 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2011-11-16 00:14
Researchers on reading skills have "discovered" that skilled readers recognize words from visual memory rather than recognizing letters and constructing words out of them.
http://explore.georgetown.edu/news/?ID=60788&PageTemplateID=295
Musicians have known that all along. You become a good reader of music by getting beyond recognizing notes and playing them. Instead, you recognize groups of notes that form patterns you have become familiar with by practicing scales and arpeggios. When you see the shape of a C major scale, you don't read C, then D, then E, etc. Instead, you recognize the look of the "C major scale shape" and start your fingers, which play the scale by themselves. While that's happening, you look at and recognize the next shape.
That's why Baermann III is so important. Of course you should make music even when playing scales, but the primary use of Baermann III is to build your vocabulary so that you can recognize the "words," at least of tonal music, by their visual shape.
To me, at least, it seems obvious that I read English by recognizing how whole words look. I go back to recognizing individual letters only when I need to sound out an unfamiliar word, or part of one. I also recognize the pieces out of which they are made. For example, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is made up of pneumono + ultra + microscopic + silico + volcano + coni + osis. Almost all of these pieces are familiar scientific terms, which I recognize one chunk at a time rather than one letter at a time.
Ken Shaw
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Author: Katrina
Date: 2011-11-16 03:01
Cool article, Ken. I know for sure it's how I read words, and probably how I read music too!
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Author: tictactux ★2017
Date: 2011-11-16 07:11
> Researchers on reading skills have "discovered" that skilled readers
> recognize words from visual memory rather than recognizing letters and
> constructing words out of them.
That's hardly news. I wonder why it took the Georgetowners so long to re-discover that. ;-)
That's why we strive to have traffic signs with very distinct pictograms on it, because it takes us far less long to scan a pattern than to read a word letter by letter.
--
Ben
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-11-16 08:43
No, it isn't news at all. The problem comes when learning theorists decide to completely discard phonetics and try to get children to learn every word they will ever use as a memorized word pattern. Sometimes you just have to resort to "sounding it out." Same with music - sometimes the melodic or (especially) rhythmic material on the page just isn't an already familiar pattern and you have to read it note by note until you can execute it without so much conscious thought.
Karl
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Author: Buster
Date: 2011-11-17 02:28
When we encounter musical shapes that are quite recognizable, for most, they seem to lie in the more major/minor/dominant etc.. realm.
As Karl stated, "problems" arise when a pattern doesn't fit into our established vocabulary; yet often when those shapes are identified, one will find that they do fit into an easily recognizable vocabulary. The issue that arises is how can we identify what those patterns are, and how they fit into the harmonic landscape.
Quite often in post-romantic music, which is often incorrectly termed 'atonal', we find octatonic scales, whole-tone clusters/arpeggios (including the lydian mode, lydian dominant etc...), modes of the melodic minor scales....... far more than I can list in a short posting here.
If these quite proper "strange" shapes (which are naturally derived from standard tonal theory) are learned, they become quite recognizable. A beneficial side-effect is suffered as your ears expand their palate of recognition simultaneously- as you learn how these different shapes fit into the more "complex" harmonic progressions, you "hear" how they fit. How they fit just as the now mundane alberti bass pattern fits a major, or minor chord.
Sometimes they do need to be figured out "pho-ne-tic-all-y" as Karl stated. However, once the small chunks are deciphered it can be combined and realized that it is simply a diminished scale, or super-locrian mode.
Conversely, one can come from the other direction and learn what those "strange" scales/shapes/chords are through "technical" practice and easily recognize them when they arise in any given piece of music.
-Jason
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Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2011-11-18 02:18
I think the main difficulty in equating verbal reading processes to musical ones isn't found so much in the melodic/pitch realm but in the area of rhythm and its notation, which is something to which most verbal languages I'm familiar with don't have an analog. We learn the rhythm context of the words we use in speech by rote, by aural experience in which we're immersed from the day we are born.
Our relatively rigid, arithmetically-based system of notating musical rhythm is notoriously inadequate and is the source of a great deal of interpretive dispute (and variety), but even with its considerable limitations, there are relatively few genuine rhythmic patterns that can be used in ways analogous to words in verbal language. Beyond basic combinations of regular divisions of regularly recurring metric divisions, there aren't really rhythmic analogs to scales, modes, chords, clusters or any of the other pitch-based vocabulary components we learn and rely on. There's a seemingly infinite variety of irregular durational and metric units and larger combinations of them that simply can't be anticipated and must be read almost note-for-note, certainly unit-for-unit. These must be made sense of and given meaning from scratch by the performer because nothing like it may ever have been written down before, and nothing recognizably similar may ever turn up again in the player's experience.
Karl
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