SmartMusic vs. Auralia

Tahirih Motazedian

I am considering adopting either SmartMusic or Auralia for my "Musicianship Skills" class.  Can anyone offer their thoughts and experiences with either (or ideally, a comparison) of these two programs?

Thanks,

Tahirih

Justin Mariner

Hi Tahirih,

I would like to invite you and anyone else who is interested in SmartMusic to view the wiki and join its mailing list: https://www.music.mcgill.ca/smartmusichub/

There has been some related discussion on that list.

SmartMusic is strictly dedicated to recording and assessing performance such as sight-singing, and is the most versatile and flexible product I'm aware of for this purpose. You can choose from a modest number of preexisting exercises or make your own with notation software. Auralia does a little bit of performance assessment and also does various dictation and identification exercises. A third package, EarMaster, is somewhat in between: it's similar to Auralia but it does a little bit more performance assessment. I encourage you to download trial versions of Aurial and EarMaster and mess around with them. SmartMusic is a bit harder to figure out at first, but there are lots of youTube videos of it in action, including Cynthia Gonzales' videos about using it for sight-singing: https://www.listen-sing.com/smartmusic-exercises

My view is that the dictation/identification parts of Auralia and EarMaster are not really much better than what's available on free or almost-free web sites, especially teoria.com and musictheory.net. We chose to use SmartMusic for singing, with teoria.com as a companion for dictation and identification drill. Actually, we use SmartMusic for singing, sing and play, keyboard skills and keyboard harmony. 

Your choice would depend on what you need in your program and how much time you are willing to spend setting it up.

Best,

Justin

_________________

Justin Mariner

Assistant Professor

Schulich School of Music

McGill University

Tahirih Motazedian

This is marvelous Justin, thank you so much!