Jazz guitarists are often faced with diverse ensemble situations requiring them to develop different approaches to accompanying and soloing. Many published sources discuss the role of accompanist, but only in relation to a jazz rhythm section accompanying a soloist. However, several pivotal trios have emerged over the past few decades, featuring an instrumentation that is conducive to negating the established ‘rhythm section accompanying a soloist’ format. This study explored the bass-less trio, featuring guitar, which is becoming an increasingly common jazz ensemble configuration. The versatility of this bass-less format allows guitarists to develop their own approach to adapting traditional jazz language, thereby circumventing conventional improvisatory roles.

Historically, ear training has been taught more generally by rote methods, wherein students are presented with isolated musical artefacts, answers are identified, and results are categorised as either correct or incorrect. For an improvising musician, identifying musical structures in a binary manner does not encompass the breadth of skills required of them when engaging in the process of interactive improvisation. This research project investigates the development of aural skills through scenario based role-playing games as a remedy to this problem. A baseline of ear training pedagogy is established through an historical review of literature examining the efficacy of past and current approaches to aural skill acquisition. This elucidates a paucity in the literature concerning the interactive application of skills acquired through aural training thereby impelling the development and implementation of Interactive Musical Games (IMG). The experiment phrase examines past and current attitudes regarding ear training and explores comments discussing the approach of institutional and private lesson-based ear training. Participants then engage in the IMG and discuss their perceived efficacy of the games and reflect upon their performance. Based on this research this paper purports the positive effects interactive forms of ear training skill acquisition have over traditional methods.