About Akousia
Akousia teaches how music works, whatever your age, by letting you play it. What makes a chord sound sad, where a song is heading next, why one groove moves and another sits still: here you hear the answer instead of reading about it.
A major chord and a minor chord differ by one note, and that note moves by one key. We want you to hear it move, and to know what it is called.
Press C, E and G together and the chord sounds bright. Move the E down one key to E flat and the same chord sounds sad, while your other two fingers have not moved. That is the whole difference between major and minor, it takes four seconds to hear, and most people get told the two words years before they get to press the two chords.
Theory is usually taught in that order. The name first, a rule about the name second, and the sound later or not at all. So people learn that a dominant seventh resolves to the tonic without ever having heard the pull in it. Press G, B, D and F, then press C, E and G, and the pull is obvious. The word is only the label on it.
That works from any starting point and at any age. Those two chords lean the same way for a twelve year old and for someone who picked up a guitar at sixty, and neither of them has to be able to read a note to hear it.
So nothing here is only described. The lessons put your hands on the keys, the exercises start the moment you open one, and every example on the site opens in the piano or the drum kit, where you can move it to another key and take it apart.
No account, no streak and no path you have to finish. You start wherever you are curious, and every sound is our own synthesis, made the moment you press.
How the site works
- Hear itPress play before you read a word. The eighteen lessons open with you finding a note by pressing a key.
- Understand itWhere does this chord want to go next, and which note is making it sound the way it does? Those two questions are what every page answers, with the sound sitting next to the answer.
- Practise itThirteen ear training exercises and two instruments open in one click, so what you just read gets used in the same minute.
The rules of this site
- Everything playsNo claim without a sound next to it.
- Plain languageA term gets explained the first time it appears, with a sound attached.
- Always the whyEvery rule comes with the reason it exists, because a rule you cannot explain is one you will forget.
- Our own soundAll audio is our own synthesis, made the moment you press, with nothing lifted from existing recordings.
Remi Erskine
Remi writes everything on this site. Piano first, guitar later, and a long stretch in between where theory was a subject to get through instead of a sound to recognise. Subdominant meant nothing for years, and then one day it landed as something you could hear coming.
Akousia is that day turned into a website. Press the F and then the C, and the pull those two have is the thing the word was describing all along.
- Several sources per topicEvery article is checked against at least five authoritative sources before it goes live.
- Song facts get verifiedWe check the key and the chord progression of every song one by one, by ear and against the source.
- Spotted a mistake?Email us. A correction is usually up within a week, with a credit in the article.
A new ear training riddle every day on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts, under the handle akousiamusic. Name the song from its chords and train your ear in fifteen seconds.
Questions, ideas, or a song we really have to cover? Write to [email protected].