Chapter 7. The Daily Practice: Four Weeks

This chapter puts the exercises of Chapters 3 to 5 together as a single daily practice of fifteen minutes, built up over four weeks. It is the same practice that the practice group follows in the study in Chapter 8, so a reader who uses it is doing exactly what will be tested.

Hypothesis · not established · The status of this chapter

Everything in this chapter is the author’s method. It is a structured way of practising the three stages, not a treatment and not a proven training programme. Its value is the question Chapter 8 asks.

Before you begin

Note

Practise when your voice is rested, not straight after heavy singing or speaking.
Sing at the working level found in Stage One. If any exercise causes pain, a scratchy throat that lasts, or hoarseness the next day, stop and rest; if the problem continues, see a doctor.
Do not close the ear canals while singing loudly, and never press on the neck.
You need a tuner app (or the program in Chapter 4), a phone for recording, and the practice log below.

The fifteen-minute session

Minutes	Stage	Exercise	Chapter
0–2	3	The inner fundamental: hum your reference pitch from memory, check it, log the error	5
2–4	2	Entering the stream: silent listening	4
4–7	1	Two-route listening, then the light-touch check to set the working level	3
7–11	2	Sustain and shift; the listening glide	4
11–15	3	The zero point; inner pitch first; onset from listening	5

The record-and-compare exercise (Chapter 3) and the making-and-listening exercise (Chapter 4) are done once a week, on the last day of each week, in place of minutes 7 to 11.

Four weeks

Week	Emphasis	What to add
1	Stage One	Learn the two routes and the working level. Keep the Stage Two and Three exercises short and simple.
2	Stage Two	Lengthen sustain-and-shift to eight-second notes on five pitches. Begin the listening glide.
3	Stage Three	Lengthen the silent gap in “inner pitch first” from two to four seconds. Use onset from listening on every note.
4	Integration	Silent gap six seconds. In the last minutes, sing one short phrase of a real song using all three stages: no comparison, listening, starting from the inner note.

The practice log

Each session gets one line. Four numbers are enough:

day (1 to 28);
minutes actually practised;
inner reference error in cents, from the first exercise (positive if sharp, negative if flat);
effort, a rating from 0 (no effort at all) to 10 (the most effort you can imagine) of how much effort singing took today, given right after the session.

Calculation

A few lines of Python turn the log into weekly figures. The numbers below are made up to show the format; they are not results from anyone.

import csv, io, statistics

# practice_log.csv: day, minutes, inner_ref_error_cents, effort_0_10
log = io.StringIO("""day,minutes,inner_ref_error_cents,effort_0_10
1,15,-38,6
2,15,-25,6
3,12,-31,5
4,15,-20,5
5,15,-22,5
6,15,-15,4
7,15,-18,4
8,15,-12,4
9,15,-16,4
10,15,-9,3
11,15,-11,3
12,15,-7,3
13,15,-10,3
14,15,-6,3
""")
rows = list(csv.DictReader(log))
for week in (1, 2):
    w = [r for r in rows if (int(r["day"]) - 1) // 7 + 1 == week]
    err = [abs(float(r["inner_ref_error_cents"])) for r in w]
    eff = [float(r["effort_0_10"]) for r in w]
    print(f"week {week}: {len(w)} sessions, "
          f"median |error| {statistics.median(err):.0f} cents, "
          f"median effort {statistics.median(eff):.0f}/10")
# week 1: 7 sessions, median |error| 22 cents, median effort 5/10
# week 2: 7 sessions, median |error| 10 cents, median effort 3/10

To use it on a real log, replace io.StringIO(...) with open("practice_log.csv").

Note

Why your own log cannot settle the question. If the numbers in your log improve, that is encouraging, but it does not show that the method works. Pitch memory improves with any daily practice; effort ratings drop as an exercise becomes familiar; and people who expect improvement tend to rate themselves as improved. Only a comparison with a group that practises something else for the same time, with the outcome measured by someone who does not know who did what, can separate the method from these effects. That is what Chapter 8 is for.

When the practice goes wrong

The voice gets breathier and weaker. “Less effort” has turned into “no support”. Keep the breath flowing; the aim is to remove unnecessary effort, not all effort.
Listening turns into judging. If attention in Stage Two keeps returning to “is this good?”, go back to the silent listening exercise for a minute.
The inner note will not come. Play the reference again and shorten the silent gap. Inner hearing is built from outer hearing.
The vibration becomes a target. If you find yourself pushing the sound “into the mask”, return to Chapter 4: the vibration is a signal to receive, not a place to aim at.

Summary

The daily practice is fifteen minutes and visits all three stages, starting with the inner fundamental and ending with onset from listening.
Over four weeks the emphasis moves from Stage One to Stage Three and then to a real phrase of music.
A simple four-number log tracks practice time, inner-reference error and effort.
A personal log can encourage but cannot prove; the controlled test is in Chapter 8.

Fan, Y. (2026). Turning the Hearing Inward: A Bioacoustic Study of the Ergen Yuantong Listening Method [反闻闻自性] (Version 1.0.0). 5D Library. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23666557 · Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).