "loo." Same ritual, every single session, through the final. By Unit 3 you'll do it without thinking; that's the point.

Steady beat, in the body (session 1). Walk it, tap it, then pass one clap around a circle so the pulse survives every handoff without a bump. Three speeds.

Grouped in twos or in fours (both days). A pattern plays with its natural accents. Where does the weight come back? Show it on your fingers — no counting, no writing, just the feel of the returning strong beat.

Pitch matching (session 1, and forever after). A tone sounds; you sing it on "loo." Two rules get stated once here and stand all semester: any octave that fits your voice earns full credit — a low voice matching a high tone an octave down is right, not close — and matching is about the pitch, never about how pretty the voice is. Timbre is not graded in this course, this week or ever.

The echo game (both days). Short patterns, played once, sung right back on "loo" — the room as one giant echo. The ladder gets a little wider session 2, including two rounds where do itself moves and you have to find the new home first.

Hold your do (session 2). The endgame. You sing do and keep it while other notes play against you, then the whole room re-lands together. Losing it is normal; the skill is the re-landing.

Solo hearings. A few of these drills include quick individual turns — a matched tone, a short echo. With a full section, 6–8 students get a solo turn per session, which works out to every voice being heard about once every two and a half weeks; in a smaller room, everyone, every time. It's twenty seconds, it's low-stakes, and it's how singing in this room becomes ordinary.

Part 3 — Before session 1 (the prep step)

Run Tutorial 1 (the AI ear-training tutorial) first — it hands you the six error classes, the course's shared language for describing exactly how an ear goes wrong. The studio uses those words out loud from day one, and your weekly recording submission asks you to diagnose yourself with them.

Part 4 — What counts, and how

Participation is the grade: show up, sing, point, clap, guess wrong out loud, fix it. 20 points, graded in session across the two meetings. When you're heard — in the room or on your recordings — this is the lens, all semester:

Criterion weights: perception 50 · realization 35 · labeling 15

A student who sings the right pitches with the wrong syllables loses only the labeling points. A student who sings the right syllables on the wrong pitches fails the item.

Syllables arrive in Unit 4; until then, "labeling" means this week's words — twos, fours, same, different, and the error classes — and the inversion above is already the course's whole philosophy in two sentences: the sound is the point, the words serve the sound. And one more standing rule, stated once, good all term: if you cannot sing it today — voice tired, voice changing, any reason at all — play it instead. Any instrument, any app. The ear being trained is yours either way.

Part 5 — Missed a session? The make-up path

Full credit, no penalty, by the end of the week. Do this at home: (1) run the practice page's daily loop for the days you missed; (2) record two short clips — one pitch-match against a tone from the free tone generator (Tools page), one "hold your do" where you sustain your note while sliding the generator's tone around for a few seconds, then re-land; (3) write three sentences diagnosing your own clips using the error classes. Submit clips + sentences in Canvas under this studio's make-up assignment. It's the same skills, self-administered — the recording submission this week teaches you the exact protocol.

Why this makes you a better musician

Every song you will ever play lives somewhere — a key center your ear grabs in the first two bars, whether or not anyone names it. This week you stop grabbing it by luck. You walk out able to find the home tone of any song you love, sing it, lose it on purpose, and land it again — and every remaining week of this course builds directly on that anchor. Next week it gets a pulse vocabulary; in Unit 4 it gets its syllable; by the final you'll read a melody you've never heard and sing it from that same home tone. It starts here, out loud.

Canvas placement block

canvas_object    = Assignment
title            = "Unit 1 Drill Studio — Ear Before Eye"
assignment_group = "Drill studios"
points_possible  = 20
grading_type     = points
submission_types = [on_paper]        # graded in session; make-up: online_upload (clips + sentences)
due              = in session, both meetings; make-up by the end of the week
published        = true