Visualizing the notes you hear.

[xtp]

I wish I was able to visualise music as you describe.

Most of my ideas comes from recording my improvising. When I do this it just comes out, I dont really think it or visualise it, it just kind of transmits to the fingers as rythem or riffs etc.

Later I go back and transcribe the stuff I like and make it more formal, but my ability to do this is painfully slow, [I always work the solo's and sequences out but it can take me hours,days...]

So slow I am at this that I am considering trialing melodyne to see if it can accurately transcribe what I do.

It would very nice to be able to listen to my improvisations and think, C13,Bb9 follow by x riff etc.

I do most things by ear but a snail pace

[Goose8-)]

Most of my ideas comes from recording my improvising. When I do this it just comes out, I dont really think it or visualise it, it just kind of transmits to the fingers as rythem or riffs etc.

Basically that's how I do it also. When I improvise, I play my tracks which are already laid down then I use my computer keyboard and play notes with the letter keys and when I find something that fits I go to the piano roll and "draw" my notes with the mouse but when i'm improvising, you might call it visualising if you want to, but somehow I just instinctively play the right notes.

My problem is getting a nice rythm. I'm always stuck with one specific off-beat rythm. It's a cool rythm, but I don't want all my songs to sound the same, now do I?

I'm overcoming that mental block though; by feeding my mind different information and listeng to other music I might get past that. By the way, that's what they teach us in one of my university subjects; how that connects to civil engineering, I'm still trying to figure out...

I think breakbeat would be some challenge for me to figure out

[jancivil]

Conformity is a straightjacket and no gift.

Being gifted or not has nothing to do with conformity imho. This would lead to cumbersome conclusions like classical composers can't be gifted because they conform to the rules of classical music...

I was not about rating the results of any thinking process i.e. if it's conform or not. I was about a "normal" kind of thinking ability. Some people with the different brain structures I referred to can't do so - they percieve the world just different, regardless what conclusions they come up with.

"conformity is no gift" is a counter to 'the gift of conformity' which is by itself nonsensical; taking that counter statement as if your syllogism is contained within that is absurd.

Normal people have no particular challenge being normal. I do not see the gift. Now you may say, 'some gifts are double-edged and kind of a curse', there you will have said something.

[TiUser]

it is not an abnormality.

There are people who have these combined perceptions - audio always creates visual perceptions then and I do think this can be very confusing when you need visual perception for "normal" uses... like driving a car, then listening to music would be a disaster...

What I mean is fore sure not "normal" perception at all.

[experimental.crow]

let vurt do the heavy lifting ...
he has trained for it ...

[TiUser]

Conformity is a straightjacket and no gift.

Being gifted or not has nothing to do with conformity imho. This would lead to cumbersome conclusions like classical composers can't be gifted because they conform to the rules of classical music...

I was not about rating the results of any thinking process i.e. if it's conform or not. I was about a "normal" kind of thinking ability. Some people with the different brain structures I referred to can't do so - they percieve the world just different, regardless what conclusions they come up with.

"conformity is no gift" is a counter to 'the gift of conformity' which is by itself nonsensical; taking that counter statement as if your syllogism is contained within that is absurd.

Normal people have no particular challenge being normal. I do not see the gift. Now you may say, 'some gifts are double-edged and kind of a curse', there you will have said something.

You made relationship between conformity and gift/gifted not me... I just wanted to point out that I see no such direct relationship.

"Normal" is just a result of a statistical examination how most people do - nothing more or less. I do not put any personal rating in this. I was also not about anybody challenging nor being "normal" neither being "not conformant" or what might be the better. The "normal" can also change, when poeple get bigger, maybe the "normal" shoe size may increase, if you have more schools some skills may become "normal" which were not before.

Maybe it's clearer now what I meant. Sorry if my language abilities may probably exceed this discussion - I can just try to do as good as I can.

It looks to me that gift/gifted and "normal" are a kind of opposite to you - but I think that's not quite right. It depends on what you think is a gift, and now we are into rating... If someone has this disturbing perceptions I referred to he might probably wish not having these and rate others who are "normal" in statistical terms as gifted - because they can do what he can not (i.e. separate perceptions).

[vurt]

it is not an abnormality.

There are people who have these combined perceptions - audio always creates visual perceptions then and I do think this can be very confusing when you need visual perception for "normal" uses... like driving a car, then listening to music would be a disaster...

What I mean is fore sure not "normal" perception at all.

when you drive, or cycle for example you are concentrating on your visual perceptions, rather than any aural phenomena, even if you are listening to music it is as a peripheral sense.
with synaesthesia, in the majority of cases, it is not like you would see an "object" that you would try to walk around, its something entirely different.

there was a docu a few years back called "the girl who tasted shapes" which is a good start maybe for some reseacrh if you are actually interested.
avoid wiki though.

