Solfege is really helping me but i have questions

Harmony & Theory
#21

I will say this sometimes the internet is very good for some things, but often it is just a sea of junk. But that man has a very good channel, I was looking at some of his other videos.

There was this other website I came across that you might like if you haven’t seen it already.

https://partimenti.org/

The schemas part has some good information in it.

I thought I saw something about compound scales. Does it describe how to sing those?

This was as far in detail as it goes?

What I am trying to figure out is how does it follow the tetrachords in this hexachord system as it crosses into the next tetrachord, and the mutations. It’s hard for me to grasp because I don’t get the hexachord system as I am assuming it doesnt have a lower or the hexachord is just it. But these 3 hexachord go into 3 different keys. The tetrachords are there so that is right in front of our eyes, or ears i should say haha, but the hexachord is like an extra layer of complexity in use for this specific style of writing. It was like they just threw out the B since it has that b5 lydian tetrachord, but this is where I don’t understand why. I mean I am assuming the whole 3 key thing to adjust for singers vocal range.

I have said it in previous posts, but everybody has a pitch sense. Even people who claim this perfect pitch crap are stupid. There are definitely degrees to this sense. Play the game every day for about two weeks, and you will get what I mean. When you aren’t warmed up your guesses will be ballparked. Think of it like a line, and you are trying to hit the bulls eye everytime. When you don’t, you will see that the bullseye isn’t far off. Your sense of pitch just isn’t, using my hands here to do quotations “perfect”. rofl! But you can sharpen it if you consistently do variations on your weak solfege syllables, making sure to only sing them when you are doing specific variations of two of your weak tones against the do re mi. This is where I think headphones wouldn’t help you. As you sing you need to hear your voice matching to the piano during these variation drills. There is also another trick I do when I feel frustrated, as I hit the button I close my eyes so visual doesn’t distract me even though I am just looking at the website game screen. This prevents any visual distraction to help focus purely on aural. I wish I could change the instrument cause I sense that I am just learning piano talk here so the more clear this gets which it’s getting close I want to say switch it to another instrument like flute or saxophone. Stick to monophonic for awhile, and learn more instruments before jumping in harmonic intervals.

Really is patience, when you get a wrong answer do not get mad. Listen again, and again. The syllable will manifest itself, just be patient. It can get frustrating, but listen. This is when you will get what I mean by pitch sense. Because you will have guessed a note in the ballpark, and the answer will be to the left or right. It is not perfect pitch, that is bullshit. They call it perfect pitch because they think they are special, because they cannot remember why they have this ability. It is either genetic trait passed down, genetic trait nutured as a child, or learned as a child. Everybody has a pitch sense otherwise we would be deaf. This ability comes from the vocal syllables, so if you want it well you better start singing fixed do solfege for the rest of your life. Depends on how dedicated you are to music and sound. I imagine harmonic intervals and chords to be very difficult. Because our voice is only capable of most of the time monophonic, unless you are throat singing, this might be why they say certain aspects of it aren’t learnable as adults.

#22

Ok so I know what I’m about to do is terrible forum etiquette, but I still think I may be helpful. I teach these topics a lot and have done a lot of solfege myself for my own study/ear training, especially the more awkward stuff, dissonant lines and harmonies etc.

I have not read your original post in full nor all the other comments, I skimmed the original post and didn’t get a sense of what it is you’re trying to accomplish - in a nutshell, what is the goal of your activities? Others who are tight on time might be more likely to chime in to if we see a quicker representation of what the question is. I think knowing what the basic end goal is would help to shape recommendations of what path makes the most sense.

#23

Do you have any material for sight singing in solfege, or know of some good beginner stuff off IMSLP?

Trying to get a better sense of music, the tuning system from a blind perspective. Since music is just aural, I am trying to see how far I can take fixed do solfege at my older age. I am not worried about speed, so we can forget about that for now. I want to see the music on the staff, start singing it, so I can start hearing it in my mind. I basically feel musically illiterate. We are going to have to start in the nursery rhyme department I am probably guessing. Like childrens book, but sheet music. Like those beginner books, but this time I don’t really want to use an instrument until after I sing it. We didn’t do this enough in marching band during my high school days. I was just tracing the fingerings the entire time.

Right now I am just trying to learn the sound of the piano, and the notes by the perfect pitch games. Only monophonic though no chords or harmonic intervals. Not until I start 100% after like 200 or 300 notes. The Si note is basically my last note that is giving me trouble, but I am trying to focus on Di and Ri for awhile, and give it a month or so before I start working on hearing the difference between Fi and Si. Fi isn’t as bad, and I can hear this note more so than Si. Si just seems non existent currently. Di and Ri still trip me up but if I move slowly I can tell them apart. But the problem is my Do is F# and i would like to leave it this way cause I feel that is just the way I am. It took me a few weeks to discover my do re mi, but it feels like it might just be different for everybody or at least thats what I made up in my mind or I am different. Well I want to leave it this way for awhile anyways like a whole year, and make up my mind before I change the anchor point.

