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Shape Recognition

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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