Yes: interval, chord and rhythm recognition are trainable skills, with most learners hearing clear gains within 2-4 weeks of daily practice.
Yes. Recognizing intervals and chords is a skill like recognizing faces or words: your brain gets sharply better with repetition and feedback.
Most people notice real progress within a few weeks of short daily sessions. The trick is consistency, not talent.
Ear training works because it is straightforward perceptual learning: present a sound, guess, get immediate feedback, repeat. That loop reliably improves discrimination and recognition across hearing, vision and touch, and musical intervals are no exception.
What determines speed: session frequency (daily beats weekly), feedback immediacy, difficulty near the edge of your ability, and production (singing back what you hear) alongside recognition.
What it will not do: grant perfect pitch or replace instrument practice. It builds the recognition layer that makes practice and transcription faster.
The strongest design features from the learning literature: spaced short sessions for consolidation, adaptive difficulty holding success near 70 percent (too easy teaches nothing, too hard teaches noise), interleaving related categories to force real discrimination, and error-specific feedback (hearing what you chose versus what played).
Tavi La Si implements each: an Elo-based adaptive engine per skill atom, confusion-pair tracking that surfaces exactly what you mix up, and post-answer compare playback.
Transfer is the honest caveat: drilling isolated intervals transfers partially to real music, which is why context modes (intervals inside a key, progressions, cadences) exist: they train the skill in the setting you will use it.