Nothing has changed about my recommendation of the Relative Pitch Ear Training SuperCourse. However, since publication of Compose Yourself, there’s a new kid on the block, and he will be introduced below.
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Scale-tone mood: Each tone of the scale carries a certain quanta of musical meaning. The e-book “How to Sing Solfa (and Improve Your Musical I.Q.)” offers a training method for recognizing scale tones and their mood quality in the melodies you hear, but if you want to go beyond the e-book, I recommend the program at Scott Edwards’ eartraininghq.com.
Just let me insert the customary disclaimer here and say that I have no business relationship with perfectpitch.com or with eartraininghq.com, and have nothing to gain by recommending them. I have tried both programs and found them effective. Also, after exchanging a few e-mails with Scott Edwards, I invited him to write a guest blog this month, and he was kind enough to agree.
The perception of scale-tone mood exists on another musical plane, quite apart from relative-pitch perception or perfect-pitch perception (see below). The difference is tonality: scale tones belong to a key, and their relationship to the key center is of overwhelming importance in determining their identity and mood. Relative pitch is concerned only with the difference in pitch between two or more notes and the mood generated by this difference.
Together, these two modes of perception make up the major tributaries of musical meaning in harmony and melody.
Harmony: Both of the courses mentioned above include training in harmony perception. Here, I only want to reiterate the advice given in “The Truth About Those Three Chords” (see above), and Excerpt 2, as well as the upcoming Excerpt 3 from Compose Yourself: Don’t think of chord progressions as moving forward in time like a caravan on a journey left-to-right and down across the printed page of music. Lead sheets are actually mis-leading when it comes to hearing chord progressions! Rather, think of harmonic movement as movement forward and backward in space. Each chord takes you farther from the tonic chord or closer to it. After you try this perceptual shift for a while, you will learn to recognize all the way-stops on the “Harmonic Journey” (title of Excerpt 3).
Perfect pitch training: There have been some interesting developments in this area since the publication of Compose Yourself. An international team of researchers recently published a study in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience that showed that the epilepsy drug Valproate was effective in helping adults to acquire perfect pitch.
The study says that Valproate resets the brain’s neurons to a state of receptivity—or, in the jargon of neuroscience, plasticity—found only in childhood. When the test subjects were given Valproate plus training in pitch recognition, voilà, they learned to recognize pitch color, the intrinsic sensation generated by individual pitch frequencies. For them, “C” became recognizable as “C,” somewhat the way we recognize “red” as “red” and “blue” as “blue.” Now this is a big deal, because until this study scientists did not believe it was difficult for adults to learn perfect pitch, they believed it was impossible.
Since many musicians regard perfect pitch as the Holy Grail of musical aptitude, the market for Valproate has probably shot through the roof since the publication of this study. However, you might want to reconsider before rushing off to find yourself a black-market dose: among its many potential side effects are fatigue, dizziness, upset stomach, vomiting, tremors, hair loss, and weight gain. My guess is that safer ways to reset your neurons will soon emerge.
Outro
Be sure to catch Scott Edwards’ guest blog. And if I’ve managed to convince you that ear training isn’t just for music majors, then I would suggest a couple of starting steps:
- Check out the “Interval Color in Hit Songs” e-book. The song list is a valuable way to hear how intervals convey emotion.
- Do the project at the end of Excerpt 2, “Cracking the Interval Code.”
- Do the exercises in the “How to Sing Solfa” e-book.
This trio of projects is free and will give you a taste of the benefits of ear training as it relates directly to songwriting. If you want to go deeper, then by all means check out the recommended courses.
Questions? Just e-mail [email protected].
