MUT2247C – Sight Singing and Ear Training IV is a 1-credit, 30-contact-hour course and the final semester of the four-part aural skills sequence required of music majors across Florida. It follows MUT2246 and is normally taken as a corequisite with MUT2117, Music Theory IV.
This semester completes the sequence and, at most programs, functions as an exit competency. Students who finish it are expected to be able to sight sing unfamiliar music accurately, take dictation of chromatic and post-tonal material, and hear harmonic function in real repertoire — the aural fluency the rest of a music degree assumes.
The material moves beyond common-practice tonality. Where the third semester covered late-nineteenth-century chromatic harmony, this course takes on twentieth- and twenty-first-century idioms: modal and synthetic scales, whole-tone and octatonic collections, quartal and quintal harmony, extended tertian sonorities, pitch-class set recognition, atonal melodic singing, and the rhythmic complexity of asymmetric meter, metric modulation, and polyrhythm.
Programs with a jazz emphasis often incorporate jazz harmony here — extended and altered chords, ii-V-I recognition, and transcription — which is directly employable in Florida's large commercial music market.
Dictation reaches its most demanding form: longer excerpts, two-voice counterpoint, and harmonic passages requiring students to notate soprano, bass, and functional analysis simultaneously.
The course is offered at approximately 20 Florida institutions — the State University System music schools (FSU, UNF, USF, FAMU, FAU, FGCU) and the state colleges with transfer music programs (Broward, Chipola, College of Central Florida, Daytona State, Eastern Florida State, Florida State College at Jacksonville, Florida SouthWestern, Gulf Coast State, Miami Dade, Northwest Florida State, Pensacola State, State College of Florida, St. Petersburg, Valencia).
Completing the sequence establishes the aural fluency every professional music path assumes:
Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando are among the largest employers of live musicians in the United States; the cruise industry hires heavily out of Miami and Port Canaveral; and Florida's church and worship music sector sustains many working musicians. Sight-reading fluency is a hiring criterion in all three.
Florida music programs run two parallel four-semester sequences, paired semester by semester, with each aural course normally a corequisite of its theory partner:
The sequence is cumulative and gatekeeping. Each aural course requires the previous one, and most programs require a minimum grade to progress.
Most Florida programs treat completion of MUT2247 as the point at which a student is expected to be aurally fluent, and many administer a comprehensive proficiency examination at or near the end — sometimes as a barrier to upper-division standing or to graduation. Students should confirm their program's specific requirement, since it is frequently separate from the course grade.
The course appears as both MUT2247 and MUT2247C, and under the titles Sight Singing and Ear Training IV, Ear Training and Sight Singing IV, and Aural Theory IV. Match on the course number rather than the title. Credit value is most commonly 1.
MUT2246 (or placement) is the standard prerequisite, with MUT2117 as corequisite. Programs commonly require a minimum grade in the prior course to progress.
This is a music major requirement and does not satisfy Florida general education core requirements.
Worth knowing before the sequence ends: graduate music programs almost universally administer aural skills and theory placement examinations at matriculation, and students who place poorly are required to take remedial coursework that does not count toward the degree. The four-semester sequence is what those exams assume. Students planning graduate study should treat this final semester as preparation for that exam rather than as a box to check, and should keep practicing over the summer before matriculating — aural skills decay quickly without use.
Generated August 31, 2026 · Updated August 31, 2026