Ear Training...Getting a trained ear.

Chords, scales, harmony, melody, etc.
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Sascha Franck wrote:
fateamenabletochange wrote:Royal College Pianoforte.
I googled that. No relevant hits. What is it?
sigh http://www.rcm.ac.uk/


:roll:



Since your handing out so much advice here sport, how about learning how to use google.

That's easy too.

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shankfiddle wrote: It only is if you have already convinced yourself that you cannot be wrong. I'm a music teacher, so although I would love to just give up, I have to continue as long as there is spongy logic to correct.
What would you say is the rate of success for your students?
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NextdoorNeighbor wrote:What would you say is the rate of success for your students?
this is a somewhat ambiguous question. a student's success (however you choose to define it) is dependent on more than the teacher or his methods. parents/family/maturity/work ethic play a much more important role.

i don't think that I help or hinder a student's success beyond inspiring in them a desire to learn and expand their own knowledge of music. then i provide the path, but i don't "teach" as much as I facilitate learning, if that makes sense.

I have a 21-year-old beginner student who has been playing for only a month, but has a great ear. She has learned to play 2-octave major, natural and harmonic minor, scales with solid tone and good intonation. To me that is incredibly successful, and says more about her perseverance than about my tutoring. so i don't understand the relevance of your question

that being said, as long as there is improvement week-to-week, I call that successful. So all my students are successful, thanks for asking :)

... and now we are entirely off topic... let's get back to the discussion about chords and aligning partials?
Sascha Franck wrote:
shankfiddle wrote: It is not relative, chords are based on the overtone series.
Pardon?
What do chords have to do with overtone series?
Last edited by shankfiddle on Sat Dec 17, 2011 12:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

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shankfiddle wrote:
NextdoorNeighbor wrote:What would you say is the rate of success for your students?
this is a somewhat ambiguous question. a student's success (however you choose to define it) is dependent on more than the teacher or his methods. parents/family/maturity/work ethic play a much more important role.

i don't think that I help or hinder a student's success beyond inspiring in them a desire to learn and expand their own knowledge of music. then i provide the path, but i don't "teach" as much as I facilitate learning, if that makes sense.

I have a 21-year-old beginner student who has been playing for only a month, but has a great ear. She has learned to play 2-octave major, natural and harmonic minor, scales with solid tone and good intonation. To me that is incredibly successful, and says more about her perseverance than about my tutoring. so i don't understand the relevance of your question

that being said, as long as there is improvement week-to-week, I call that successful. So all my students are successful, thanks for asking :)
No doubt they are :)

I don't disagree with any particular point. I'll rephrase the question and explain. I haven't studied this thread very deeply, so I'm simply assuming that you teach (facilitate the learning of) ear training. If you don't, forgive me and disregard the question.

How many of your students walk out of your class with a demonstrable ability to recall specific pitches by memory?

The reason I ask is to gain perspective into the nature/nurture debate as it relates to perfect pitch. My field is cognitive science, so I have an academic interest in your insights.
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Got it, thanks for the clarification.

I teach students to play the violin and ear-training is one facet of that. I do not place emphasis on perfect pitch as the something all musicians NEED, we work on interval identification, scales and relative pitch. And through these exercises I have had two students acquire perfect pitch. Most leave me with great pitch memory, if we spend our hour-lesson working on several pieces in several keys, and at the end I ask "sing the first pitch of the first piece we played today without using your instrument" they'll just start singing the melody with perfect intonation in the correct key.

It becomes "acquired perfect pitch" when you develop the ability to use reference pitches in the environment, or your own voice (that's what worked for me) to calibrate your ears.

But even possessing perfect pitch there's still more ear-training to practice, ie chord identification, chord progression transcription, melodic dictation (all these skills support each other)... Alas, I've only ever had one student that advanced, as I lose students to colleges.

I'll go back through the thread and repost some passages that may be interesting to re-examine from a cognitive science perspective. That way you wont have to filter through pages of dense discourse...

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shankfiddle wrote:Anyone who can identify intervals and chords knows each has a specific character, or color... If one were born with amazing innate pitch memory, then every note he/she hears is not an isolated event. Every pitch he/she perceives is not just a note, but also an interval relative to the remembered reference pitch.

