How can I teach myself to sing harmony?

I would say that the easiest way is to sing-along with music that you like and try to listen to yourself, and perhaps record, your singing. Another option would be to find a choir where you live. I know that here in Sweden, singing in choir is huge and there are plenty of choirs in every little town. Singing in choir is excellent for practicing harmonizing and singing.

Harmonise eh? First thing first, do you have a keyboard or a piano at home? If so it’s pretty easy to do so.

Let’s take the note C. If you want to harmonise in C Major just sing the note which is four semitones above it (each semitone is each key, doesn’t matter if it’s black or white [ooh ooh ooh]). In this case, the note to sing is E. You can also harmonise by singing the key seven semitones above it. In this case that’s the G key.

Here, take a look at this C Major keyboard illustration for reference.

I believe that this is a good starting point. Just practice with the basic notes and keys and play around with them with your voice. It would be good to also practice along with a musically-inclined friend. I sometimes just sing with a friend of mine and since we’re both quite solid in our musical foundation (and also because we have relative pitch [mine’s passable, meh]). Note: Relative pitch is, extremely simplistically speaking, your ability to harmonise (correct me if I’m wrong Flutherites)

Having a musical instrument at home would really help, in my opinion, although I’ve never really tried to train myself to harmonise. I just like to sing along, and occasionally harmonise when it feels right.

You need a second person who can sing and has some ear training or aural skills. A friend perhaps doing it for free. You need feedback. You can use an instrument and sing to get started, but you need more. A choir is perfect.

If you’re still in Mount Vernon, OH you could enroll in Community Choir at Kenyon

Relative pitch means being able to reach the proper intervals if given a correct starting point. If the piece is in C, having someone play the C will give you a jumping-off point to get to E, G, or wherever. Absolute pitch means that you can hit the C without references.

Definitely join a choir. That will be the simplest way to learn how to sing in harmony. Learning to hear and repeat harmonies is harder than simply learning how to hold your own note/melody against another, but by doing it a lot you’ll be able to pick that up, too. After a while it’ll be a lot easier to listen to a piece of music and hear (and then reproduce!) the harmony part.

I love to sing the harmonies in Rufus Wainwright’s music. Even now sometimes I’ll hear a new harmony part in one of his songs that I’ve known for years, some of his songs are crazy complex, in the best way possible.

I have to agree with @Saturated_Brain in that that’s a start. I sing harmony at church sometimes and I was never taught anything and I don’t have any notes to look at it, but I can just “tell” which notes go with which and it follows the pattern that @Saturated_Brain described with the 5 and 7 semitones. You can practice with that. Listen to a few songs and try to do it that way.

My mom recently joined a choir to improve her singing and I think that would be a great idea. I’ve always wanted to join a choir (I’m no solo singer, but I can sing in a choir pretty well).

Join a Church Choir. You will be thinking in Harmony before you know it.

I suggest getting a vocal coach. My mom is one so she taught me and my 5 sisters harmony, starting when we were about 1 years old. Now we have a band called Cimorelli and almost 500,000 subscribers on youtube. Harmony is great thing, and if you want to learn it I recommend you start as soon as possible. The quicker the better.