To best serve the 21st-century music student, the development of aural skills must lay the foundation for future musical learning. In our presentation, we explore music curricula that decouple the first-semester aural skills course from the first-semester theory course (typically, the study of diatonicism in a tonal context that includes analysis and voice leading). Since we believe that aural skills are not ancillary to written theory (Chenette 2021 and Chenette, Davis, and Kleppinger 2022), our courses feature learning outcomes rooted in music perception and cognition. This curricular design lays a foundation for students to make meaningful and experiential associations with musical sounds, and wrestle with ways to conceptualize them (solfege, letter names, Roman numerals, lead sheet symbols, Nashville numbers, etc.) before exploring the complexities of notation. The early weeks, thereby, focus on singing and listening with complete immersion in solfege and other protonotation tools. We build from this notation-free foundation as the curriculum progresses, expanding to include short dictations, harmonic hearing activities, error detection, sight singing and rhythm reading, and improvisation over ostinato patterns. This presentation profiles five institutions that share this aural-first philosophy, followed by a case study of two. Even though each programs aural-first course (and any concurrent classes, e.g., fundamentals, keyboard, etc.) has been designed to meet both institutional and student needs, we will show how an initial grounding in aural skills provides students with a strong foundation for the rest of the theory and aural core sequence.