Monday, February 27, 2012

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

By Jonathan Keith Robertson


Pitch recognition is very simply the capability to recognize the pitch of the musical note when you hear it. While some individuals think pitch recognition is something you're born with, millions of people around the world of all ages have learned to determine musical notes through practice.

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

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

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

Successfully learning pitch recognition may be easier than you think. In fact, educators promote several ways of ear training, the most popular which are recall skills and audiation. Each of these methods has its own critics, but both might help people like you learn to recognize musical notes.

The actual memorization technique couldn't end up being simpler. You simply listen to a single note at a time repeatedly until you associate the specific note with the sound. Just like memorizing a Bible verse in a Weekend school course, you can use this approach to identify the name of a note by sound.

This method has its critics, however.

The actual memorization technique, these critics suggest, may teach individuals to recognize a few notes, however without deeper knowledge as well as understanding their own new skill, doesn't develop beyond the "party trick" standing. That is, they can identify individual notes played to them, but they can't connect this ability with any kind of practical musical application.

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

Simply put, audiation involves your inner ear. It's the idea that you are able to mentally hear and realize music even if you aren't actually listening to a sound. Utilizing audiation, your brain assigns meaning to musical sounds, much like your brain has already assigned meaning to the words 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 mind with the sounds you listen to. But it's more than that. If you apply audiation on top of a few existing music knowledge, you can study to predict as well as understand the patterns of music pieces even if you aren't familiar with them.

According to some music teachers, audiation is the key to developing real, usable pitch recognition abilities. Associating the complicated ideas associated with a art or science in match concepts with which you're already familiar is amongst the successful instructing methods available.

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




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