How we hear music
I am an active music listener, maybe extremely active. I have a problem just casually listening to a song and it gets in the way of simple things in life. I am not a good date for a musical outing. I don’t want my wife to talk while music is being performed and I become fixated on the performance.
I was listening to “Hey Jude” by The Beatles with a student the other day and I was verbally annotating the song. Notice how the drums are really back in the mix and the tambourine is quite present. The song starts with a pickup “Hey” is on the end of a four count and “Jude” is the down beat.
We listened to the acoustic guitar A songbook called The Compleat Beatles notated the guitar capoed up on the third fret. But my ear said that is not correct. It is a guitar that has been tuned down so the strings are lower in pitch by a whole step and looser. I can be annoying this wayJ.
Musicians develop their hearing in a way that is more complex than the casual listener we train ourselves to hear the distinct difference in two pitches or intervals. We learn to do this with multiple notes at a time. Chords are when we heara combination of three or more pitches sounded simultaneously. They have different flavors and many musicians can tell you what type of flavor a chord is. (examples include Am, Cmajor7 and hundreds of others)
Ears are really special things and we only get two of them. We can train our ears to observe and we can train our ears to tune out. It is fairly common for our ears to lose some mid and higher frequency sensitivity as we get older. I urge you to protect them.
I am an active music listener, maybe extremely active. I have a problem just casually listening to a song and it gets in the way of simple things in life. I am not a good date for a musical outing. I don’t want my wife to talk while music is being performed and I become fixated on the performance.
I was listening to “Hey Jude” by The Beatles with a student the other day and I was verbally annotating the song. Notice how the drums are really back in the mix and the tambourine is quite present. The song starts with a pickup “Hey” is on the end of a four count and “Jude” is the down beat.
We listened to the acoustic guitar A songbook called The Compleat Beatles notated the guitar capoed up on the third fret. But my ear said that is not correct. It is a guitar that has been tuned down so the strings are lower in pitch by a whole step and looser. I can be annoying this wayJ.
Musicians develop their hearing in a way that is more complex than the casual listener we train ourselves to hear the distinct difference in two pitches or intervals. We learn to do this with multiple notes at a time. Chords are when we heara combination of three or more pitches sounded simultaneously. They have different flavors and many musicians can tell you what type of flavor a chord is. (examples include Am, Cmajor7 and hundreds of others)
Ears are really special things and we only get two of them. We can train our ears to observe and we can train our ears to tune out. It is fairly common for our ears to lose some mid and higher frequency sensitivity as we get older. I urge you to protect them.
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