Eyes and Ears
An Anthology of Melodies for Sight-Singing
 | Eyes and Ears is a book of melodies for use in practicing sight-singing. You can download it for free. It currently contains about 400 melodies, arranged systematically for education. So far, I've concentrated on assembling a body of relatively easy material that would be sufficient for the first semester or two of a college-level musicianship course. There is a small amount of didactic text, but if you're going to use the book for self-instruction, you'll need some background in basic music theory, and preferably access to someone knowledgeable to provide guidance. |
Eyes and Ears is being used by:
- Danny Beard at the University of Southern Mississippi
- Laura Ritchie'sMusic 654 at the University of Chichester
- Joel Matthys atCarroll University
- Mansoor Habibdoost's solfege course at the University of Guilan
- Daniel Shaw at Johns Hopkins University's Center for TalentedYouth summer program in Carlisle, PA
- Ruth Robertson at Lincoln University of Missouri, Jefferson City, MO
- Rob Swenson's AP Music Theory at American Heritage School, American Fork, Utah
- Peter Knapp at Long Beach City College
- University Prep, Redding, CA
Joel Matthys has written open-source ear trainingsoftware calledLatido that incorporatesthe melodies in Eyes and Ears.
Paul Morris has madea versionof the anthology that uses a nontraditional notation system called Clairnote.
Download
| book | sight.pdf |
| LaTeX and Lilypond source code |
Buy a Printed Copy
Printed copies are available via Lulu.com.Click here tobuy a copy. This is just a fun project for me, so I'm not taking any royalty from sales on Lulu.
Getting Involved
Please contactme if you're interested in gettinginvolved in this free-information project.The following would be good ways to help:
- Test-drive the book. Use it for self-instruction, or, if you're a teacher, photocopy pages with materials you like, hand them out, and use them in class. Let me know how it went, and give me suggestions for improvements.
- Send me photocopies of public-domain sheet music. Please make sure to include the title page and copyright page so I can document the fact that it's a public domain edition. My address is 2233 Loma Alta Dr., Fullerton, CA 92833, USA.
Some notes:
- Just because a melody's original composer has been dead for hundreds of years, that doesn't meanwe can use a modern, copyrighted edition of his/her work in this kind of book. The editorial work can also becopyrighted. To be safe, make sure the sheet music you're dealing with was published before 1923. (Many editionsyou'll find in print today are actually just reproductions of 19th-century sheet music.) Good online sources forpublic-domain music includethe Mutopia project andtheChoral Public Domain Library.
- It's very hard to find extremely easy pieces of sheet music for sight singing, e.g., pieces whose onlyleaps are between notes of the tonic triad. They're particularly valuable.
- With more difficult pieces, there's no shortage of material out there. Use taste and judgment. Make sureit's singable.
Sources and Legal Stuff
Nearly all the melodies in Eyes and Ears are in the public domain. The source of each songis noted in the Lilypond source code. The source code archive also includes a file called "permissions"that includes the texts of some e-mails from people who have done editorial work on the tunes, givingpermission for their use in this project.
Melodies entered by me from public-domain sources
In cases where the Lilypond source code file was entered by me, Ben Crowell, froma public-domain source, I dedicate that particular file to the public domain.
Melodies from the Mutopia project
As noted in the source code, a particular Lilypond file may be from the Mutopia project, and thenthe editorial work that went into creating that is copyrighted by the person who did the work. A noticeon the Mutopia site states that "All music is either in the public domain, released under the MutopiaBSDlicence, or released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License." In all three of these possiblecases, it is legal for you to download, copy, modify, redistribute, and sell a work such as Eyes and Ears thatincorporates that melody, but in return you must comply with the relevant license, and it's up to you tolook up the licensing information on the Mutopia site.
Melodies from the Choral Public Domain Library
Similarly, some of the melodies are from the Choral Public Domain Library. Despite the site's name, the editorialwork involved is, by default, copyrighted by the person who did the work, and these melodies are thereforenot actually public domain unless the editor has specifically made her edition P.D. As with the Mutopiaproject, it's up to you to find out the license, but the only CPDL melodies incorporated in Eyes and Earsare those that either are P.D. or have permissive copyleft licensing. (Some of the melodies in the CPDL are under morerestrictive licenses, which forbid commercial use, or allow only religious use. Melodies with such licensesarenot included in Eyes and Ears.)
Melodies from Thierry Klein
As noted in the source code, many of the French folk songs are fromThierry Klein's web site, which is now defunct.These melodies are all public domain, and his transcriptions have been used with his permission. Thanks, Thierry!Melodies from the Max Hunter Collection
The melodies in theMax Hunter folk song collection at Southwest Missouri State Universityhave been edited by Dr. Michael F. Murray, and he believes them all to be in the public domain.Copyright of everything else
Other than the public-domain melodies, everything else about thebook is copyright 2004 by Benjamin Crowell, and licensed under your choice of theCreative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licenseorGPL v3. This includesthe original music I've written for the book, as well as the copyright for the anthologizing of themelodies (i.e., selecting and collecting them, which is subject to its own copyright even though most of the melodiesare public domain).
Customizing the Book
The easiest way to obtain the book is simply to download the Adobe Acrobat (PDF) file. However, some peoplemight also want to compile it from the Lilypond source, e.g., in order to customize it. Note that if you'reredistributing the customized version (as opposed to just using it yourself), your customizations need to bereleased under the same license (that's the "share-alike" part of the license's name).
To compile the book yourself, you basically just download the source codefile to a Unix machine, unpack it, get in the directory it creates, and do the command `make'. You will need to haveinstalled the following software already: LaTeX, Lilypond, Perl, flex, and bison. If you want itto construct the thematic index, you'll also need to download my open-source software Clamor (just the software,not the big file containing the samples). You have to compile and install Clamor as explained in its documentation,and then modify the file build.pl in the Eyes and Ears distribution so that the `use lib' line gives the directoryin which Lily.pm is installed.
If you're going to include new melodies in the book, they have to be formatted in a certain way, usinga specific subset of the Lilypond language, and with certain information in the header section. Basically,you can just look at the files that are already in the book and base yours on them. If you don't do the headerscorrectly, the melody won't have the right title, and won't be indexed by title and composer. My script thatgenerates the thematic index will also get upset if you use fancy features of Lilypond that it doesn't knowabout; all that happens then is that you'll see an error message flash by while you're compiling the book,and that particular melody will be omitted from the thematic index.