Had a few music lessons, no formal training. When at school, they taught music, but I dropped out of music lessons as soon as I could - they didn't make any sense to me, that was after perhaps a year or two.
Looking back, maybe one issue is that I have a tiny vocal range, trying just now, I find it a bit uncomfortable to sing notes through a complete octave. So, I probably thought I couldn't sing because I'd only be able to sing along if the music was restricted in range and the right key. Also as a male voice, at least after your voice breaks, you have the extra challenge of singing an octave below others especially if no other men are singing, or only singing quietly.
Another issue is that I have good sensitivity to pitch, but never formally trained. So, I can hear far more distinctions of pitch than just 12 notes to an octave. More like perhaps fifty or a hundred notes per octave that sound distinctively different, like they are different notes, I'd imagine, and more than that if listening carefully while tuning. At any rate if you raise a note by a tenth of a semitone, I find it quite a noticeable change of pitch. In theory many musicians can distinguish 25 distinct notes per semitone played one after another (a lot more if they are part of chords and you listen to the beat patterns) - if they listen carefully - wouldn't be unusual if you can do that. You get to hear more distinctions of pitches the more you work with microtonal music - and some microtonalists can hear a lot more than that especially in the vicinity of middle C - while others hear fewer - but - when notes are close together like that they sound like similar notes, just slightly different in pitch. I'm talking here about notes that sound like they have a different quality or character.
Sometimes notes that are close to each other can sound as different from each other to my ears as notes that are far apart.
As well as that, if I listen carefully, I can pick out overtones so that a single note on a single instrument, to me can sound like many different pitches played simultaneously. When listening to water, or engine noises or such like, again I hear it like a symphony of many different simultaneous pitches and rhythms. So - not sure if it was always like that or something I learnt later - but quite possibly that might have happened back then as well.
That makes it pretty hard to work out what other people are doing - if you haven't yet laid down the basic framework of 12 recognizable pitches per octave - because people naturally, instinctively adjust the pitches as they sing, this is called adaptive tuning.
These are just guesses. It might well be something else. I can't go back in time and ask myself questions and do tests to find out what the issue was.
But for whatever reason - I found music challenging to listen to and almost impossible to participate in - but also tremendously fascinating.
I come from a musical family, all my siblings are musical - and they don't seem to have any of these issues. So I'm not sure what "went wrong" in my case.
I used to practice piano for ages by myself, and taught to read from beginner's books for piano - nothing advanced, quite simple pieces. And later on I taught myself recorder. Eventually quite complex pieces for recorder. And learnt 'cello a bit, again self taught.
All the way through - for instance with recorder, then I had major issues keeping a steady pitch - as of course most people do on recorder when they start - but later on still did, difference is I could hear what was going on (I think many beginner recorder players hardly notice) but couldn't do much about it. But somehow was fascinated by it, and taught myself enough breath control to be able to have reasonably steady pitch though still not as controlled as I would like.
With the 'cello then I used to spend ages - like sometimes hours - just tuning it - and had fine tune adjusters at the bridge end on every string (which few string players do). It was - not frustrating or boring, but a rich and fascinating experience.
And - just tuning the 'cello I found a fascinating thing to do - turns out that I'm rather sensitive also to overtones and beating, and you get amazingly intricate complex things going on as you tune notes to each other if you can hear those things.
When listening to music - then - it was - like a rich tapestry of sound - but hard to understand, often more like a cacophony than a lovely pattern of pitches.
When I got to university - then they had regular lunchtime concerts by the music students every Friday - and in the evenings, I think was a Wednesday - frequent concerts by visiting musicians and the resident quartet, the Fitzwilliam quartet. I went to all the concerts I could manage. And - for a while it was like that - fascinating cacophony, hard to understand, things like string quartets - not necessarily what most would consider challenging listening.
Mixed up with other concerts that most would find pretty challenging by the student composers there - things like music made from engine noises, and banging the piano in different places, and audio clips layered together in early "computer music" to make compositions - and so forth.
So anyway - at some point with a lot of listening, it kind of "clicked" and I found myself immersed in the music - often it was like going to another world, when it ended, it was like the most engrossing book you could read and more so, took quite a while to return to the "real world" again.
