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For teachers: hearing and perception

Author: Matt74
Date: 2017-01-18 22:38

I am "neuro-atypical". All my life I have struggled with my ear. I can play in tune just fine, and even improvise a bit. To a certain extent I can even play things back to someone one on one, if I don't think about it. And yet, I failed sight singing and dictation twice in college. (Although it should be mentioned that they didn't actually "teach" it.)

It always seemed to me that I hear things just fine. But I absolutely could not play by ear. At best I could isolate a few notes from a tune. When I would try singing a familiar melody I could sound tuneful, but I inevitably got the notes wrong. I always wanted to be a jazz musician, but people were not helpful, and I was expected to just go and transcribe Charlie Parker (circa 1993). I could play from the "Omnibook" just fine. And yet, I could not figure out how to play "The Pink Panther" or "Night Train" to save my life. In spite of this, I was convinced that I heard things perfectly well, could play in tune, improvise somewhat, and even sing in a choir - sometimes when I am the only one on my part. However, I was keenly aware that many non-musician's can pick a tune out better than I can. For a long time I thought this was a memory issue, and in part I think it is, but I just discovered something....

Now through the magic of "Garage Band" I can import a recording and transcribe it by playing along with it. I can go over it 10,000 times, and even edit it after I record my version, note by note. By playing them together I can be sure it's exactly right. In the process I discovered this:

I realized that I was hearing perfectly fine. I hear the texture, and hear it aesthetically and emotionally. I couldn't copy it because I couldn't "catch" it as it went by. I was doing a drum part, and I could hear it note by note as it went by, but couldn't "sing it back". The music affects me, and I percieve it accurately in a purely sensory way. The problem is that it doesn't have time to "sink in". I know from extensive neuro-psychological testing that I have a deficit in "information processing". This means that I have problems processing my experiences and encoding them into memory. This or something else causes me to have problems with working memory, holding things in my head and manipulating them - like doing math in your head. I believe that I also have problems with memory itself, but that's a different issue.

Did you ever see a tee shirt or something on the floor, out of the corner of your eye, and think it was your pet "Fluffy"? You saw exactly what it was. Your eye didn't see wrong. It reported exactly what was there. But your brain interpreted it wrong because you didn't see it well enough. You thought you saw "Fluffy" because somehow you were expecting to, and didn't see it long enought impress what it actually was. A similar thing happens when you look at a fuzzy picture, or fragment of a picture. At first you can't tell what it is, and it looks like nothing, or you try to make it something else, untill you actually see it for what it is, and then you KNOW what it is. You saw exactly what was on the page, but didn't know how to interpret it.

So my whole life I have been dealing with this. It may be that I simply never learned to identify intervals and chords like other people do, because my sense perception was always in overdrive just trying to relay the signals, and my brain never got to the identification part. I even get confused sometimes about major and minor chords because both triads contain major and minor thirds. I hear one or both of the thirds accurately, but have some difficulty sorting the root out. When I was transcribing this piece I immediately recognized I/IV and V/I relationships, but got them switched. (The piece started on V, which got me mixed up. It took me a while to realize I was playing C/F when it was supposed to be G/C.) Then I got the chords perfect, but the voicing wrong. I could tell the voice leading wasn't right, but it took me a while to figure it out.

Anyhow, that's long, and I am unusual, but you may have students with similar problems. I never got much help in school or lessons, in part because I'm good at compensating for my deficits, but they're still there. I'm sure it would have helped immensely to be taught playing simple melodies by ear when I was young.

- Matthew Simington

Post Edited (2017-01-18 22:44)

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