#24

Great. For those goals I would personally recommend

  • Ditch the idea of perfect pitch and focus on relative pitch, and ‘movable’ do.

  • Consider sight-singing practice and ear training/testing practice as two separate but related activities.

  • Start trying to sing very, very simple major scale patterns using solfege. Toggle the amount of assistance from an instrument (you playing along) as it’s good ‘training wheels’ to be playing along when you start singing. Gradually move to patterns with larger intervals, or basic nursery rhymes

  • For ear training (many apps and such available - I like iwasdoingallright.com ) I would keep a ‘do’ drone present while you do the exercises so you relate what you hear back to a tonal center, and I would make sure you’re working at a level of difficulty where you mostly get the notes correct, but get challenged here or there - if you’re getting half of them wrong it’s more like a guessing game at that point and imo doesn’t have that much ‘growth value’

iwasdoingallright allows for custom scripts so you can get extremely detailed about your challenges…for example say you often mix up mi and fa when so and la are present. You can make custom scripts that, for example, only use those four tones, or if it’s a 2 note melody, maybe always have some combination of so/la and mi/re , etc, sky can be the limit if one wanted to nerd out hard.

I think of it like…essentially what you’re doing is trying to memorize sounds. So just like a toddler learns his vocabulary, you might have to go word by word and relate things back to the phrases (melodies) that are most familiar to you.

Oh also, I think ear training based on intervals is so, so, so much less useful than based on key center. By that I mean stuff that plays you two pitches and asks you to identify the interval between the two pitches. It’s a bit meaningless imo because something like la up to mi feels incredibly different than do up to so even though they are both an ascending fifth.

2 Likes
#25

Dude this website is awesome! It is hard to find good ear training stuff.

#26

I disagree, I find interval training to be really useful. Whether the interval is in relation to the root or not, hearing and recognizing that interval is good practice, particularly when you’re not sure what key something is in. Once you can spot those intervals the key doesn’t matter, because finding one note lets you find all the others. And then you can work backwards to figure out the key, if it’s not obvious.

2 Likes
#28

To me this isn’t an agree/disagree thing as much as it’s contextual. I can see situations where being rock solid on intervals is important. For example, the stuff yo mentioned about not knowing what key your in, then working backwards. Makes sense.

I can’t say I’ve ever been in that situation though, because any time I’m doing anything related to ear training (or applying ear training), I always know what key I’m in. If transcribing, that’s literally the first thing I do - figure out what key I’m in.

I know the experience I had with ear training in college, identifying random intervals (particularly if they were descending) always seemed more challenging than “melodic dictation”, where the professor would play a series of notes and we’d have to transcribe. He’d always tell us what key it was in (or what note it started on). I never thought intervals on those tests. I always though “key” and scale degree. That probably doesn’t work so well if it’s atonal. But unless someone forces me to listen to atonal music, I stay as far from it as I can. So again, contextual.

The bulk of my post-school-ear-training application has been in transcription and in those situations, like I mentioned above, I always felt it was quicker to think scale degree instead of interval. It’s just a matter of reducing steps (in regards to the way my brain works), much like I gradually got away from thinking “mi” and starting thinking “major 3rd scale degree”. It’s more steps to think “I just heard “mi”…and I’m in C major…so “mi” is E natural” than it is to just think “I’m in C major and I heard the 3rd scale degree, so that’s an E natural”. And just due to having to memorize all my arpeggios and scale, that lookup in my brain is instant. So, this is all highly personal stuff in some regard. I guess I can see the attractiveness of having perfect pitch because that makes the chain even shorter :slight_smile: I’m not nibbling on that bait though because there are only so many hours in the day lol

So the TLDR; is, try getting good at intervals and also knowing what scale degree you’re hearing. You might be better at one than the other and you might find your use cases force you to prefer one over the other. Whichever that is, do more of it :slight_smile:

1 Like
#29

i feel scared though guys cause on this site please tell me i am wrong lol if you just use the natural notes it isnt major right? maybe the owner is trying to trick me? cause abcdefg doesnt sound major anymore @.@. did i mess up my brain or is f# major actually my fixed do. o.O

tonesavvy tonedear i think both of these sites are mirrored.

i freak out a bit when i try to switch cause somehow i have hardwired some connection and it wont undo. i use to be moveable all the way.

haha sometimes i just accept f# as major do and try to calm myself.

luckily i can transpose my synths around :smiley:

maybe the atonal transcription thing is what fired off something and hardwired it. its freaky though cause abcdefg doesnt have that major sound anymore kinda makes me have anxiety, but then i just say meh maybe everybody is different.

