Monday, February 27, 2012

Pitch Recognition - What Exactly Is It and Why Should You Care?

By Jonathan Keith Robertson


Pitch recognition is very simply the capability to recognize the pitch of a musical note when you listen to it. While some individuals think pitch recognition is something you're created with, huge numbers of people around the world of all ages have learned to identify musical information through practice.

While some instructing methods are more successful than others, one thing has been shown: Pitch recognition isn't a present. It's a ability you can learn.

Ear training is important to musicians because it's part of the basic expertise of making music. Musical notes are the language of songs, and it's not possible to develop strong singing or even playing skills with no full comprehension of the language.

Learning music with out ear instruction is like attempting to speak Chinese without knowing exactly what all the figures look and sound like.

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

The memorization method couldn't end up being simpler. You just listen to one note at any given time repeatedly before you associate the specific note with the sound. Just like memorizing a Bible passage in a Weekend school course, you can use this approach to identify the name of a note through sound.

This technique has its critics, however.

The actual memorization method, these experts suggest, might teach people to recognize a few notes, but without deeper knowledge as well as understanding their new ability, doesn't develop beyond the "party trick" status. That is, they are able to identify individual notes performed to them, but they can't associate this skill with any practical musical application.

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

Simply put, audiation involves your own inner ear. It's the idea that you can mentally listen to and realize music even if you aren't actually listening to a sound. Using audiation, your brain assigns meaning to musical sounds, much like your brain has already assigned meaning to the words in the languages you know.

Much of audiation when used as a pitch recognition technique is forming auditory imagery -- that is, associating pictures in your head with the sound you listen to. But it's more than that. If you apply audiation on top of some 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.

Based on some music educators, audiation is the key to developing actual, usable pitch recognition skills. Associating the complex ideas of any art or even science to concepts that you're already familiar is among the most successful teaching methods available.

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




About the Author:



Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...