I am at the beginning of my journey to learn singing. To master interval recognition, my teacher and many people recommend using reference songs (the first 2 notes of the song corresponding to the interval).
I have a nagging worry that this method makes it much faster on the short-term to perform this task, but slower in the long term, because my brain does not jump from sound to interval name, but it needs to go sound -> song -> interval name.
A little bit in the same way that when you learn multiplication tables, you can be faster on the short term by using tricks (9 * N
is 10 * N - N
), but this becomes slower in the long term.
While many online resources recommend using reference songs, this website seems to caution slightly against it:
The first method is “reference songs”. [...]
This method is the one usually used when music students are forced to learn interval recognition just for the “aural skills” section of their instrument exams. It’s actually a great way to get started, but you will quickly realise it is very limited for real music applications where you can’t recognise each song for each pair of intervals quickly enough. It’s also not great for harmonic intervals.
Are there some scientifically grounded evidence that could help answer that dilemna?