When I get a headrush sometimes my ears start ringing... it's ALWAYS the same pitch. So let's extend this: hypothetically say that a child is born with amazing pitch memory: a pitch that they never forget. The child has had this pitch in his head before ever taking a music lesson or picking up an instrument. when that child DOES get piano lessons, the first note he ever plays is a middle C. If he has the pitch memory we discussed he's not just hearing middle C, he's thinking "it's lower than the pitch in my head. and that interval has a specific character" even if only subconsciously- you are ALWAYS comparing your experiences with past ones whether you acknowledge it or not. Don't you think that child, with next to no musical training, would describe each note as having its own "color" if there was always a reference?
shankfiddle wrote:
sammy24 wrote:As an example of this, I once tutored an autistic child, who can identify single notes spot-on, with his eyes closed. But he couldn't do too well when I played two notes simultaneously, at best he'd get one of them. There must be, however, those who can identify any and all the notes they hear through absolute pitch alone. Also, maybe some people are only correct 80% of the time. Or, they can tell the difference between A and Bb, but can they tell the difference between 150 hz and 155 hz?
well now we're getting into psychology/perception... just as fun as music if you ask me

Now I have a few more supporting examples.

You compare the idea of "perfect pitch" to the idea of seeing color, but even color is subjective. You THINK you don't need a reference to know that a green is a green, BUT I would argue that you calibrate your eyes to the known color of your surroundings the second you wake up, just as "vocal tension" does with sound. What if you were to stare directly the sun for ten minutes to "calibrate" then try to identify some colors for me. It would be a bit more difficult, no?

In my anthropology class a bit ago, we learned about how culture defines perception (NOT the other way around), by looking at a case study of an isolated native balinese culture. In their language there is no word for the color green, and as such, they don't perceive it as a distinct color, they would identify it as a blueish yellow or a yellowish blue, because their language has words for those colors. If the language does not define a term you don't perceive it.

Find a roomful of small children and tell them to separate themselves into 3 groups, tall, medium and short. Tell another class to get into groups of Tall and short. You could have two children of exactly the same "absolute" height and ask "how tall are you?", and one would say "medium" and the other may say "im tall, but shorter than most of the other tall kids" or vise versa.

Along the same lines, my bloodline goes back to India, where the musical system is based on 24 tones per octave, not 12. A carnatic-ly trained musician can identify a B half-flat where a western-trained musician would hear an out of tune B. The carnatic ear is exactly twice as precise as the ear of someone raised in a western culture solely because of the musical language. I really do believe that's been an advantage for me in learning the violin, aruguably the most difficult instrument in terms of intonation.

SOOOO even though you may think that perception of color is absolute, it is actually shaped by your specific culture and by referencing past experiences. I would argue that the manner in which you think you have "absolute color" is the same way one develops absolute pitch. (or has it innately, nothing more than an ability to auto-calibrate)
shankfiddle wrote:But even someone who obsesses about intonation as you mentioned is conditioned by his/her musical culture.

If you asked for a 440, most musicians could sing it perfectly using only memory like Sammy24 and I discussed - it is a standard reference pitch. Ever been in an orchestra? You'll never forget that piercing oboe tone... no vibrato... pure 440hz drilled into your head. We've been "calibrating" to 440 for the entirety of our musical careers.

I had a professor who played a separate violin/bow with gut strings, no chinrest, etc specifically for baroque music and actually tuned to A415 because historically that's what they tuned to back in the day. that's just what an A was defined as and as such every single note was flatter. Over the years, the trend has been a sharpening of pitch. When my fellow students who were "born with perfect pitch" heard the professor play a Bach partita tuned to to 415 they cringed, and almost couldn't handle it. But had they been born in the 1600s and been educated at that time, their ears would have a completely different idea of what defined playing "in tune".

And just clarify, when you say "they can tell how sharp or Flat a note is without a tuner..." do you mean that to one with perfect pitch if you played an A440.05 they can tell you "the A is one twentieth of a cent sharp" like a human oscilloscope?

because as Tony Ostinato said earlier, that is a bit ridiculous - the 440-based-scale is a cultural construct. those who are "born" with perfect pitch are calibrated by their musical culture... even the most expensive tuner needs to be calibrated. That an A is defined as a convenient multiple of 10 is a relatively recent phenomenon.

While perceiving the overtone series is innate, the perception of A as needing to be exactly 440 is not.


let's try to eventually bring this back to overtones, deal?

