Week 6 — Drill Plan · Intervals Outward I

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 6 of 15 (Week 6) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 3 · SLO 4
Sessions: session 1 · session 2 (Skills Check 6 in the last quarter hour of session 2)

Instructor-facing. This file is excluded from the student cartridge. Every stimulus named below is notated, with its performance script, in _keys/KEY-stimulus-sheet-week-06.md — nothing musical is spelled out here.

Named in Music Theory I: interval size from letters, quality from semitones (derived independently), P/M/m/A/d, the intervals above the tonic in a major scale, inversion, spelling below a given note.

First time teaching this

The point of the LU: the gaps between notes become nameable objects. Six of them — m2, M2, m3, M3, P4, P5 — get drilled until each is a sound the ear recognizes before the mind measures. The singing dial widens today too: melodies may now leap as far as a perfect fifth, and every leap gets a stepwise recovery.

The one thing that must land: an interval has a home inside the scale the class already sings. Do–fa IS the perfect fourth; mi–fa IS the minor second. Every identification drill routes through a solfège pair first, the label second.

The most common way it goes wrong: treating this as arithmetic hour. The theory class counted letters and semitones this morning; if this studio turns into counting on fingers, the ear never gets its turn. Play first, sing back, name last — and when a student measures instead of listens, shrink the stimulus, don't explain the table. Second trap: quality blur. Rooms hear size (a third) long before quality (major or minor third); the paired-hearing drills exist for exactly that gap.

The do ritual

Every session opens with the do ritual (defined in full in Unit 1's B): play I–IV–V–I in the day's key, sing do, class answers do–mi–sol–mi–do on syllables — and it runs again before any drill in a new key or the parallel minor.

Drill sequence

Session 1 — stimuli by keys-sheet name; two play–echo cycles per rung unless noted.

Session 2 — minor maintenance, dictation, then the check.

When they miss it

Escalation path

Room-wide failure: drop one rung — the ladder falls back to seconds only (E1–E2), ID drills fall back to from-do rungs (the known menu), dictation falls back to D1 with the leap sung by the class before writing. Re-establish tonic the standard way: stop, run the do ritual, resume. Abandon criterion: two escalated attempts, still failing — bank it, say "your ear has the size; quality arrives with mileage; moving on," and log it. The named pick-up hook: every Unit 6 drill returns inside Unit 7 — the echo ladder extends to sixths, sevenths and the octave, the hook game returns with the tritone, and interval-isolating dictation becomes leap-mapping transcription. A banked drill re-enters there at floor difficulty.

Tempo table

Rotation note (P states it to students): solo hearings this week live inside the sing-from-a-given-note segment — 6 to 8 students heard individually per session keeps the standing arithmetic: every voice solos roughly every two and a half weeks at a section of 36; in a small room, everyone, every session. Log who has been heard — the Unit 7 check next week assumes the rotation has touched everyone twice.