Mnemonics, up and down
Going up: "Somewhere" from West Side Story. Bernstein opens "There's a place for us" with an ascending minor 7th on the first two syllables, and it's the rare leap this size that everyone has heard sung. The original Star Trek fanfare makes the same jump with more brass.
Going down: Watermelon Man, if Herbie Hancock is in your rotation. Falling minor 7ths are scarce in famous openings, so the descending button above will do most of the work here, and the inversion trick below does the rest.
Jazz fills in both directions. Mark Levine's interval table fixes the ascending minor 7th to the bridge of McCoy Tyner's "Aisha" and the descending one to Billy Strayhorn's "Chelsea Bridge."
On the staff
The working dissonance
Sevenths are dissonances, but where the major 7th bristles, the minor 7th leans. It's the interval between a dominant chord's root and its seventh, the added note that makes V7 feel like a held breath. In the old common-practice rules that seventh always resolved down by step; jazz and pop loosened the leash, letting minor 7ths hang in the air as color. Both habits live in your ear already. The interval sounds like motion pending, even when the motion never comes.
A notation footnote that occasionally matters: ten semitones can also be spelled as an augmented 6th, an interval that resolves outward instead of inward. The two are identical in sound, and for training purposes they're one answer. The spelling is the composer's note to the performer about what happens next.
What it gets confused with
The major 7th above it is the sharper, more abrasive seventh; the minor 7th is rounder and more settled into its lean. The octave, two semitones up, doesn't rub at all, and that's the test at the top of the range: if the wide leap sounds like the same note again, it's the octave; if it bristles hard, the major 7th; if it leans with some warmth left in it, this one. When in doubt, invert: a minor 7th flips into a plain major 2nd.
How Aubel handles it
The minor 7th unlocks eighth beyond the starting set, deep in the pool, after the octave and major 7th have staked out the top of the range. Its rounds are mostly about that three-way neighborhood: octave, major 7th, minor 7th, each one semitone apart and each with a different temperature. The detail screen leads with Somewhere.