I had a few formal piano lessons at that point, just one or two, given by a student at the university. We worked through some early pieces in Bartok's Microcosmos, my own choice. (If you've come across it, may think of his ferociously difficult advanced Microcosmos studies - but it starts off really simple, but interesting and challenging five finger exercises in book 1 - and introducing just one finger at a time also - but - not tied to the framework of "Western" rhythms and phrasing - so - interesting way to begin piano if you are into that sort of thing).
I also worked through a bit of Hindemith's "Elementary training for musicians" - another "classic" that takes you all the way from the simplest of musical ideas, repeating pulse - to advanced concepts step by step - but it got rather too hard for me at the time, quickly so didn't get very far. Some time I want to go back to that :).
On recorder - then I discovered the music of Jacob Van Eyck, the C17 blind Carollinier (player of church bells from keyboard), which starts off simple and gets more and more elaborate, probably many recorder player's favourite composer as it lies so well under your fingers as you play.
Later on - a long time later on - then I made my first steps in composition. Was interesting how it happened. I was, and still am, keen on Tolkein's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Anyway one day when I woke up, I had a song running in my mind, a melody for the Dwarf's song about the misty mountains at the start of the Hobbit. It was the first time I ever made up a tune for myself. Not sure when exactly but probably in my mid to late twenties.
So, up to then I thought that composition was something you could only do if you were a music student who had studied for years and mastered music theory and chord progressions etc etc, and able to look at a score and read it and hear the music in your mind and all that sort of thing.
But I realized - it is something anyone can do - the world of "Amateur composing". Anyone can make up a tune. Doesn't have to be a great tune, or become a hit or anything. I just mean, the creative process of making a tune yourself rather than only ever playing tunes written by other people. It takes you right to the heart of music in a way that few things do.
And you don't have to understand the theory at all. The theory is something musicians invented in order to understand what composers do - I think better to think of it that way rather than the other way around. Of course composers who are trained in theory use that to help them compose music, I'm not denying that. But all the rules, fundamentally, are based on things discovered by composers with a keen ear who listened to what they played, and found out what sounds good to them.
It's very different from, say, maths (which is my first subject) - where you have a rigorous notion of what counts as a proof - and if you put symbols together in a way that feels great, but doesn't follow those rules - it simply isn't mathematics. Same is true for physics. I think that's a lot of the reason why you get so much by way of "fringe physics" because many people don't understand the fundamental way it works.
You can observe things, e.g. that a chord sounds nice - but a proper scientific physical theory, e.g. to try to explain why certain chords sound harmonious (and there are theories for this) is based on a set of rules that you have to follow exactly once you have laid them down. And if those rules don't come to the right predictions, you have to change the theory - or - say things such as "this theory only works in such and such conditions".
While with music theory - well the bottom line is - that if it sounds right to you as the composer - then you can just go ahead and do it. And the people who write theory books are then left with the problem of working out a theory for whatever it is you did.
So - then as well as writing my own amateur music compositions from time to time, and improvising endlessly on piano (in a non conventional way not based on standard chord patterns or keys - sounds great to me but some people would find it quite challenging) - I then went on to invent some mathematical ideas for "fractal music" which take a tiny seed pattern and build that up to make an entire piece of music.
This sort of thing.
Plays the tuning - then the short seed phrase - then everything else comes out of it by following mathematical rules.
So anyway - that led me into the world of microtonal music because at an early stage I added microtonal capabilities to the program - able to use any number of notes per octave, or to use any of the notes from the harmonic series etc.
To me it all sounds great. I don't have any "twelve equal grid" for categorizing the pitches I hear, or for understanding the chords, never managed to learn that.
So anyway that led to a lot of interest from microtonalists - because - though I'd added those capabilities just in order to be able to play in those various tunings for my fractal tunes - it turned out - that there was hardly any software available at that time for composing and playing on a computer in anything except twelve equal + pitch inflections.
You could code a microtonal composition in midi - but it was a long and complex process. There were some microtonal software programs around - but not many - perhaps about 3 that you would know about at the time if you were a microtonalist - with only one of them for Windows (one other for the Mac - L'iL Miss Scale Oven by Jeff Scott, no longer avilable, and one for Linux, SCALA by Manuel Op de Coul, which at that point was unable to play sounds, just output results of tuning calculations into a window, and Graham Breed's JI Relay for Windows - also - not widely known, Fred Nachbaur's midi tempering utilities for Windows)
So - I ended up getting many requests from keen Windows microtonal musicians and composers to add various features to Tune Smithy which they could use to retune their compositions in Midi. It was the start of "virtual instruments" - at that time the main one was GigaSampler - so retuning it to midi - that let you get a first impression of what your composition sounds like - on fairly reasonable versions of "virtual instruments" - playing back recordings of entire notes recorded on the original instruments, pieced together to make the music.