[vurt]

let vurt do the heavy lifting ...
he has trained for it ...

no heavy lifting no more, not with my crushed nerves

[TiUser]

it is not an abnormality.

There are people who have these combined perceptions - audio always creates visual perceptions then and I do think this can be very confusing when you need visual perception for "normal" uses... like driving a car, then listening to music would be a disaster...

What I mean is fore sure not "normal" perception at all.

when you drive, or cycle for example you are concentrating on your visual perceptions, rather than any aural phenomena, even if you are listening to music it is as a peripheral sense.
with synaesthesia, in the majority of cases, it is not like you would see an "object" that you would try to walk around, its something entirely different.

there was a docu a few years back called "the girl who tasted shapes" which is a good start maybe for some reseacrh if you are actually interested.
avoid wiki though.

I can't disagree. It's just I believe concentration would be easier to focus without such perceptions - but that's just what I imagine. Do you think more it's just something additional, totally different? My opinion here I guess it depends on the case but I can just try to imagine as I do not have these perceptions and even imagining this is hard enough.

[vurt]

seriously, check out some of the actual scientific research on it, there have been a few studies here n there.
from the numbers involved very few of the case studies found it to be intense enough(ie more heightened) to be any kind of problem in day to day life.
and as i already said, many of them didnt even realise they had anything "special" till they heard about the studies, just thinking it was a normal thing. if so many people within the studies never realised it was a "gift" whats to say millions of others arent just getting on with it as a normal day to day occurence?

although, im not saying everyone does, im just saying that even scientists are wondering if everyone does indeed have it, just some of you dont have the sense heightened like some of us, same as some peoples eyes or hearing is bad.

btw not everyone "sees" the sounds, some taste them, some feel them.
its a somewhat interesting subject, far more interesting than a thread on kvr could give it credit for.

[kovacs]

It would very nice to be able to listen to my improvisations and think, C13,Bb9 follow by x riff etc.

This is more related to skill and experience than innate gift, IMHO. I have a friend who is an extremely talented piano player. She is perhaps one of the best pianists I know. She has perfect pitch and can listen to a piece of music and write out the chord sheet for the band guitarist (sometimes that would be me, which makes me very humble). That she doesn't even consider a career in music is shocking to people like me who dream of it. ("It comes so easy for some...")

Yet the ability to distinguish chords is not "natural". Chords are a human intepretation of mixtures of various harmonic structures. You need to learn playing and reading chords just like you need to learn reading and writing.

I have played guitar for close to 30 years, and 20 years ago I earned a Bachelor of music performance. Yet after years of playing, composing and interpreting music I am *still* not able to simply hear a piece of music and instantly play the chords back. I can maybe get the gist of it, but I need to sit down and work it out. I also have serious problems learning chord progressions by heart.

But while I may have problems with figuring out chords, I can hear structure, repetitions and patterns very easily, so to me a piece of music "becomes" very much like a patchwork, maybe a sort of quilt, in my mind. I "feel" the structure and recognize patterns the same way I see colors. I think a lot of musicians have this ability, and it is probably also why a lot of music is (after all) based on structures of repetitive patterns. It's how we think and how we recognize things.

Maybe it's a matter of having different skills, interest and sensory capabilities when it comes to seeing it one way or another? I don't know.

But it is a fascinating topic.

[wrench45us]

some musicians have a 'natural' gift and some have different sorts of gifts that make making music, I don't know, a more intuitive, direct experience and others just love music and have to work at it --often very hard work. The often cited example of the latter is Robert Fripp.

[jancivil]

Conformity is a straightjacket and no gift.

Being gifted or not has nothing to do with conformity imho. This would lead to cumbersome conclusions like classical composers can't be gifted because they conform to the rules of classical music...

I was not about rating the results of any thinking process i.e. if it's conform or not. I was about a "normal" kind of thinking ability. Some people with the different brain structures I referred to can't do so - they percieve the world just different, regardless what conclusions they come up with.

"conformity is no gift" is a counter to 'the gift of conformity' which is by itself nonsensical; taking that counter statement as if your syllogism is contained within that is absurd.

Normal people have no particular challenge being normal. I do not see the gift. Now you may say, 'some gifts are double-edged and kind of a curse', there you will have said something.

You made relationship between conformity and gift/gifted not me... I just wanted to point out that I see no such direct relationship.

"Normal" is just a result of a statistical examination how most people do - nothing more or less. I do not put any personal rating in this. I was also not about anybody challenging nor being "normal" neither being "not conformant" or what might be the better. The "normal" can also change, when poeple get bigger, maybe the "normal" shoe size may increase, if you have more schools some skills may become "normal" which were not before.

