Hello! I've been doing piano and flute exams for some time now and yet in every exam I've lost marks in my aural. I find memorising melodies particularly hard - any suggestions of ways of practising or improving this? Thanks

Many of us who have difficulty memorising long sequences on one or two hearings would say, "Unless you want to play jazz, don't bother". If you want to be a musician working from notation, which most of us are, the value of exams is in the parts that carry over into practical music making. These include technical command of your instrument; understanding of musical styles in different periods; the ability to play scales and arpeggios from notation; the time values of written notes and rests; the ability to compare heard music with its written representation and detect the differences between them. Of course not all exam boards include tests of all these capabilities.

If you need to get the sound and structure of music into your head, which is what a very good conductor will do, so that he can look at his players instead of the score, you put the work in, at best with the score only. If you work from recordings, you should listen to lots of them, so that you don't find yourself repeating an extreme interpretation without understanding why the conductor did it that way.

Is it the pitching you struggle with or the length. I had a student who could only ever remember the first bar of a two bar melody.

The way we improved is to practice the lowest grade and gradually move up until you get to the correct grade. If you just work on your current level then it will feel a bit relentless.

Another good way is to move your hand up and down with the music as you're listening and that can help you remember the shape

(I've just seen your age on another post.) You could try asking one of your school music teachers to help you with this. I work in a school and the head of music often gives my students extra aural sessions before exams, to let me concentrate on the other things. Are you doing GCSE music?

I also agree with ExpressYourself's suggestion that you start at the lower grades. I had a student come to me for aural help for grade 5, particularly the echoes. It was his first piano exam. We started from grade 1, and worked up to grade 5 fairly quickly. The other thing we did was focus on the key chord at the beginning; listening to the melody in the context of that key helped him remember it.

I would say develop your understanding of musical intervals (the scale gap between two notes). So when you hear an excerpt and the last two notes are a fifth apart, the fact you immediately recognise this will help you to remember the excerpt. So get testing yourself on intervals - there are online tests that can help you do this. And get into working out simple tunes you know by ear, which will naturally teach you a lot about intervals because you will be hunting around for the right notes and beginning to work out for yourself how they fit together, rather than just always playing from written music which is a different skill altogether.

do you practice aural regularly? I ask this because I know a lot of schools and teachers start aural tests a couple of weeks before the exam! You can practice them online using sites like Hofnote. Maybe your teacher could spend more time on them with you too.

Wow! Thanks guys for all the brill advice! I'm sure this will help me loads Yes - I hope to start GSCE Music in July 2013... Thanks again x

My feeling is that there is no subsitute for a teacher who will teach the aural (but I would say that as that's what I do!). A lot of teachers practise the aural tests with pupils (often at the last minute) and school teachers will often do the same (again, often at the last minute), but this is not the same as being taught how to do them

I regularly look at the relevant tests for whatever grade my pupil is to do next, and try to apply one of them to whatever they're learning at the time. In many cases the ideal time is before they've had a chance to look at the music: new grade 2 piece needed? Listen first, see if you can clap the pulse and tell the time-signature. Grade 4/5 for TG which need cadences? Once learning is underway, look at the structure and see how often it "goes home" or "settles away from home" - and so on.

That's great, but judging by the amount of people that have to come to me for lessons (often with days to go before an exam), this approach is by no means universal.

Oh, absolutely - and they want you to cover modulations and singing lower parts and all...

Sadly, the norm is about 10 minutes aural a few days before the exam. In AB exams, the aural section is worth just 3 marks less than scales. Months are normally spent preparing scales, compared with a short one-off aural lesson! Come on, teachers, do the maths here! Ideally, as S_G says, aural should be taught, but every little helps and some practice using a cd or online resource is better than nothing.