Melody and Rhythm Dictation Skills

Section A: listening skills

The first part of the listening paper is not about memorising set works. It tests two skills: writing down music you hear, and describing a piece you have never heard before. Neither can be crammed the night before, and both reward a calm, repeatable method. This module gives you one, and it gives you the arithmetic that lets you check your own answer before the examiner does.

Melody and rhythm dictation

A melody or rhythm is printed with parts missing, and you fill them in while the extract plays. The command word is "Complete", and the question is worth 6 to 10 marks. You will hear it several times, and that is the part most people waste. The commonest way to lose marks here is to try to get everything on the first playing, panic when it does not work, and then spend the remaining playings staring at the same bar. Each playing should have one job.

A reliable dictation method

Put these steps for tackling a dictation question into a sensible order.

• Before it starts, read what you have been given and find where the gaps are
• Listen once without writing, just to get the shape of the whole thing
• On the next playing take the rhythm only: how many notes, long or short
• Now take the pitch, deciding for each note whether it moves up or down and by how far
• On the last playing, check what you wrote rather than writing anything new

Why rhythm first?

The method takes the rhythm on one playing and the pitch on the next. Why is that order better than the other way round, or than doing both together?

• The rhythm tells you how many notes there are and where each one falls, so it builds the empty slots that the pitches then drop into. Pitch first leaves you with notes and nowhere to put them
• Pitch is the harder of the two, so it makes sense to leave it until last
• It does not really matter. Rhythm and pitch are independent, so either order works
• The rhythm carries more marks than the pitch does

What you actually write

Counting in crotchet beats, which is how nearly every GCSE dictation question is set out:

Complete the bar

A bar in 4/4 already contains a minim and a crotchet. You can hear that the rest of the bar is filled with quavers. How many quavers do you need?

The bar that will not add up

You are completing a piece in 3/4. You have written a bar containing a dotted minim followed by a crotchet, and there is one more playing to go. What should you do with that playing?

• Rewrite that bar. A dotted minim is already 3 beats, so with the crotchet the bar totals 4 in a bar that can only hold 3, and it is wrong whatever you heard
• Listen again carefully and see whether it still sounds right
• Leave it. Examiners mark what you heard, not the arithmetic
• Change the time signature to 4/4 so that the bar fits

Step or leap?

Once the rhythm is down, every remaining decision is only ever "up or down, and by how much":

The unfamiliar piece

The second question gives a skeleton score of a piece closely related to, but not one of, the set works. There is nothing to memorise, and no credit for guessing which piece it is. Texture means how many layers of sound there are and how they relate: • Monophonic: a single line, alone. • Homophonic: a melody with accompaniment underneath it. Most songs. • Polyphonic: two or more independent lines running at once, each going somewhere of its own. A description that earns marks sounds like this: *"The piece opens quietly with a solo flute, so the texture is monophonic. Strings enter beneath the melody at bar nine, making it homophonic, and the dynamics build steadily from there to the end."*

What is the question really asking?

Which of these earns marks?

Five students each write one sentence about the unfamiliar extract. Select the THREE that would earn credit.

• "The tempo is moderate throughout and slows noticeably in the final two bars."
• "The texture is homophonic: a solo voice over a chordal accompaniment."
• "The dynamics build from quiet to loud across the last section, with no sudden changes."
• "It is a lovely, catchy piece that would work well in a film."
• "This is almost certainly the Bach, or something very like it."
• "The music changes a lot and there is a great deal going on."

Major or minor?

A student writes that the extract must be in a major key "because it is fast and loud and cheerful". What is wrong with that reasoning?

• Tonality is about which pattern of notes the music is built from, and it is independent of speed and volume. Plenty of fast, loud, energetic music is in a minor key, and slow quiet music is often major
• Nothing. Fast and loud music is reliably major
• They should have worked it out from the time signature instead
• Major and minor cannot be heard at all, so the question is unanswerable

Plan a description

Write a description of an extract you have heard recently, real or imagined, as though answering the unfamiliar-piece question. Follow the model from the example card: name the element, describe it specifically, and say where in the extract it happens.

• Tempo: what speed, and does it change anywhere?
• Dynamics: how loud, and where does that shift?
• Timbre: which instruments or voices, and when do they enter?
• Texture: monophonic, homophonic or polyphonic, and what tells you so?
• Tonality: major or minor, and resist justifying it from mood alone

Listening summary

In the dictation question the command word is "_____", and you take the rhythm before the pitch because the rhythm builds the slots that the pitches drop into. Every bar must add up to the _____ signature, which means you can prove a bar wrong without hearing it again. A dotted minim lasts _____ beats. In the unfamiliar-piece question, a melody with accompaniment underneath it is described as _____.