Aural Skills Exam Reflections

Today I completed the second attempt of my Aural Skills LRCM exam. Having spent the last several months preparing I definitely felt more prepared than my last attempt (fall of 2025).

The Aural Skills exam is not an easy or forgiving challenge. 75 minutes, roughly 10 questions, spanning melodic & rhythmic dictation, harmonic dictation, chord identification, and atonal melodic dictation. The short time-limit (most proctored theory exams are 2-3hours) means you only get an average of 7 minutes per question.

Chord identifcation was perhaps the easiest of the items. Essentialy identifying all of the common chord types by sound: major, minor, diminished, augmented, dominant 7th, minor 7th, half-diminished 7th, diminished 7th.

Tone cluster identification was a bit harder, but not extreme. Given a starting pitch, identify the remaining notes in the chord. These tended to be non-tertian sonorities. I know I got one wrong because I could not identify the second pitch interval. After I returned home, I sat at the piano and resolved it. It was an ugly chord. D - A (P5) G#/Ab (an octave higher). The major 7th with the A and the tritone with the D made it very difficult to decipher. I guessed E, then changed to E# (which is F) and realized post-exam that it was definitely not a minor 10th/3rd sonority.

Melodic dictation was pretty solid, as was rhythmic dictation. I have a few years of musicianship training at the Victoria Conservatory of Music to thank for this. Under the guidance of Crystal Wiksyk, I acquired excellent dictation skills.

The harmonic dictation was perhaps the most challenging for me, least of all because it is my least practiced skill. It’s been a long time since my conservatory days, and this one was rusty. Fortunately it the exam required Soprano and bass dictation only, along with roman numeral analysis of the resulting chords. My drills over the last few months came in very useful here, and I’m fairly confident I did well on this.

Now the waiting game. I need a 70% to pass and fully enter the LRCM program. A few weeks more of waiting for the results shouldn’t be too hard. It’s been years to get this far.

Composition next time.