So, Tune Smithy grew and grew, with one then another microtonal feature, then it split into many different "tasks" and for quite a few years that was my life work. And some time I'll go back to it - though - it is still available and quite a few composers use it every day for their day to day microtonal composition - but it's not been updated for many years now. That's because there are many other alternative ways to do the same thing nowadays. Still there are a few things which you can only do in Tune Smithy - and for composers who want to do those things - it's worth it for its rather clunky old interface - and - somewhat eccentric way of doing things - deriving from its origins as a program for making fractal music.
Anyway - that led me to the microtonal online community - many microtonal composer friends now. And - turned out that they liked my amateur microtonal compositions, which was a surprise. So I started doing a lot more amateur microtonal composition. Just led by my ear, what sounded good, with - a bit of theory - understanding what notes are expected to go well together from harmonic series, and a very basic understanding of how chord progressions work (e.g. cycle of fifths) - but largely guided just by what sounds good.
Here is one of my easier listening pieces - here I just improvised in 17 equal - which is similar to twelve equal in many ways.
Actually, this is - quite a good first step if you are used to twelve equal - but - has more "crunchy" chords. T
So - in microtonal music especially - that's actually an asset in a way. May be in other situations also. Because you don't have the framework of twelve equal intervals and music theory progressions etc - you come to the microtonal tuning with a fresh start, ears picking things out for the first time.
Many composers get to microtonal music by first learning twelve equal composition - maybe right through music college - and then - have to either unlearn or adapt all their ideas to microtonal tuning systems - and can be a major issue. I'm talking about Western composers here. Of course there are also many composers who start with other traditions.
So - then they are constantly relating everything they hear in microtonal music to 12 tone paradigms - this sounds like a major third, this sounds like a minor third, this sounds like a fourth, this sounds like a dominant seventh, ...
So for instance, they might explore seventeen equal - it has lots of similarities to twelve equal - though eventually you'd find that it has seventeen different key signatures instead of the usual 12, and that it has different flavours of chords that in twelve tone are treated as identical (other systems similar to twelve tone music include 19 equal, 31 equal and 53 equal - the last one of course has 53 different key signatures - many others also).
For me, I have a major challenge there - that I've not learnt to recognize musical intervals such as major and minor thirds etc by ear. I can hear that a melody is minor or major - but if you play just a single interval in isolation - it's a major challenge recognizing it - even to have a rough idea how wide it is.
This is something I discovered when I programmed a test into Tune Smithy to learn to recognize intervals. I expected it to be easy - as after all I have fine pitch sensitivity. But - when I first tested - was astonished to find - that if I had just two notes played one after another - with no musical context - I couldn't even tell the difference between a whole tone and a fifth!
I'm better at it now, but still am quite challenged in this area. For the programming - there are many ways to test that the pitches the program play are correct - including spectral analysis - and looking at the midi data. And I am very good at recognizing a pitch if it comes up again later in the tune. So if you have an E at 5/4, and later on maybe a fair bit later on it's played as a 400.0 or an 81/64, not that far away, chances are I'll notice that the note has changed. So - have quite good long term pitch memory - though not absolute pitch. All that helps with microtonal programming.
Also - I can tune microtonal intervals by listening to the beat patterns when the notes are played together. That's also useful for testing the programming also and debugging - you can play two notes together on the in built wave shape player in Tune Smithy - and if theory says it should be beating at a rate of 2 beats per second, and instead it is beating at say 4 beats per second - you know you've done something wrong.
But I still don't have good recognition for musical intervals. And I can't read a piece of music and hear it in my mind's ear as most composers can.
I can read it and play it on keyboard or recorder. But - for instance if I have a tune in my mind which I want to write down - then - first I have to pick out the notes on recorder or keyboard - and then write it down as music notation.
Perhaps the one thing I wish I had, most of all, from early music training - is this ability to read a score and hear it in my mind - or to hear music in my mind and know how to notate it directly to a score.
Now - I can still work with scores without hearing it in my mind. Don't know how it works. But once I'm used to a particular tuning - sometimes it kind of takes over and I put notes on the score feeling sure they will work without really knowing what they sound like. Then play it, and it works. It's often quite useful for the creative process, this mixture of having a kind of rough idea, but still, not really knowing what is going to happen when you hit that play button.
