Solfege Problem
My friend has asked me to teach her how to sight sing. She is OK with rhythm and reading the notes (parlati) But she has difficulty recognizing the musical intervals when it comes to cantati solfege. The problem is that she cannot determine whether I'm playing an octave or a perfect fifth on the piano and it has made her really upset.
I've always been able to recognize the intervals intuitively, hence I can't think of any exercises I could give her to improve her ears. Or at least nothing based on an experience or something.
Are there any ways I could train her ears with?
Replies (14)
That would surely help. Thank you
I only knew twinkle twinkle and Beethoven's piano concerto from the list you mentioned, but I would definitely think of some other tunes and try them in the class.
You should have her listen to the Berg Concerto for fifths.
All jokes aside, I'm sure that there are some good tricks, but I imagine that having some patience with the reading will eventually imprint it. As Scott suggested, you may want to figure out some music she knows that she can use as a shorthand. Lots of pop music uses seconds and thirds.
At the very least, if she forgets and can sing a scale, then she can find the note, but it's good to be patient as long as the practice is there and makes sense.
I have a rather fundamental question. When I play two notes simultaneously, should she be trying to hear each note individually and then attributing them to an interval or should she adapt her ears to the combination of the notes?
Do I even need to go in that direction?
Hi, I have always done Scott's trick myself with great success...
Every Interval made me think of a tune...
Whether the 5ths on a piano are technically perfect should not matter, especially for the ears of a beginner. If the piano is in an acceptable state of tuning, the perfect 5ths will be close enough.
If they weren't, too many musicians and audience members would find modern tuning unacceptable.
Don't let John's tuning ideé fixe muddle the issue.
Eventually, it's desirable to be able to pick out an interval when both pitches are sounded concurrently (it's a necessity for the working musician). A beginner's ability to do in the beginning will vary, but that will ultimately be a goal.
Thank you, everyone :)
Mahta
There was a time when I could sight-sing to professional performance level, and we weren't taught by listening to intervals. I'm not at all convinced that this is a skill that will transfer in any useful way to singing by sight. This is more the skill of musical dictation, which is a different beast altogether, I would suggest. Certainly, even when I could sight-sing to a high level, I couldn't take musical dictation to save my life.
Much more useful is to sing the intervals from notation. And the best way to do this, I think, is to gradually work from simple to more complex melodies, covering an increasing range of intervals. When sight-singing at performance speed you don't have time to relate intervals to tunes - that's a bit of a dead end, I feel. With experience, you get a sense of how an intervals "feels" in the vocal apparatus, just as fiddlers get a sense of how a shift "feels" on the fingerboard. No-one is going to confuse a 5th shift and an 8ve shift on the fiddle, and no singer will confuse the physical sensation of a fifth jump to an octave jump. The octave is much harder work!
There is an excellent free workbook here with a progressive approach to learning sight singing. Well worth a look.
You've got me curious - I'm unfamiliar with the terms parlati and cantati and a quick Google search didn't turn up anything useful. Do you have a link to a good definition?
I definitely rely on recognizing intervals when singing from printed choral music. Sometimes I even write in symbols such as m3 or P4 in tricky passages, especially if there is a sudden key change and switching between sharps and flats or vice versa.
Since I didn't know the English terms, I wrote the terms we use in Iran, phonetically. I'm sorry! I just took a shot and hoped for you to understand what I meant....
I THINK the words are derived from Italy, in which case, their dictation is not probably correct. The definitions I could think of at the moment are:
Parlati: related to speaking
Cantati: related to singing
My English is not that good or I would have explained their usage in solfege. Sorry for that.
[Solfege is not an English word either, right? What is the best synonym for it? :S ]
In Italian parlati is spoken, cantati is sung (Solfege is the same over here).
If she has trouble, one way is to have her sing the two pitches that are being sounded and fill in the scale between them, but until her ears develop, it may be a better use of time to have her sing a lot.
Thanks for the explanation. I have minimal familiarity with solfege but hadn't heard of the other words, and wondered if they were some kind of subcategory of solfege.
I think it's great that you are helping your friend and I wish you success.
I had to practice ear training and sight singing for the first time this semester for a music theory class, and I started off having a lot of trouble recognizing intervals as well. What really helped me was using common melodies that contain those intervals as guides and using the exercises on musictheory.net (http://www.musictheory.net/exercises) to practice. They have one specifically for recognizing intervals. I started off by isolating the intervals that I wanted to work on. At first, I just chose between m2, M2, m3, and M3. Then I kept adding more intervals to the mix until I could recognize all of them consistently. If there were any two that I had particular trouble distinguishing, like m6 and M6, I could isolate those two and focus on them before adding them in to the whole list.
There is an online ear training site called Theta Music which you can check out for free. It's designed primarily for 'ear' players (lots of guitarists and rockers) but the games are fun and it really does help sharpen your ears. I spent a couple of weeks driving my family insane with it LOL
It also has games for singers which require a small mic (easily and cheaply available at any Radio Shack).
With one studio account, you can have all your students using it and you have assignment and checkup functions available to keep them on track.
http://trainer.thetamusic.com/
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May 13, 2013 at 03:47 AM · In aural skills classes, it's common to use popular tunes to help recognize intervals. For example, the Here Comes the Bride starts with a perfect 4th, twinkle twinkle starts with a perfect 5th, Brahms Lullaby with a minor 3rd, Jaws with a minor 2nd, There's a place for us is a minor 7th (so is the slow movement from Beethoven piano concert #5). You can also use intervals from pop tunes that the student recognizes.