Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Pitch Recognition - What Is It and Why Wouldn't You Care?

By Jonathan Keith Robertson


Pitch recognition is basically simply the capability to recognize the actual pitch of the musical note when you listen to it. While some people think pitch recognition is something you're created with, huge numbers of people around the world of every age group have learned to identify musical notes through practice.

While some instructing methods tend to be more successful than the others, one thing has been proven: Pitch recognition isn't a gift. It's a ability you can learn.

Ear training is important to musicians because it's a fundamental part of the basic skill set of making music. Musical notes are the language of songs, and it's impossible to develop strong singing or even playing skills without a full idea of the language.

Understanding music with out ear instruction is like trying to speak the Chinese language without knowing exactly what all the characters look and sound like.

Effectively learning pitch recognition may be easier than you think. Actually, educators market several ways of ear instruction, the most popular of which are memorization and audiation. These methods has its own critics, but both can help people like you learn how to recognize music notes.

The memorization method couldn't end up being simpler. You simply listen to a single note at a time repeatedly before you associate the name of the note with the sound. Much like memorizing a Bible passage in a Sunday school course, you can use this approach to identify the name of a note through sound.

This technique has its experts, however.

The memorization method, these experts suggest, might teach people to recognize some notes, however without deeper knowledge as well as understanding their own new ability, doesn't develop beyond the "party trick" status. That is, they can identify individual notes performed to them, but they can't associate this ability with any kind of practical music application.

A far more robust instructing method that some hearing training courses teach is called audiation.

Simply put, audiation involves your own inner ear. It is the idea that you are able to mentally listen to and comprehend music even when you aren't actually hearing a sound. Utilizing audiation, your brain assigns a meaning to music sounds, much like your brain has assigned meaning to the phrases in the languages you know.

A lot of audiation when used as a pitch recognition technique is forming auditory imagery -- that's, associating pictures in your head with the sounds you hear. But it's more than that. If you utilize audiation on top of a few existing musical knowledge, you can learn to predict as well as understand the patterns of musical pieces even though you aren't familiar with them.

According to some music educators, audiation is the key to developing actual, usable pitch recognition skills. Associating the complex ideas of any art or science to concepts that you're currently familiar is amongst the successful teaching methods available.

It's true that many people may have a gift for music, but all of us have the cleverness to learn the simple skill of pitch recognition. All you need is the best system to teach it to you.




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