Hobbies

Music, by ear

Name: Two songs worked out by ear, on the spot – Dylan Summerville
Uploaded: 2026-10-18T19:30:00+11:00
Duration: 2 min 55 s
Description: Dylan Summerville plays and sings two songs he had not played before, worked out by ear on the spot on a laptop webcam: ABBA's Slipping Through My Fingers and an Elliott Smith song with his own chords. Mixed, not pitch-corrected.

Guitar and singing, learned by ear.

I taught myself guitar by ear. It's mainly chords, and I can figure a song out from memory on the spot; I've proven it in several TikToks.

It became a much bigger deal at the end of July 2025, the week after I began coding. My thyroid had gone wrong suddenly that month, I'd been going through severe headaches, the splitting kind, and around 23 July I actually crashed my car. I stumbled into bed and slept for two days. When I got up, I felt I was thinking differently. Directly before the change I had a sudden thought, "I'm here now", and afterward my thoughts became very clear, abstract, and logical, with complete realism in every turn. Within a week I had started building the Job Adder workbook and scripting in Python, and a week after starting the Job Adder I had a desperate urge to buy an instrument: I could hear the chords in songs and knew I could play them. That's when I could play songs from memory on the guitar without any trouble.

The years before that, from the gym to the mask coming off, are on who I used to be.

I can also tune a guitar by ear. I don't know whether I have perfect pitch, since I can't name the notes; I just know, relatively, how to tune the guitar, and vaguely what an E sounds like.

I had piano lessons as a child, only a few before I gave up. The teacher yelled a lot, and spat when yelling.

Two songs worked out on the spot, on a laptop webcam, 2 min 55 s: ABBA's Slipping Through My Fingers, which I'd never played, then an Elliott Smith song with chords of my own. The audio is mixed, not pitch-corrected.

Singing is the one I'm working on. I have autism and ADHD, and I find there's a disconnect between me and my vocal cords; learning to use my diaphragm bores me. So I use my own method to hit the notes. My voice swings between notes at times, and I rely on the guitar to find the right notes and understand the key. You can hear all of that in the video above.

Three more songs, played from memory on 25 October 2026, are on Songs from memory, each with its video.