8/31/2011

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

By Jonathan Keith Robertson


Pitch recognition is very simply the ability to recognize the pitch of a musical note when you listen to it. While some individuals think pitch recognition is one thing you're born with, huge numbers 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 gift. 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 strong singing or playing skills without a full comprehension of the language.

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

Successfully learning pitch recognition may be easier than you think. Actually, educators promote several methods of ear training, the most popular which are recall skills and audiation. These methods has its critics, however both might help people like you learn to recognize music notes.

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

This technique has its experts, however.

The memorization method, these experts suggest, might teach individuals to recognize a few notes, however without deeper knowledge as well as understanding their new skill, doesn't develop beyond the "party trick" status. That is, they can identify individual notes performed to them, however they can't associate this skill with any kind of practical musical application.

A far more robust instructing method which some hearing training courses train is called audiation.

Simply put, audiation involves your inner ear. It is the idea that you can mentally listen to and realize music even when you aren't actually listening to a sound. Using audiation, your brain assigns meaning to musical sounds, much like your brain has already assigned meaning to the phrases in the languages you know.

A lot of audiation when used as a pitch recognition technique is forming auditory imagery -- that is, associating pictures in your head 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 as well as understand the patterns of music pieces even though you aren't familiar with them.

According to some music teachers, audiation is the key to developing actual, usable pitch recognition abilities. Associating the complicated ideas of any art or even science in match concepts that you're currently familiar is amongst the successful teaching methods available.

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




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