Ear training is something that does develop as you play, however, it's rarely enough.
Put yourself in this situation, you're hired for a gig with a band you've never worked with, a song is called out by request that you've never heard, you don't have charts, you're told the key, style and counted in, what do you do?
Play that major scale? Nope, think of all the possible chord substitutions possible, we've shown that Db7 is a perfectly valid substitute for G7 in the key of C (yet if you played a D natural over that Db7 chord and didn't resolve it properly it would sound awful). This is just one example, there are tons.
I've been in this situation, as have many other freelance musicians I know, this is where ear training is critical, you need to hear how a note sounds against a chord and quickly find a note you can you to resolve that note if it's tense.
Believe it or not ear training requires singing, even if you're a bad singer.
I'm sure most of you sang Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Do in elementary school – this is a major scale, Do being the root, Re being the second, Mi being the third, etc. This technique is called Solfege, and very useful to learn to hear. Sing it slowly, the full duration of a breath for every note with your instrument (electronic keyboard is preferable.) And learn to hit those notes dead on, once your confident, only play every other note, then only play the Do's and check yourself there after singing, you should have landed dead on.
Sing sequences:
Do-Mi-Re-Fa-Mi-Sol etc.
Do-Re-Mi-Re-Mi-Fa etc.
and tons more.
Some people have a great natural ability to hear notes, I wasn't one of them, it took a lot of singing to get to the point I was when I started teaching, and I would still have students with further developed ears then mine come in for their first music lesson outside of elementary school. It's possible to learn, even if you think you are tone deaf, and it will help every aspect of your playing.
Monday, December 3, 2007
Ear Training Basics
Labels:
basic skills
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comments:
According to Dr. Daniel Levitin, the "absolute pitch" part of the brain is centered in the auditory cortex, specifically in the planum temporale. People who have absolute pitch can tell you which note they're hearing, which is remarkable.
Perhaps more remarkable was an experiment Dr. Levitin performed: he had lots of people sing their favorite songs without hearing it. He would then play a recording of that person synced up with the actual song - it turns out that people were overwhelmingly on the right pitch and tempo. Most people have absolute pitch but cannot associate their understanding of pitch to a concrete schema - we don't hear 440hz as "A" because that's not a natural schema for the human brain.
Think of all the voices you can identify - that's partially due to timbre and partially due to your planum temporale working to interpret the pitches at work! While music came before language (in fact, considerably before language) it's no surprise that people have an unconscious perception of absolute pitch.
Of course, translating that vague sense of absolute pitch into a finely-tuned form is much more difficult to do! People with absolute pitch have bigger planum temporales - and they have a definite mental schema involving tone.
The trick to ear training is taking what you hear and immediately translating it into the sound that your instrument makes. I know I don't think "oh, that's a C" - I just know it's a C and that's all there is to it. Ear training is much more about tricking your mind into trusting its sense of music and tone - and practice alongside repetition - to develop a somewhat unconscious archetype for pitch.
Amazing stuff.
Post a Comment