What you're training
A deceptive cadence sets up the exact same expectation as an authentic one — I-IV-V7, the dominant leaning hard toward home — and then doesn't resolve there. Instead of V7 falling to I, it rises to vi (the relative minor): the bass still moves up a step like a real cadence, it just lands somewhere else. Training your ear to catch that moment means you stop assuming every dominant chord is about to resolve home, and start actually listening for where it goes.
Two levels, one skill
Level 1 asks the binary question first: after I-IV-V7, did the cadence land home, or somewhere else? Level 2 raises the bar — a third possibility joins the mix, IV, a plagal-flavored sidestep that never really resolves the dominant tension at all. Now you're not just detecting a twist, you're naming exactly where the progression landed: authentic, deceptive, or elsewhere.
Go deeper
This drill is Trio 8 of the ear-training series — the moment a dominant chord breaks its promise. The theory: cadences → covers how phrases end and why a deceptive cadence still counts as one. For the real-world payoff, Where V actually goes — all 558 dominant resolutions in a 57-piece corpus traced, only 40% land home → lets you see just how often composers pull this exact trick. Another way a chord can lean somewhere unexpected → is the other lane of this series, if you want the pull toward a foreign key instead of a swapped ending.
Where it fits
Comfortable with chord quality and cadence resolution already? The deceptive cadence is the next layer — the exact same V-to-home pull you already hear, just watching for the moment it gets rerouted. The full drill ladder has everything else.