So - it has an upside also. But I wish I had a closer connection between heard pitches and musical scores. I've tried teaching myself, composer friends say that this is natural and what I need to do is to do lots of interval recognition training. And you can get interval recognition training software. But it is difficult to stick at it for long when you find yourself so bad at it, getting scores like - 50% to start with, then with a lot of work you get 80% recognition say, but then drop back down again when you stop trying. When other things are much easier to do, and with many other demands on your time - that's a hard thing to do. But some day maybe I'll do it. From my experiences trying it out, I think it would be a case of many months, quite possibly a year or so, of interval training for - say half an hour a day - that might do it. I would of course also train in recognition of microtonal intervals not just the major / minor etc of twelve tone music.
I also wish I had clearer long term memory and picture of music that I hear. Am amazed when I hear composers talking about a new piece of music they have just heard for the first time - all the details that they remember. For me it's an immersive experience - I live it - a bit like reading a novel perhaps - and it washes through me - but especially when I hear it for the first time - may not have much memory at the end of the piece, maybe just a few kind of "glimpses" in my memory, remember a few moments in a hard to articulate way, that's all. Was totally caught up in it, it's not a case of being distant from it - but not got a clear memory after the event.
If I follow it on a score as it plays then I can remember more easily. Though I don't have this immediate connection of pitches to score - still - I find I can follow the score in a rough kind of a way - if it's not too complex or have too many similar passages in it - and I find that helps me to hear the structures in the music so is something I do from time to time, just listen to music I like and follow it on a score. But - if it's like a symphony, going presto, turning over a page every few seconds, and perhaps have to turn back from time to time for the repeats - then I can get lost easily :). And once lost can be hard to find my place again because I don't have that exact connection just approximate between the notes I hear and the notes on the score. It's probably hard to understand what I'm saying here if you have that as something you learnt from an early age as a trained musician. You hear the music, you understand how the notation works, but you can't join the two of them together exactly in your mind.
So - perhaps if I did interval training and could recognize intervals instantly - and other ear training - that might well help to make that connection.
It's a minor thing in a way, I greatly enjoy and appreciate the music which is the main thing. Does it matter if I don't remember it afterwards as easily as a trained musician? :).
Looking back, maybe one issue is that I have a tiny vocal range, trying just now, I find it a bit uncomfortable to sing notes through a complete octave. So, I probably thought I couldn't sing because I'd only be able to sing along if the music was restricted in range and the right key. Also as a male voice, at least after your voice breaks, you have the extra challenge of singing an octave below others especially if no other men are singing, or only singing quietly.
Another issue is that I have good sensitivity to pitch, but never formally trained. So, I can hear far more distinctions of pitch than just 12 notes to an octave. More like perhaps fifty or a hundred notes per octave that sound distinctively different, like they are different notes, I'd imagine, and more than that if listening carefully while tuning. At any rate if you raise a note by a tenth of a semitone, I find it quite a noticeable change of pitch. In theory many musicians can distinguish 25 distinct notes per semitone played one after another (a lot more if they are part of chords and you listen to the beat patterns) - if they listen carefully - wouldn't be unusual if you can do that. You get to hear more distinctions of pitches the more you work with microtonal music - and some microtonalists can hear a lot more than that especially in the vicinity of middle C - while others hear fewer - but - when notes are close together like that they sound like similar notes, just slightly different in pitch. I'm talking here about notes that sound like they have a different quality or character.
Sometimes notes that are close to each other can sound as different from each other to my ears as notes that are far apart.
As well as that, if I listen carefully, I can pick out overtones so that a single note on a single instrument, to me can sound like many different pitches played simultaneously. When listening to water, or engine noises or such like, again I hear it like a symphony of many different simultaneous pitches and rhythms. So - not sure if it was always like that or something I learnt later - but quite possibly that might have happened back then as well.
That makes it pretty hard to work out what other people are doing - if you haven't yet laid down the basic framework of 12 recognizable pitches per octave - because people naturally, instinctively adjust the pitches as they sing, this is called adaptive tuning.
These are just guesses. It might well be something else. I can't go back in time and ask myself questions and do tests to find out what the issue was.
But for whatever reason - I found music challenging to listen to and almost impossible to participate in - but also tremendously fascinating.
I come from a musical family, all my siblings are musical - and they don't seem to have any of these issues. So I'm not sure what "went wrong" in my case.
