I'm not really tone deaf, but I've always struggled creating a pitch. My high school friends termed me as tone-mute.
But actually, I am kind of tone-deaf. My ear is good at some things and horrible at others. I have a really hard time telling relative pitch. I can tell if two notes aren't the same, but a lot of times it's hard for me to tell if it's flat or sharp. Especially if the two sounds are different timbres.
Part of me thinks that I really am tone-deaf, and that I learned pitch by feeling the resonance rather than hearing it. And eventually, my massive amount of time playing musical instruments has slowly improved my ability to detect intonation.
I read an interesting article at lunch today, which brought me to this site:
http://www.delosis.com/listening/home.html
which then has lead me to believe I'm not as tone deaf as I think I am, but compared to my friends who got perfect scores, I still wonder why I have to struggle despite all the musical training I've had...
2 comments:
I would guess that there are a couple of different skills involved and I will just make up terms for them :) the first I would term as external listening, being able to tell if other people\instruments are in tune or playing the same note or phrase. The second is internal listening, this would relate to being able to hear ones internal voice (how your voice sounds different to you then it does to others) I've read that ear infections when young can really mess with this. The third is a combination of the first two, external listening and comparing it to the internal listening to see if the pitch matches. A forth might be resonant awareness, this is the ability to actually feel the physical vibrations of either vocal chords or instrument. The fifth could be vocal chord muscle memory or vocal chord precision. What I mean by this is for the vocal chord muscles to learn that a certain note should feel a certain way while singing it and having enough muscle control to reproduce it the same way every time, of course this gets paired with your internal listening or with a voice trainer who can tell you if have matched or not. There are probably more but those are what I think of :) so the question is what part can you/needs improving?
Your third is probably the hardest for me. Now that i actually have some money, maybe i should try out some voice lessons.
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