#30

there needs to be context to establish a key. That’s why I like doing initial melodic (one note at a time) ear training exercises with a drone present. If you search youtube for “C drone” or “F# drone” you get plenty - you can have that playing while you do the exercises.

1 Like
#31

didn’t say it wasn’t!

Sure! A lot of things are good practice. But because there are always so many possible things to work on for any given topic (in this case, ear training) I think it’s the most useful to think comparitively and relative to the goal. Otherwise we wind up justifying everything and anything, and might not be making the best use of our time.

In this case (and I think in most cases where people want to do ear training and solfege for practical purposes related to basic music making, I’ve definitely found key-oriented to be superior. Training on melodic intervals becomes part of that anyway - we definitely need to know what a fifth sounds like. But again, a fifth from do to so is a very different animal (and, well, sound) than a fifth from mi to ti, or from le to me.

So it’s not that learning the sounds of different intervals isn’t useful - it defnitely is - I just have found that in comparison to learning solfege and relating things back to a key center, it’s not nearly as useful.

I do gotta disagree on that one - I think that’s just not how we hear things. It’s also a little limited because it sounds like you’re talking about an end goal of ‘figure out the notes’ which is more so just a stage in a process; there needs to be more going on to make the ear training activities become useful vocabulary builders for our improvisational and compositional goals.

Also, when we have the key wrong we’re likely not going to be miles away; if we’re wrong we’re most likely hearing something as a 5th up/down or maybe mixing up wither the tonal center is the relative major/relative minor or something. In either case it wouldn’t really effect my comments much.

#32

should i just stick to f# drone until i master the rest of the syllables? before switching the drone note? si is like the step child that throws it all off, sometimes i catch it, and sometimes he can throw the whole thing off kilter well try to anyways, but some of the syllables are so cemented this doesn’t happen to the thing as a whole in atonal. di and ri are still a bit hazy but i just kinda sing di ri do in my mind and i can catch it, but i have to go slow.

#33

dude here is a good exercise once you grasp the entire thing, this is a good practice regime. start with do and radiate outwards after you have either gotten all the syllables or you decide to add a tone if you decide to stay within the layer. If you make a mistake start all over, but before starting over practice on the two notes that you mistaked for each other. put them in and sing the syllables for about a minute then start over again from do. you don’t have to start over, but I feel in order to master them all you have to do it with no mistake.
Do
Ti Do
Do Di
Ti Do Di
Li Ti Do Di
Ti Do Di Re
Li Ti Do Di Re
La Li Ti Do Di Re
Li Ti Do Di Re Ri
La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri
Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri
La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi
Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi
So Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi
Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi Fa
So Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi Fa
Fi So Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi
Fi So Si La Li Ti Do Di Re Ri Mi Fa

I think I might try radiating outwards from Li the other point of resolution I hear, and another point to radiate off of the tritone Fi.

#34

so basically what you are telling me is something in my room is low droning an f# under my nose!

#35

I dont even know where to begin with this video but wow!

I will have to watch this in chunks. Bro this guy is a champion transcriber wowzer!

#36

im telling you guys i seriously sense my do as f# this is no joke haha i heard my humidifier in the kitchen and it sounded close to my do sure enough it was a bit sharp but in the f# range rofl! doing atonal transcription piano practice aka perfect pitch game really jarred some bolts loose up in my brain rofl! used my tuner pitched app on android. the reason i feel this way is because if i hear any other note on this game that is not do it is not f# rofl!

kinda crazy to the other notes not in major reside around li and its phrygian pentatonic, has this native american sound. if it isnt the natural notes or the tritone the sound wants to resolve to the li. this is easier to hear in isolation, but as a whole it’s harder to spot this sound. this is how i perceive the entire atonal sound though either resolving to do or li. but really the sound can go anywhere, these are just some very big sounds that i notice with resolution. its like the game goes cute to serious lol. cute with natural note serious with phrygian pentatonic. maybe the tritone is like the path or crossroad between these sounds. i wonder if its like this for everybody or if everybody hears resolution different. its like some fun western, but when the indians come it gets serious.

