uning] Digest Number 3965

Gene wrote:

"I think you misunderstood my question--I meant, in sight reading.

In my experience you learn to hear polyphony by listening to a lot of
it and paying attention, but that's actual sound."

It's simply practice. After playing/singing from score for long enough, the sounds are internalized, you can literally look at the page and hear them in your head.

Here's an exercise for developing this kind of skill: take a simple piano piece, with a treble and a bass line. Play both lines. Now read the score through, in time, without playing, imagining the sounds. Then play one line and sing the other. Play the line again and imagine the other. Sing the line and imagine the other. Finally, read through the score again, in time, and imagine both lines.

I have several friends who have come to music from a professional science or math background, and although they understand the mechanics of music, they have considerable frustration when it comes to some elements of musicianship. What might be called an intellectual command over the music comes systematically and fast, but actually performing (and these skills are really performance skills) requires some frustratingly low level exercises, generous use of time, and lots of repetition. I'd love to be able to say that there was some efficient alternative to such practicing, but I honestly don't know of one.

DJW

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Daniel Wolf <djwolf@...> wrote:

> It's simply practice. After playing/singing from score for long enough,
> the sounds are internalized, you can literally look at the page and
hear
> them in your head.

My experience is that I learned to hear my own part, and also
recognize where I was harmonically. Maybe more time would have done it.