Songwriting and ear training are two concepts that are strongly linked together, which is often overlooked. The goal of songwriting is to create music for an audience to hear. The goal of ear training is to develop a sense of hearing better able to listen to musical ideas.

A musician with better ear training is going to be better at listening to songs written by others for ideas. In addition, it helps to be able to objectively listen for those same ideas in your own songs. There are few areas of ear training in particular where songwriters should focus.

Dynamics

The pitch and rhythm of notes are an important aspect to writing a song, but dynamics also play a substantial role in songwriting. Dynamics is the area of music where a songwriter plays with how loud a song is. This is not necessarily the same idea as altering the volume of different instruments in a mix, but it can sometimes be related.

The ‘palm mute’ used by guitarists is an example of a guitarist using dynamics to alter a part. Both examples below are A power chords played with a straight eighth note pattern. The second example uses a power chord to introduce a dynamic change. There is no chord or rhythm change – but the dynamic change from the palm mute changes the line by accentuating the first downbeat and second upbeat of the passage.

Example 1 - Power chords without dynamics

Click to read the rest…

As I touched on in the first post on this subject, there are a wide variety of ideas about how absolute pitch works. Why do some people ‘just have it’? If you’re not born with it, how can you develop it? Why do some people hear real differences in a C and a D, and others not?

In this post I want to discuss some of the ideas around how absolute pitch works, and highlight what I thought was particularly promising in the forum post on absolute pitch training I mentioned before.

Conflicting theories

If you look at training courses for absolute (or “perfect”) pitch, you’ll find a lot of conflicting explanations of what makes the ear hear different pitches differently. Anything from the relative strength of the harmonics, to timbral clues (like the start and end of notes), to an inexplicable ‘character’ that you must try to hear through very deep listening.

My educational background is scientific and I’m a big fan of Occam’s Razor – so it’s probably no surprise that I tend to subscribe to the more basic explanation, one grounded in fundamental science: Click to read the rest…

Over at Ultimate-Guitar.com, a neuroscience student is inviting people to try an informal experiment with him, to test a method of developing absolute pitch.

It’s an interesting approach. He’s using a recording of a pure tone of middle C (261.6Hz for you Frequency Fundamentals students!) to ‘meditate’ on. Click to read the rest…