akousia
Start here

Resolve or Hang

A short chord phrase plays and you say one thing about it: did it come home, or is it still hanging. You will hear that difference long before you can name a single cadence, which is why this is the place to start.

  • 2 answers
  • no names needed
  • the ending decides

at which level

  • Beginner
  • Any instrument
Start the exercise

A short chord phrase plays and you say one thing about it: did it come home, or is it still hanging. Two answers, and no names needed.

After an answer

Got it right? Then it waits for the answer to finish playing and moves on. A miss always waits for you.

Round length

One question per screen, the answer comes with the reason, and nothing is saved anywhere but this browser.

What it asks

You hear three or four chords in a row and answer whether the phrase arrived or stayed open. That is the whole task. Nothing here asks you for a Roman numeral or a cadence name, because the feeling comes first and the vocabulary comes later. Most people are right about eighty percent of the time on their first try. The interesting part is the twenty percent.

The question pool

Three kinds of ending, mixed in whatever order the round gives you. The clear ones land on the tonic after the dominant, and almost nobody misses those. The open ones stop on the dominant or the subdominant, so the phrase is audibly on its way somewhere. The mean ones go from the dominant to the relative minor, an ending that has the shape of an arrival and none of the rest.

How you answer

Two buttons, Resolved and Hanging. There is nothing to type and nothing to look up, so you can run twenty of these in the time a naming exercise takes for five.

When the round ends

Ten questions, twenty, or no limit at all. A few minutes is plenty, and this one works well as a warm-up before any other listening exercise.

When you get it wrong

You get the verdict and the reason, in that order. Hanging, that was the dominant, and it still wants to go home. Then the final chord plays again on its own so you can hear what you just read. Once the mean endings start landing, the reason text starts naming what you heard. That is how the word deceptive cadence arrives, attached to a sound you already recognize.

Keep going

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