Afternoon all.
I’m just wondering if anyone here is skilled at using solfege, and which system they currently use? Further, do you have any arguments in favour of your specific system etc?
I think they’re for different purposes. Fixed is like C D E F G A B except you can sing it.
Moveable seems useful for trying to abstract away keys, and that is how I memorize scales, but I’m not sure if that is a good idea, or not….
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If you’re interested in improving your ear to e.g. transcribe, pick out licks / chord movements by ear or to improvise then you’re interested in movable do.
If you learn fixed do then you only get another name for the notes, which is not very useful. Sure the note names are more singable, but as a guitarist that is probably not a primary concern.
Movable do is extremely useful because music doesn’t happen in a single key. By learning movable do you’re learning that e.g. Mi is the major third, which is a new concept (distinct from the note names). Mi is a sound that’s similar across keys because it’s relative to a root. The root itself is sometimes the key the song is in, but if you’re a skilled improviser the root you’re referencing is probably the root of the chord the rest of the band is playing.
Many people will do something similar to movable to, but they will instead refer to the note functions directly e.g. “Major Third”. While the important thing is that you can hear the note function in your mind, and recognize it when it comes up, I think the syllables are easier to work with, especially if you’re going to practice sight-singing as an ear-training exercise. I also found the syllables a useful learning tool, because they were completely new to me I could attach new meaning to them. If you come up to me on the street now and go Miiiiiiiii I will instantly hear an implied root note with a major third above it 
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This times 100.
Movable do coupled with sight singing were the best ear training aid for me. IMO way better than any interval recognition. Magic starts to happen when you internalize the syllables. It gave a huge boost to my transcribing skills (saves tons of time too) since you won’t have to use your instrument to hunt for the note(s) you’re hearing.
I think the important thing sight singing brings out is the ability to make your internal system “hear” pitches before they occur. Many probably neglect it.
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Movable - I sing in church that’s completely Acapella and that’s what we use for learning. Solfege was essentially invented for this purpose to begin with. Solfege is useful for interval and ear training. Fixed seems kind of useless as it’s just another name for notes without the interval training of movable or at worse some hairbraned scheme to convince people they can “learn perfect pitch.”
I remember a girl in my college theory class mentioned this. She said they use fixed do more in Europe and they also have more “cases” of perfect pitch. I shrugged that comment off at the time and now, around 2 decades later, it still seems kinda silly lol! I wonder if there’s even reliable data on something like this?
I’m not entirely convinced of the purported impossibility of this.
I certainly don’t think it’s impossible. I would love to see a demo from someone that didn’t initially have it and worked it up to something presentable though. I’m sure there are probably some who have done it. I’d imagine it to be pretty rare though.
Another interesting wrinkle is that if someone developed extremely good relative pitch, they could probably fool us. I’ve had periods where if I were working on a piece of music intently, the tonic of that piece I could call up accurately. So, if I had top notch relative pitch (hypothetical, mine was pretty good at my peak but not quite Beato level), I could use this as my starting point to compare things to and appear to identify pitches accurately with seemingly no “hint” pitch.
It’s a fascinating aspect of human learning though, I’d love to see some formal studies on it. I’m sure there’s something out there but I’ve never looked.
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From my readings fixed do isn’t an attempt to learn perfect pitch so much as it is to establish a good long term pitch memory and to be useful for sight singing and sight reading in pieces that have a lot of tonal shifts or are tonally ambiguous. Julliard teaches fixed do for sight singing, for example.
I don’t think you can learn perfect pitch but I think you can establish a good enough pitch memory and good enough relative pitch that you basically give the impression of having perfect pitch. Adam Neely did a good video on why perfect pitch isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway but the grass is always greener I guess.
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Another reason we use movable is a lot of the music is very modal. If you were gonna solely be locked in major and minor world all day fixed might not have as many draw backs.
I know people that have exceptionally good intervalic pitch but Ive never know or know of anyone that learned perfect pitch to the “random keys name them” (like Rick Beatos son) level as an adult. It’s entirely possible to learn one root note and center from there and have so good intervalic it’s close but it’s not the same as true perfect pitch. I would guess there’s a high incidence of this kind of pitch recognition amongst Greek Orthodox chanters as much of the music is essentially duophonic with an ison root note and a scalar (usually modal) melody.
True perfect pitch seems to be only something that forms as a child when the neuroplasticity is high and seems highly related to places where language has a pitch component. The highest incidence in the world is Asian countries with pitched language. There’s also a correlation with listening to lots of harmonically complex music as a young child as the brain tries to patternize and make sense of what is being heard. More Schoenberg for babies less Mozart, haha
@ShadowoftheSun
Know of a choir director with it and when the whole choir goes slightly flat as people tire it’s agonizing for him even though harmonically the intervals are still in tune. I bet 432hz stuff drives people with perfect pitch crazy.
Another component that would be interesting to study is how perfect pitch works in places with music that has more than 12 subdivisions of the octave. Is there a higher or lower incidence?
Another interesting consideration is how much of ancient eastern liturgical music used what is essentially an intervalic form of notation whether it be the Greek Byzantine style or the Russian Znamenney notation they use a relational frame work vs the precise rhythm and note style of modern notation.
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movable all the way.
I’ve shared my thoughts before on the forum, post #42 here and on: Solfege is really helping me but i have questions - #42 by JakeEstner
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I know several people with absolute pitch and they can just immediately play anything, it is very annoying to me.
Yeah, but there are downsides - apparently people with absolute pitch have difficulty with transposing music on the fly, for example, and slight tuning issues can be very annoying for them.
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