Types of musical hearing: what’s what?

Musical hearing is the ability to mentally distinguish sounds by their color, pitch, volume and duration. An ear for music, in general, like a sense of rhythm, can be developed, and there are many types of hearing (more precisely, its facets, sides) and each is more or less important in its own way.

Musical and non-musical sounds

There is simply a sea of ​​sounds in the world around us, but musical sound – this is not every sound. This is only the sound for which it is possible to determine and height (it depends on the vibration frequency of the physical body that is the source of sound), and timbre (richness, brightness, saturation, coloration of sound), and volume (the volume depends on the amplitude of the source vibrations – the stronger the initial impulse, the louder the sound at the input).

Rђ RІRѕS, non-musical sounds are called noise, for them we can determine both the volume and duration, often the timbre, but not always we can accurately determine their pitch.

Why was this preamble needed? And to confirm that the ear for music is the instrument of an already trained musician. And to those who refuse to study music under the pretext of lack of hearing and rape by a bear, we say frankly: an ear for music is not a scarce commodity, it is given to everyone who wants it!

Types of musical hearing

The issue of musical ear is a rather subtle one. Any type of musical hearing is in some sense associated with a certain psychological process or phenomenon (for example, with memory, thinking or imagination).

In order not to theorize too much and not to fall into banal and controversial classifications, we will simply try to characterize several concepts that are common in the musical environment and relate to this issue. These will be some types of musical hearing.

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Absolute pitch – this is memory for tonality (exact pitch), this is the ability to determine a note (tone) by its sound or, conversely, to reproduce a note from memory without additional adjustment using a tuning fork or any instrument, and also without comparisons with other known pitches. Absolute pitch is a special phenomenon of human sound memory (by analogy, for example, with visual photographic memory). For a person with this type of musical ear, recognizing a note is the same as for anyone else simply hearing and recognizing an ordinary letter of the alphabet.

A musician, in principle, does not particularly need absolute pitch, although it helps not to be out of tune: for example, to play the violin without errors. This quality also helps vocalists (although it does not make the owner of perfect pitch a vocalist): it contributes to the development of accurate intonation, and also helps to hold the part during ensemble polyphonic singing, although the singing itself will not become more expressive (quality) just from “hearing”.

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

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Relative hearing is a professional musical ear that allows you to hear and identify any musical element or the entire work, but only in relation to (that is, in comparison) the pitch it represents. It is not associated with memory, but with thinking. There may be two key points here:

• in tonal music, this is a sense of mode: the ability to navigate within the mode helps to hear everything that happens in music – the sequence of stable and unstable musical steps, their logical relationship, their connection into consonances, deviation and departure from the original tonality;
• in atonal music, this is hearing 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 powerful and perfect tool for a musician; it allows you to do a lot. Its only weak side is only an approximate guessing of the exact pitch of the sound: for example, I hear and can play a song, but in a different key (often simply more convenient for intonation – it depends on the type of singing voice or instrument you play).

Absolute and relative pitch are not opposites. They can complement each other. If a person has absolute pitch, but does not practice his relative pitch, he will not become a musician, while professionally developed relative pitch, as a cultivated type of thinking, allows any person to develop musicality.

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Inner hearing – the ability to hear music in the imagination. Seeing the notes on a sheet of paper, a musician can play the entire melody in his head. Well, or not just the melody – besides it, in his imagination he can complete the harmony, the orchestration (if the musician is an advanced one), and anything else.

Beginning musicians very often need to play a melody to become familiar with it, more advanced ones can sing it, but people with good inner hearing simply imagine the sounds.

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There are more types of musical hearing; each of them helps a musician in his general musical activity or in a more specialized area. For example, the most powerful tools of composers are such types of hearing as polyphonic, orchestral and rhythmic.

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“Musical eye” and “musical nose”!

THIS IS A HUMORIC BLOCK. Here we decided to place a humorous section of our post. How interesting and rich in impressions our life, the life of modern man…

Radio workers, DJs, as well as lovers of fashionable music, and even pop artists, in addition to hearing, which they use to enjoy music, also need such professional quality as How to find out about new releases without it? How to determine what your audience likes? You always need to sniff out such things!

Come up with something yourself!

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END. As musical and practical experience accumulates, hearing develops. Purposeful development of hearing, comprehension of the basics and complexities occurs in a cycle of special courses in music educational institutions. These are rhythmics, solfeggio and harmony, polyphony and orchestration.