Wednesday 31 August 2011

Pitch Recognition - What Is It and Why Wouldn't You Care?

By Jonathan Keith Robertson


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

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

Ear training is important to music artists because it's a fundamental part of the basic skill set of making music. Musical notes are the language of songs, and it's not possible to develop strong singing or playing skills with no full idea of the language.

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

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

The memorization technique couldn't end up being simpler. You just listen to a single note at a time repeatedly until you associate the specific note with the sound. Much like memorizing a Bible passage in a Weekend school class, you can use this method to identify the name of a note through sound.

This technique has its critics, however.

The actual memorization method, these experts suggest, may teach individuals to recognize some notes, but without deeper knowledge and understanding their new skill, doesn't develop beyond the "party trick" status. That is, they can identify unique notes performed to them, but they can't connect this ability with any practical musical application.

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

To put it simply, audiation involves your inner ear. It is the idea that you can mentally hear and realize music even if you aren't actually hearing a sound. Utilizing audiation, your brain assigns a meaning to musical sounds, just like your brain has already assigned meaning to the phrases in the dialects 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 sound you hear. But in addition to that. If you utilize audiation on top of some existing musical knowledge, you can learn to predict and understand the patterns of musical pieces even though you aren't acquainted with them.

Based on some music teachers, audiation is the key to developing actual, usable pitch recognition abilities. Associating the complex ideas of any art or science to concepts with which you're already familiar is amongst the successful teaching methods available.

It's true that many people may have a natural gift for music, but all of us have the intelligence 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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