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Sure. Thanks for you insights and the condensation - very interesting, and even a mentioning of the "breen" languages (language is my current focus)!
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Well a dreamer has got to dream.

Funny how this woman became a world famous musician while being deaf since the age of 12


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_Glennie



Finally I'll leave everyone with this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_pitch
Absolute pitch (AP), widely referred to as perfect pitch, is the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of an external reference
Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability in laboratory settings for more than a century,[60] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s.[61] However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability,[62] as all adults who have undergone AP training have failed, when formally tested, to show "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors".[63]
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tapper mike wrote:
Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability in laboratory settings for more than a century,[60] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s.[61] However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability,[62] as all adults who have undergone AP training have failed, when formally tested, to show "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors".[63]
using Wiki as definitive on anything is lame.

pap and dogma and pedantic overanalysis. Once the term 'absolute' is used it is defined out of existence. No one has ever acquired 'absolute' pole vaulting ability either, which isn't to say the lots of people don't/can't do this.

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fateamenabletochange wrote:sigh http://www.rcm.ac.uk/
You are now finally making an idiot out of yourself (well, you already started before, more on that below...).
When you search that site for "pianoforte" or "perfect pitch" you get no relevant hits at all.
So, explain what you mean with "Royal College Pianoforte".
fateamenabletochange wrote: using Wiki as definitive on anything is lame.
Hear hear... and posting a meaningless link to the royal college of music is more clever?
pap and dogma and pedantic overanalysis.
So, you find that worse than what you are doing all over this thread?
Once the term 'absolute' is used it is defined out of existence.
Err? "Perfect" pitch is very often called "absolute" pitch.

Whatever, I think you should just not take part in this discussion anymore, simply because with each and every post you're making more and more of an absolute idiot out of yourself.
Seriously, someone stating nonsense such as an orchestra would tune up without any reference pitch should not take part in any serious discussion about whatever pitch related things, simply because that statement alone is proving perfectly that you're absolutely clueless. You clearly and exclusively talk out of your ass only.
shankfiddle wrote: ... and now we are entirely off topic... let's get back to the discussion about chords and aligning partials?
Oh yes please. I'm still waiting for an explanation about what intervals and chords have to do with perfect pitch (I mean, apart from simply nothing).
Just another "talked out of the ass" statement without any scientific justification.
And seriously, I completely don't give a rats ass whether your bloodline is going back to india or the moon or to an entirely different universe. A statement such as "The carnatic ear is exactly twice as precise as the ear of someone raised in a western culture solely because of the musical language" shows that you probably have as little of an idea as fateamenabletochange. Just because someone's using 24 steps per octave makes his/her "carnatic ear" (whatever nonsense that might be) more precise? So you also assume I can't hear a slow pitchbend? Because all my hearing is only able to perceive 12 steps per octave?

Puuh-f***g-lease, please stop posting such incredible BS. None of the posts you have made in this entire thread has yet been good to prove the slightest relationship between intervals or chords and perfect pitch. Simply because there's no scientific relation.

Im serious: I feel sorry for your students.

- Sascha
There are 3 kinds of people:
Those who can do maths and those who can't.

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And fwiw, I just read the entire Wikipedia article, it is practically identical with what I learned during studying, IMO it's pretty much spot on.

But well, in this thread we do have at least 2 persons that do know more... maybe they will finally share their secrets with us mere mortals.

- SF
There are 3 kinds of people:
Those who can do maths and those who can't.

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I think you'll find you can't control me Sascha.

You sound drunk, given to grandiosity, hyperbole and disrespect.

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fateamenabletochange wrote: You sound drunk, given to grandiosity, hyperbole and disrespect.
FYI, it's 11:30 over here and I've just been doing sports with my little 16 month old boy.
Anyway, you're completely right with one thing: I do indeed have no respect for you as someone taking part in this discussion, simply because you are exclusively talking nonsense and seem to have perfectly no clue when it comes to the things this thread is about. This isn't even meant personally - i mean, I don't know you at all. But I *do* know that you behave completely idiotic in this discussion. And for that I have no respect at all.

- Sascha
There are 3 kinds of people:
Those who can do maths and those who can't.

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Last edited by shankfiddle on Sat Dec 17, 2011 12:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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