I used to practice piano for ages by myself, and taught to read from beginner's books for piano - nothing advanced, quite simple pieces. And later on I taught myself recorder. Eventually quite complex pieces for recorder. And learnt 'cello a bit, again self taught.
All the way through - for instance with recorder, then I had major issues keeping a steady pitch - as of course most people do on recorder when they start - but later on still did, difference is I could hear what was going on (I think many beginner recorder players hardly notice) but couldn't do much about it. But somehow was fascinated by it, and taught myself enough breath control to be able to have reasonably steady pitch though still not as controlled as I would like.
With the 'cello then I used to spend ages - like sometimes hours - just tuning it - and had fine tune adjusters at the bridge end on every string (which few string players do). It was - not frustrating or boring, but a rich and fascinating experience.
And - just tuning the 'cello I found a fascinating thing to do - turns out that I'm rather sensitive also to overtones and beating, and you get amazingly intricate complex things going on as you tune notes to each other if you can hear those things.
When listening to music - then - it was - like a rich tapestry of sound - but hard to understand, often more like a cacophony than a lovely pattern of pitches.
When I got to university - then they had regular lunchtime concerts by the music students every Friday - and in the evenings, I think was a Wednesday - frequent concerts by visiting musicians and the resident quartet, the Fitzwilliam quartet. I went to all the concerts I could manage. And - for a while it was like that - fascinating cacophony, hard to understand, things like string quartets - not necessarily what most would consider challenging listening.
Mixed up with other concerts that most would find pretty challenging by the student composers there - things like music made from engine noises, and banging the piano in different places, and audio clips layered together in early "computer music" to make compositions - and so forth.
So anyway - at some point with a lot of listening, it kind of "clicked" and I found myself immersed in the music - often it was like going to another world, when it ended, it was like the most engrossing book you could read and more so, took quite a while to return to the "real world" again.
I had a few formal piano lessons at that point, just one or two, given by a student at the university. We worked through some early pieces in Bartok's Microcosmos, my own choice. (If you've come across it, may think of his ferociously difficult advanced Microcosmos studies - but it starts off really simple, but interesting and challenging five finger exercises in book 1 - and introducing just one finger at a time also - but - not tied to the framework of "Western" rhythms and phrasing - so - interesting way to begin piano if you are into that sort of thing).
I also worked through a bit of Hindemith's "Elementary training for musicians" - another "classic" that takes you all the way from the simplest of musical ideas, repeating pulse - to advanced concepts step by step - but it got rather too hard for me at the time, quickly so didn't get very far. Some time I want to go back to that :).
On recorder - then I discovered the music of Jacob Van Eyck, the C17 blind Carollinier (player of church bells from keyboard), which starts off simple and gets more and more elaborate, probably many recorder player's favourite composer as it lies so well under your fingers as you play.
Later on - a long time later on - then I made my first steps in composition. Was interesting how it happened. I was, and still am, keen on Tolkein's Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. Anyway one day when I woke up, I had a song running in my mind, a melody for the Dwarf's song about the misty mountains at the start of the Hobbit. It was the first time I ever made up a tune for myself. Not sure when exactly but probably in my mid to late twenties.
So, up to then I thought that composition was something you could only do if you were a music student who had studied for years and mastered music theory and chord progressions etc etc, and able to look at a score and read it and hear the music in your mind and all that sort of thing.
But I realized - it is something anyone can do - the world of "Amateur composing". Anyone can make up a tune. Doesn't have to be a great tune, or become a hit or anything. I just mean, the creative process of making a tune yourself rather than only ever playing tunes written by other people. It takes you right to the heart of music in a way that few things do.
And you don't have to understand the theory at all. The theory is something musicians invented in order to understand what composers do - I think better to think of it that way rather than the other way around. Of course composers who are trained in theory use that to help them compose music, I'm not denying that. But all the rules, fundamentally, are based on things discovered by composers with a keen ear who listened to what they played, and found out what sounds good to them.
It's very different from, say, maths (which is my first subject) - where you have a rigorous notion of what counts as a proof - and if you put symbols together in a way that feels great, but doesn't follow those rules - it simply isn't mathematics. Same is true for physics. I think that's a lot of the reason why you get so much by way of "fringe physics" because many people don't understand the fundamental way it works.
