Why am I telling you all of this? Because even after receiving a degree in music, I wasn’t able to use my ear in any practical way for music practice or performance. Although I was never perfect, I could get a pretty good idea where the notes were, and where they were going. I couldn’t sing a melody in my head and feel confident I would play it on my instrument correctly, and I certainly couldn’t tell the quality of chords without a lot of effort. It took many listens and a lot of corrections to even get close, and even then it was very rarely perfectly accurate. Dictation, writing down music that you hear, wasn’t so simple that I could hear a melody and write it out perfectly without effort. The problem was that this had almost no practical music applications. I learned a lot of tricks that helped me (with some effort) to recognize what notes, chords, intervals, and melodies were. Maybe I could recognize the chords based on a couple of intervals I heard in them, or maybe I would just recognize what the chord was not which would give me a pretty good idea as to what the cord was. When sitting in a testing environment I could figure out what an interval was because I recognized it from a familiar piece, or I could sing up to the notes based on a scale. I wasn’t confident recognizing chords or even intervals. It was the same way for a lot of other students.Įven after doing well in all of my undergraduate ear training classes, I still had little to no practical use for the pitch recognition I acquired. For me it was one of my most difficult classes. You’re being tested and judged on a learned skill, not the memorization of facts and numbers like most classes. When I took these required classes I noticed something. You need to work on it, and you need to work on it a lot.Īlmost every major university will include ear training courses in major music instruction. No one is born with incredible relative pitch. Is it a skill you can learn? Of course it is. No one would argue that being able to accurately play music that you hear in your head is a bad skill to have. Practicing Pitch Recognition Through Relative Pitch is Difficult If you know what the next note is on your instrument by sound, and you can play the passage technically, why in the world would you play it wrong? You wouldn’t, and musicians with great pitch recognition don’t. You can usually tell if a sight reader has great pitch recognition, it’s like they never make mistakes. If you’re a pianist you can also start making up harmony to what you’re playing as well. If your eyes can’t keep up with the music, but you know what the music sounds like, you can play the music on your instrument while your eyes catch up. Pitch recognition is also important when it comes to sight reading. Some people with perfect pitch wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between those two frequencies, but others could. They can tell the difference between an A at 440 Hz and an A at 442 Hz (the difference between those two frequencies is almost inaudible to most people). People with perfect pitch know when anything is out of tune. Many myths have developed around perfect pitch that needs to be dispelled. People have difficulty understanding and defining it. Relative pitch is learned, and perfect pitch is innate or developed naturally at a very young age. If the person with perfect pitch understood music theory, they would be able to recognize that interval as a fifth because they know an F to a C is a fifth, not because they were using relative pitch for hearing that distance. They wouldn’t recognize the distance it was away from the F. If after the F the person heard a C, the person with perfect pitch would recognize it as a C. An F sounds like an F to someone with perfect pitch. Even if someone with perfect pitch has a reference note, they are likely just identifying the note in isolation in their minds. Without a reference pitch the notes the person with relative pitch reproduces may not be the same as the notes they heard, but the distance between them would be the same. They could therefore replicate the sounds they hear relatively. If a reference note is not given, someone with a good relative pitch could still recognize the distances from one note to another. If you had relative pitch and heard three notes at once, you could tell what they sound like in relation to each other, and identify the type of chord it was.
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