Week 9 — Drill Plan · Triads by Ear

Course: MUS 155 Aural Skills I · Kenosis College
Instructor: Professor Hemsworth
Unit: Learning Unit 9 of 15 (Week 9) · two sessions per week
Objectives: SLO 1 · SLO 3 · SLO 4
Sessions: session 1 · session 2 (Skills Check 9 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-09.md — nothing musical is spelled out here.

Named in Music Theory I: the triad — three notes stacked in thirds — its four qualities, the diatonic triads of major and minor, inversions, the figures 6 and 6/4, and triad chord symbols. This morning, do–mi–sol got its name.

First time teaching this

The point of the LU: this is the naming moment the whole course was built toward. Since Unit 4 the class has sung do–mi–sol back to you every single session without knowing what it was; in this morning's theory session the theory class named it a triad. An hour later they sing it as a named thing — same door, same shape, and now a word for it. Say that out loud in minute one, because it is the spine's thesis enacted: the sound came first, the name caught up. From there the week widens the one shape into four qualities, teaches the ear to pull single members out of a blocked chord, and starts hearing which member sits on the bottom — the seed of Unit 11's bass-line work.

The one thing that must land: quality is structure, not mood. "Major happy, minor sad" files two of the four and strands the other two. The ear cue that scales to all four: the outer frame (perfect, shrunk, or stretched) plus the middle note (high third or low third). Drill the frame; the mood follows.

The most common way it goes wrong: the augmented triad panics the room, because there is no syllable path to it — its raised fifth has no name in our solfège. That is by design: augmented is drilled as a color to identify, echoed on "loo" only, never sight-sung. Say so plainly and the panic becomes curiosity. Second trap: treating an inversion as a new chord. It is the same three notes with a different bottom — the drills make that audible, not theoretical.

The do ritual

Identical ritual, all fifteen units (defined in full in Unit 1's B, ## The do ritual): play I–IV–V–I in the day's key, sing "do," the class sings do–mi–sol–mi–do back. This week, the first time they land it in session 1, stop and name it: "You have sung that answer every day since week 1. As of this morning's theory session it has a name — the tonic triad, root position, major quality. You could sing it before you could say it. That order is this whole course."

Drill sequence

Session 1 — stimuli by keys-sheet name; tempi, repetitions, and the words to say.

Session 2 — compound widths, inversions by ear, dictation, then the check.

When they miss it

Per drill: what the miss sounds like, and the immediate corrective — a specific next sound, never a re-explanation.

Escalation path

If a drill fails room-wide, drop one rung: the four-quality ladder falls back to major-only (A1 — the shape they have owned since Unit 4); quality ID falls back to a two-way major/minor call before re-adding the other two; member extraction falls back to the rolled chord with members counted aloud; root-or-not falls back to root position versus anything, binary. Re-establish tonic the same way every time: stop, run the do ritual once, resume. Abandon criterion: a segment still failing after two escalated attempts gets banked — "your ears will own this by next week; the seed is planted" — and logged. The named pick-up hook: every Unit 9 drill returns inside Unit 10, where each quality gains one more third on top — the arpeggio ladder returns as the seventh-chord ladder, quality ID returns with a wider menu, and member extraction adds "sing the seventh." A banked quality (augmented is the usual candidate) re-enters there at floor difficulty inside the quality grid; nothing is lost.

Tempo table

Rotation note (P states it to students): the solo-hearing rotation continues inside the extraction and sight-singing segments — 6 to 8 students heard individually per session means every voice is heard solo roughly every two and a half weeks at a full section of 36; in a small room, everyone, every session. Keep the ledger current.