You can observe things, e.g. that a chord sounds nice - but a proper scientific physical theory, e.g. to try to explain why certain chords sound harmonious (and there are theories for this) is based on a set of rules that you have to follow exactly once you have laid them down. And if those rules don't come to the right predictions, you have to change the theory - or - say things such as "this theory only works in such and such conditions".
While with music theory - well the bottom line is - that if it sounds right to you as the composer - then you can just go ahead and do it. And the people who write theory books are then left with the problem of working out a theory for whatever it is you did.
So - then as well as writing my own amateur music compositions from time to time, and improvising endlessly on piano (in a non conventional way not based on standard chord patterns or keys - sounds great to me but some people would find it quite challenging) - I then went on to invent some mathematical ideas for "fractal music" which take a tiny seed pattern and build that up to make an entire piece of music.
This sort of thing.
Plays the tuning - then the short seed phrase - then everything else comes out of it by following mathematical rules.
So anyway - that led me into the world of microtonal music because at an early stage I added microtonal capabilities to the program - able to use any number of notes per octave, or to use any of the notes from the harmonic series etc.
To me it all sounds great. I don't have any "twelve equal grid" for categorizing the pitches I hear, or for understanding the chords, never managed to learn that.
So anyway that led to a lot of interest from microtonalists - because - though I'd added those capabilities just in order to be able to play in those various tunings for my fractal tunes - it turned out - that there was hardly any software available at that time for composing and playing on a computer in anything except twelve equal + pitch inflections.
You could code a microtonal composition in midi - but it was a long and complex process. There were some microtonal software programs around - but not many - perhaps about 3 that you would know about at the time if you were a microtonalist - with only one of them for Windows (one other for the Mac - L'iL Miss Scale Oven by Jeff Scott, no longer avilable, and one for Linux, SCALA by Manuel Op de Coul, which at that point was unable to play sounds, just output results of tuning calculations into a window, and Graham Breed's JI Relay for Windows - also - not widely known, Fred Nachbaur's midi tempering utilities for Windows)
So - I ended up getting many requests from keen Windows microtonal musicians and composers to add various features to Tune Smithy which they could use to retune their compositions in Midi. It was the start of "virtual instruments" - at that time the main one was GigaSampler - so retuning it to midi - that let you get a first impression of what your composition sounds like - on fairly reasonable versions of "virtual instruments" - playing back recordings of entire notes recorded on the original instruments, pieced together to make the music.
So, Tune Smithy grew and grew, with one then another microtonal feature, then it split into many different "tasks" and for quite a few years that was my life work. And some time I'll go back to it - though - it is still available and quite a few composers use it every day for their day to day microtonal composition - but it's not been updated for many years now. That's because there are many other alternative ways to do the same thing nowadays. Still there are a few things which you can only do in Tune Smithy - and for composers who want to do those things - it's worth it for its rather clunky old interface - and - somewhat eccentric way of doing things - deriving from its origins as a program for making fractal music.
Anyway - that led me to the microtonal online community - many microtonal composer friends now. And - turned out that they liked my amateur microtonal compositions, which was a surprise. So I started doing a lot more amateur microtonal composition. Just led by my ear, what sounded good, with - a bit of theory - understanding what notes are expected to go well together from harmonic series, and a very basic understanding of how chord progressions work (e.g. cycle of fifths) - but largely guided just by what sounds good.
Here is one of my easier listening pieces - here I just improvised in 17 equal - which is similar to twelve equal in many ways.
Actually, this is - quite a good first step if you are used to twelve equal - but - has more "crunchy" chords. T
So - in microtonal music especially - that's actually an asset in a way. May be in other situations also. Because you don't have the framework of twelve equal intervals and music theory progressions etc - you come to the microtonal tuning with a fresh start, ears picking things out for the first time.
Many composers get to microtonal music by first learning twelve equal composition - maybe right through music college - and then - have to either unlearn or adapt all their ideas to microtonal tuning systems - and can be a major issue. I'm talking about Western composers here. Of course there are also many composers who start with other traditions.
So - then they are constantly relating everything they hear in microtonal music to 12 tone paradigms - this sounds like a major third, this sounds like a minor third, this sounds like a fourth, this sounds like a dominant seventh, ...
So for instance, they might explore seventeen equal - it has lots of similarities to twelve equal - though eventually you'd find that it has seventeen different key signatures instead of the usual 12, and that it has different flavours of chords that in twelve tone are treated as identical (other systems similar to twelve tone music include 19 equal, 31 equal and 53 equal - the last one of course has 53 different key signatures - many others also).