Maybe it's clearer now what I meant. Sorry if my language abilities may probably exceed this discussion - I can just try to do as good as I can.

It looks to me that gift/gifted and "normal" are a kind of opposite to you - but I think that's not quite right. It depends on what you think is a gift, and now we are into rating... If someone has this disturbing perceptions I referred to he might probably wish not having these and rate others who are "normal" in statistical terms as gifted - because they can do what he can not (i.e. separate perceptions).

You used my statement to launch from, which interprets my statement to have done. Begin that with 'I disagree', otherwise you begin to build a straw man for your argument. No offense meant by this statement btw.

It's like this, simply: a "normal" in my lexicon for the purpose of this discussion *does normal things*. Creating music that isn't just for kicks, or a mere regurgitation of what came before, you know, creating one's own recipes isn't the norm in society, it's quite outside those lines. It tends not to even be respectable work to the normals.

For me to NOT do what I do, would require something on the order of a frontal lobotomy. That, is SUBTRACTING something. That is not a gift, in my estimation of the word 'gift'.

There might BE people 'passing' as normal who are quite gifted. They might even have people who love them in a
normative way.

Vincent Van Gogh was gifted. LeRoy Neiman is a normal. Are you giving Van Gogh something when you make a Neiman or a Norman Rockwell out of him, or are you robbing him?

[TiUser]

I get the impression you feel personally offended - that's definitely not what I intended.

Just one thing:
It's like this, simply: a "normal" in my lexicon for the purpose of this discussion *does normal things*.
I don't understand this definition as it's self implying "normal". It's also within the scope of my definition based on a simple statistic view. So what's the issue here?

Just to give a metaphor: For cannibals it's normal to eat each other, for us it's not. But finally what's "normal" then? I simply think you put too much interpretation in words that is not really in there...

To your style of defining "normal" look at the following: a "green" ...means "does green things"... now you have defined "green"? I don't think so.


You seem to have a different view here as I have, that's fine to me. But you still put subliminal ratings into some terms and that's what I try to avoid. That seems to be the major difference between our opinions here.

If I get you right to you a "gift" is always something somehow "good" or "positive" on a scale. To me it's just something that not all persons can do regardless of any rating, circumstance or whatever. It's "given" to somebody - regardless if he likes it or not, if it's useful or not, if it's morally good or not.

But I accept your view too - that's probably what you missed?

Maybe always putting things into ratings is a straightjacket too...?

[jancivil]

I get the impression you feel personally offended - that's definitely not what I intended.

Just one thing:
It's like this, simply: a "normal" in my lexicon for the purpose of this discussion *does normal things*.
I don't understand this definition as it's self implying "normal". It's also within the scope of my definition based on a simple statistic view. So what's the issue here?

The issue, number one is you are operating under the assumption that I'm operating under your completely broad definitions of words, regardless of what context they resided in and despite my efforts to spell that out to you. In doing so you're reading things in, to argue about, which aren't there in my own conveyance of the thought. It's just slightly annoying. I don't feel any need to hide my displeasure. Again, no particular offense intended.

Just to give a metaphor: For cannibals it's normal to eat each other, for us it's not. But finally what's "normal" then? I simply think you put too much interpretation in words that is not really in there...

To your style of defining "normal" look at the following: a "green" ...means "does green things"... now you have defined "green"? I don't think so.

Green doesn't do anything. That's idiotic. It's an attempt to use 'the identity relation' against something really simple. A "normal" is defined there as what 'it' does. (Also, that isn't a metaphor. "Analogy" is what you're going for.)
I didn't set out to define normal per se and was AT PAINS to explain that "for the purposes of this discussion in this thread" this is what I mean. Instead of reading that and giving it some thought, you decide the thing to do is what appears to be an attempt at condescension..
The point, for the world, is: a normal is doing normal things, composing original music according to one's own lights doesn't fit. If you would like to counter that (*already qualified definition) with, oh, hmmm... statistics? Go for it.

But you still put subliminal ratings into some terms and that's what I try to avoid. That seems to be the major difference between our opinions here.

"Subliminal ratings", huh? Try another translation of your language, that doesn't have any meaning in english which correlates to any thing that's happened.

If I get you right to you a "gift" is always something somehow "good" or "positive" on a scale. To me it's just something that not all persons can do regardless of any rating, circumstance or whatever. It's "given" to somebody - regardless if he likes it or not, if it's useful or not, if it's morally good or not.

You don't get me right. I've already said 'double-edged'.

Is is giving Van Gogh something to make him Norman Rockwell, or would you be robbing him? Adding or subtracting? Yes or no.

to sum: I'm not trying to define normal for the world. You took exception to what I said, and I told you what I meant. I think the thing to do at this point, if you don't wish to consider it, is to simply say "I disagree" and/or make some kind of actual point.