This is interesting. I always had the impression that tone deafness was a singing issue. That the inability to sing on key came from a physical failure to vibrate one’s vocal chords at a specific frequency. In other words their brain knew the pitch but their vocal chords wouldn’t respond properly to their brain’s request to shift up or down the frequency.
But apparently this isn’t the case.
What some contributors here are saying is that they just can’t mentally map the process of increasing or decreasing the frequency of a sound in order to match another sound.
So tone-deaf people, can you recognize when a note in a melody is off key?
Can you recognize whether the off key note is too high or too low?
Or, maybe you can do these things it’s just that you aren’t as interested as some of us. That is, you CAN achieve pitch but have never seen any reward for doing so and so you just don’t care.
Speaking for myself, if I am at a gig or something, I will never notice the band messing up part of the song. I have had friends comment on, say, the guitarist making a mistake, but to me everything I heard was the way it was supposed to sound, as far as I know.
You might hear the guitarist playing the wrong chords for thirty seconds, but unless it was such a massive fuckup that the rest of the band lost rhythm as a result, I would probably never be any the wiser.
Yep. There are people who are good at it. I have their work on my iPod. Why would I struggle to play “Twinkle, twinkle”? It would not be enjoyable for me to even attempt it.
My husband would never be able to get it right. He might eventually get to an approximation of the tune - notes go up here, down here, up again here - but unless it was a total accident, he wouldn’t be able to recognize that he HAD found the correct keys if he did hit them.
There’s a lot of ability and knowledge that you’re assuming people just come out of the box with, and I don’t think that’s the case.
It would be like me saying that just because I learned to read essentially without formal training before I was 4, *everyone *should be able to pick out Hop On Pop by themselves, without help. Not a universal skill-set there.
Some things off the top of my head that I can see being hard to intuit:
Matching the individual notes to the original tune - that requires the person to first *hear *the difference between the notes (both in the original tune and on the instrument and in your mental/physical voice), *remember *them, *recreate *them accurately, and then recreate them *while being influenced *by comparitive notes from the instrument. There is also the difficulty of *recognizing *matching notes on an instrument which may not sound anything like the original instrument - for example, to my husband, Middle C on a sax sounds nothing like Middle C on a piano.
Physical/Spacial context of the instrument. Over the course of ‘picking out’ a tune, you also have to remember the keys or strings or what-have-yous that you already determined were useful or not. If the note-making methodology of the instrument is totally unfamiliar to you or very difficult to understand or to differentiate, it’s going to be hard to remember what you’ve already eliminated or used when you want to re-start the tune, or try another key to match the tune in your head.
I don’t think your 100 meter example is valid here. Based on my childhood experience of singing in class, most of the students I grew up with had the ability to recognize and sing on key. It was usually only one or two kids out of thirty that lacked the ability.
So if greater than 90% of people could once run 100 meters in under 12 seconds only then your statement would be on par.
And why would it be extremely arrogant to not understand that there are a minority of people that lack one certain trait? Maybe a slight arrogance but I see that as more of a show of ignorance.
Well, I don’t know how many people could write a novel, if they really wanted to and were willing to expend the time and effort in doing so (and maybe in learning a bit about novel construction)—but I strongly suspect it’s a lot more than just those who actually do write a novel.
And I think this was the OP’s point. How many people could pick out a tune, if they really wanted to and were willing to spend the time and effort in doing so. I don’t think this is a stupid or arrogant question. After all, what is singing a song (or humming, or whistling) but picking out a tune on your own built-in “instrument”?
Agreed, and I’d guess it’s not always about training or practice either. I didn’t learn guitar until my 20’s, and about a year into it my teacher remarked on how I was able to pick things out by ear, which he couldn’t do…and he was obviously a way better player than me (still is, I’m sure). So I’m guessing a big part is dumb luck/genetics, and nothing to be all that excited about.
Now, the first time I got callouses from playing…that was absurdly pleasing.
On that note [heh] I had a very good friend in high school that had perfect pitch, was a math wiz [we could go grocery shopping and he could keep track of everything I tossed him, including the tax, or you could tell him the usual bar trick of a string of numbers with =-/ and * and follow along on a calculator and he would get it right. Damn him :p] He could play anything by ear on piano if he could either read through the sheet music once, or hear it off a record twice. He went to college for music and did piano, voice, conducting and arranging/composition. He used to make money doing summer stock in operas and musicals. I would love to have 10% of his talent and skills. All I can do is sing.
[of course my high school chorus of a whopping 15 people used to compete at an insanely high level and win competitions against schools that fielded choruses of 40 or more kids … though it did give me an intense hatred of Frostiana as I was the lead soprano. Nothing like essentially droning Oh Star at my top end for most of the damned song I much preferred Veni Veni Emmanuel or LAUDAMUS (Unto Thee All Praise Be Given) in either english or welsh.]
Easily on a piano, and possibly on a violin/viola/cello. I took one year of violon lessons. I’m not sure I could do it on a brass or woodwind instrument, because I’ve never played one.
I have been playing classical guitar for 30 years. If you put sheet music in front of me I can play it; makes no difference whether I have heard the tune before or not. If you play a tune, even one as simple as Twinkle Twinkle or Happy Birthday, and ask me to play it, I don’t even know where to begin.
When I, or somebody else, hits a wrong note I can hear it and know it’s wrong, but I do not know whether it is sharp or flat.
A question for those who say you can’t do this, can you hum the tune to twinkle twinkle little star?
Since it seems like people are getting a bit touchy, I will point out that this is an honest question and not a challenge of any sort. I walked up to my grandmother’s piano at the age of five and picked out Mary Had a Little Lamb after playing with the instrument for a while (it was more than 10 minutes, and my Grandmother must have had the patience of a saint to put up with it.) So clearly I am one of the people who has this skill. I never really thought about if other people could do the same thing or not.
Interestingly, I can’t sing worth a damn. If I practice the same song enough I can get it down, but while I can hear the notes, I don’t have good enough control over my voice to be able to hit them consistently.
My piano teacher when I was younger was like that. I ended up giving up on lessons because my first instrument (guitar) was taught to me in such a different way that I felt like all I was learning was how to sight read, and not how to play piano. The classical approach is so very different than how I was taught I couldn’t get past the cognitive dissonance when I was a teenager and move on to enjoying playing. As I got older I managed to sort that stuff out, but it is a stark difference in the relationship to your instrument.
I have always found that to be the most fascinating thing about many of the classically trained musicians that I meet. The approach to music is so different than my own.
A lot of musicians can pick out the chords from a song. It takes practice to do it quickly. My guitar teacher did it nearly every day for his students. We were told to bring in a record with a song we wanted to learn. Usually it took him two passes through the song to get the chords. Lead guitar took a bit longer depending on how complicated it was.
Anybody with average coordination and mental abilities can learn the mechanics of picking out a tune. Some of us still can’t make it sound any good though. Even if the tune is simplistic enough, and requires no delicate timing or other nuances, we are only acting as a simplistic player piano, and can’t carry the skill over to the next tune.
I know how to read music, and the mechanics of playing several instruments, but is of no use to me. Some people are born with silver spoons in their mouths, I was born with a tin spoon in my ear.
My younger daughter has had this ability since she could sit up at a piano keyboard. She played around for a few days and hasn’t stopped since. My older daughter is a competent fiddle player, but she has far more enthusiasm than talent.
I am not allowed to hum, whistle or otherwise try to reproduce a tune is anyone else is playing. My Wife tells me that I have negative musical ability, and can make others sound worse just by participating.