For me, I have a major challenge there - that I've not learnt to recognize musical intervals such as major and minor thirds etc by ear. I can hear that a melody is minor or major - but if you play just a single interval in isolation - it's a major challenge recognizing it - even to have a rough idea how wide it is.
This is something I discovered when I programmed a test into Tune Smithy to learn to recognize intervals. I expected it to be easy - as after all I have fine pitch sensitivity. But - when I first tested - was astonished to find - that if I had just two notes played one after another - with no musical context - I couldn't even tell the difference between a whole tone and a fifth!
I'm better at it now, but still am quite challenged in this area. For the programming - there are many ways to test that the pitches the program play are correct - including spectral analysis - and looking at the midi data. And I am very good at recognizing a pitch if it comes up again later in the tune. So if you have an E at 5/4, and later on maybe a fair bit later on it's played as a 400.0 or an 81/64, not that far away, chances are I'll notice that the note has changed. So - have quite good long term pitch memory - though not absolute pitch. All that helps with microtonal programming.
Also - I can tune microtonal intervals by listening to the beat patterns when the notes are played together. That's also useful for testing the programming also and debugging - you can play two notes together on the in built wave shape player in Tune Smithy - and if theory says it should be beating at a rate of 2 beats per second, and instead it is beating at say 4 beats per second - you know you've done something wrong.
But I still don't have good recognition for musical intervals. And I can't read a piece of music and hear it in my mind's ear as most composers can.
I can read it and play it on keyboard or recorder. But - for instance if I have a tune in my mind which I want to write down - then - first I have to pick out the notes on recorder or keyboard - and then write it down as music notation.
Perhaps the one thing I wish I had, most of all, from early music training - is this ability to read a score and hear it in my mind - or to hear music in my mind and know how to notate it directly to a score.
Now - I can still work with scores without hearing it in my mind. Don't know how it works. But once I'm used to a particular tuning - sometimes it kind of takes over and I put notes on the score feeling sure they will work without really knowing what they sound like. Then play it, and it works. It's often quite useful for the creative process, this mixture of having a kind of rough idea, but still, not really knowing what is going to happen when you hit that play button.
So - it has an upside also. But I wish I had a closer connection between heard pitches and musical scores. I've tried teaching myself, composer friends say that this is natural and what I need to do is to do lots of interval recognition training. And you can get interval recognition training software. But it is difficult to stick at it for long when you find yourself so bad at it, getting scores like - 50% to start with, then with a lot of work you get 80% recognition say, but then drop back down again when you stop trying. When other things are much easier to do, and with many other demands on your time - that's a hard thing to do. But some day maybe I'll do it. From my experiences trying it out, I think it would be a case of many months, quite possibly a year or so, of interval training for - say half an hour a day - that might do it. I would of course also train in recognition of microtonal intervals not just the major / minor etc of twelve tone music.
I also wish I had clearer long term memory and picture of music that I hear. Am amazed when I hear composers talking about a new piece of music they have just heard for the first time - all the details that they remember. For me it's an immersive experience - I live it - a bit like reading a novel perhaps - and it washes through me - but especially when I hear it for the first time - may not have much memory at the end of the piece, maybe just a few kind of "glimpses" in my memory, remember a few moments in a hard to articulate way, that's all. Was totally caught up in it, it's not a case of being distant from it - but not got a clear memory after the event.
If I follow it on a score as it plays then I can remember more easily. Though I don't have this immediate connection of pitches to score - still - I find I can follow the score in a rough kind of a way - if it's not too complex or have too many similar passages in it - and I find that helps me to hear the structures in the music so is something I do from time to time, just listen to music I like and follow it on a score. But - if it's like a symphony, going presto, turning over a page every few seconds, and perhaps have to turn back from time to time for the repeats - then I can get lost easily :). And once lost can be hard to find my place again because I don't have that exact connection just approximate between the notes I hear and the notes on the score. It's probably hard to understand what I'm saying here if you have that as something you learnt from an early age as a trained musician. You hear the music, you understand how the notation works, but you can't join the two of them together exactly in your mind.
So - perhaps if I did interval training and could recognize intervals instantly - and other ear training - that might well help to make that connection.
It's a minor thing in a way, I greatly enjoy and appreciate the music which is the main thing. Does it matter if I don't remember it afterwards as easily as a trained musician? :).
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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