Types of musical ear: what's what?

An ear for music is an opportunity for the mind to distinguish sounds by their color, pitch, volume and duration. The musical ear, in general, as well as the sense of rhythm, can be developed, and there are many types of hearing (more precisely, its faces, sides) and each is more or less important in its own way.

Sounds musical and non-musical

The sounds in the world around us are just a sea, but musical sound - this is not every sound. This is only the sound for which you can define and height (it depends on the frequency of oscillation of the physical body that is the source of sound), and timbre (richness, brightness, saturation, color of sound), and volume (The volume depends on the amplitude of the source oscillations - the stronger the initial impulse, the louder the sound will be at the input).

But non-musical sounds are called noisyfor them we can determine both loudness and duration, often timbre, but not always we can precisely determine their pitch.

What was the need for this preamble? And to confirm that the ear for music is a tool for an already trained musician. And to those who refuse to engage in music under the pretext of the absence of hearing and rape by a bear, we speak directly: a musical ear is not a scarce commodity, it is distributed to everyone who desires!

Types of ear for music

The question of musical hearing is quite subtle. Any kind of musical ear in some sense is associated with a specific psychological process or phenomenon (for example, with memory, thinking or imagination).

In order not to theorize much and not to fall into banal and controversial classifications, we will just try to characterize several concepts common to the musical environment related to this issue. This will be some kind of musical ear.

Absolute hearing - it is a memory of tonality (exact height), it is an opportunity to determine a note (tone) by its sound or, on the contrary, to reproduce a note from memory without additional tuning by a tuning fork or some instrument, and also without comparisons with other known heights. Absolute hearing is a special phenomenon of human sound memory (by analogy, for example, with visual photographic memory). For a person with such a musical ear, to recognize a note is the same as for any other to simply hear and identify an ordinary letter of the alphabet.

An absolute ear in principle is not particularly necessary for a musician, although it helps not to fake: for example, to play the violin without mistakes. This quality also helps vocalists (although it does not make an absolute ear holder a vocalist): it helps to develop intonation accuracy, and also helps to keep the party during ensemble polyphonic singing, although actually singing only from “hearing” will not become more expressive (qualitative).

The absolute type of hearing cannot be artificially acquired, since the quality is innate, but identical all-hearing can be developed through training (almost all “practicing” musicians come to this state sooner or later).

Relative hearing - it is a professional musical ear that allows you to hear and define any musical element or the entire work, but only relatively (that is, by comparison) of the pitch it represents. It is not connected with memory, but with thinking. There are two key points here:

  • in tonal music, this feeling of fret: the ability to navigate inside the fret helps to hear everything that happens in music - a sequence of stable and unstable musical steps, their logical interconnection, their connection into harmony, deviation and departure from the original tone;
  • in atonal music, this hearing of intervals: the ability to hear and distinguish intervals (the distance from one sound to another) allows you to accurately repeat or reproduce any sequence of sounds.

Relative hearing is a very strong and perfect instrument of a musician, it allows you to do a lot. His only weakness is only an approximate guessing of the exact pitch: for example, I hear and can play a song, but in a different key (often just more convenient for intonation) depends on the type of singing voice or instrument on which you play).

Absolute and relative hearing are not opposites. They can complement each other. If a person has absolute hearing, but does not deal with his relative, he will not become a musician, while professionally developed relative hearing, as an educated type of thinking, allows one to develop musicality.

Inner ear - ability to hear music in imagination. Seeing the notes on the sheet, the musician can play the whole melody in his head. Well, or not just a melody - besides her, he, in his imagination, completes both harmony, and orchestration (if the musician is advanced), and anything.

Beginner musicians very often need to play a melody in order to familiarize themselves with it, more advanced ones can sing it, but, and people with good internal hearing simply represent sounds.

There are more kinds of musical hearing that can be distinguished; each of them helps the musician in his general musical activity or in a more specialized field. For example, the most powerful instruments of composers are such types of hearing, as polyphonic, orchestral and rhythmic.

"Musical eye" and "musical scent"!

THIS IS A HUMOROUS UNIT. Here we decided to put a comic section of our post. How interesting and rich is our life, the life of modern man ...

Radio workers, DJs, as well as lovers of fashionable music, as well as stage artists, besides the rumor they use to enjoy music, also need such professional quality as "musical scent"! How can you learn about new products without it? How to determine what the audience likes? Such things always need to smell!

About "musical eye" think of something yourself!

END. With the accumulation of musical and practical experience, hearing develops. Purposeful development of hearing, comprehension of the fundamentals and difficulties occurs in a cycle of special courses in music schools. These are rhythmics, solfeggio and harmony, polyphony and orchestration.

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