#37

Did another test again this morning same thing in atonal all the notes align with f# as do. So i figured i would look at this movable aspect try to throw it off put C, D, E another do re mi in movable terms in for a bit. At first I didn’t hear it, but it sort of morphed into do, re, mi, and I could detect it. Ok so whew right? well put them all back in, and well Do was f#. ROFL! o.O Atonal random note transcribing really alters the senses in some way. here is another thought i had one chunk of piano keys is 12 notes, and maybe the way my senses are dealing with the complexity is that f# is almost like the center point with the radiating outward trying to sense where the notes are amongst the frequency. because the major scale will fit into it, but centered with the tetrachords centered around f#. think upper in the c# d# e# f#

all i can do is laugh really, cause how in the world if i decide to do fixed do would i even begin to use f# as do. this means fi is c rofl :confused:

for now i am just rollin with it whatever i say, i think everyone may be different. its just the way our voices reside along the spectrum perhaps. because if i map this sound on a low guitar string with my voice it puts my vocal range and maybe hitting the d or c below the low e string. and that c is quite hard for my voice to hit. maybe that is perhaps the upper tetrachord underneath the f# do.

Its pretty cool to everyday that goes by the inbetween syllables become more clear. Instead of being on the fence if re is ri or di the hearing comes much clearer on the sharpness or flatness of a syllable. This probably is the practice i do on my weak syllable mistakes.

Other things I notice other notes arent as clear at the beginning. But some syllables when I fire it up come in very clear so I guess I know only a few notes so far the others arent as clear. I just start over until I hear one that I know and check it instead of searching for the right note to hear the next one that way it prevents relative pitch.

#38

Dont you worry I will sacrifice for the greater good. I will go day after day, and we will see how far I can go. The radiating outward from Do to all 12 went really good tonight over 80% correct. I am likely going to switch to this website when I get this over 95%.

And get some punching bag cause i know 2 notes at once is going to really piss me off. :smile: and if there are different intervals woo buddy my brain is gonna splode.

Lets just focus on that one note thing for a bit longer haha. I am going to try to notate which notes exactly I am able to detect on the first note after hours of not playing. Waking up and throughout day, some are like hazy, foggy, others punch out Ive heard it on E B F#. Without a doubt those come in clear. There might be others, well the solfege I guess is how I sense the name of the pitch in my mind.

Another problem I am facing is the uploaded sounds fluctuate in EQ clarity. I have listened to them so much there are a few piano notes that waver and I can pinpoint this out so it doesnt really require any solfege association. Kinda sucks. Some octaves also sound more muted or possible lower quality codec compression.

I might try radiating out from the Fi soon on the tritone at my C then we will find out if this throws off Do at F#.

I think its definitely the color genetic aspect of each note. Like Do and So. Since these sounds reside with mostly major, and one has major and minor tetrachords as its genetic makeup. Discerning between red and orange is harder when you are older like our senses are dulled. Oh and also the higher or lower the note is also can make it harder to detect probably from loud noises at work dulling it also. The longer you play the more focused you can sharpen the sense. But when you stop it quickly fades. However some things remain as I am feeling each day I grind.

After I do my morning session I can flip over to guitar note trainer app on android, and the nylon sound is much more difficult to hear compared to piano. I can only hear ti and do right now, everything else would be relating to these tones.

#39

So here i was scoring pretty high this morning 80-90 on 100-300 question sessions. Immediately I would flip over to guitar note trainer to identify classical tone sound by ear. So what i see is for about 1 minute the solfege syllables come in so strong, but if I keep getting weak syllables that I only probably know on the piano side from the grind it starts to fade then it sounds muted or dull. If I go back to the piano game and play for about 100 or so questions then switch back same thing. Gotta get my relative pitch solfege game up.

Bad thing is though that if i put c,d,e,f,g,a,b in the piano game it sounds so screwy. Like b if fa and f is ti the rest is pentatonic. But it can change sound back to major if i flip the syllables around, but i still feel the sense of F# major inside it like a dull version of C major rofl! Wtf!

I will say in the morning my ear is much more accurate. Throughout the day it gets worse. I notice the higher and really low frequency pitches between the main solfege syllables easier to detect right upon waking from rest, nap, or morning. The more tired i get these just sound like nothing but blurry. But it feels like if I dont start singing these piano blip pictures that occur from so much grinding my progress is quickly going to plateau. I think this is the next step to actually sing the pitch to solidify.

#40

I think it’s better to use 123 numbers instead of, do ray me etc.
It makes more sense to have the scale degree in your vocalization rather than, do re me. I’ve been struggling with getting a grip on scale degrees intuitively. I think when you’re Young you learn in a really intimate way, and that gives kids perfect pitch if they are taught young. But as an adult it takes serious work to learn things in an intimate way.
If What you’re doing is logical to you you can dive into that and find your bearings.

#41

Haha with as much as i am doing this it dont matter what degree you say any syllable and i could tell you degree number rofl! I struggled with the sharp syllables for a few days but once you do this 1000 times the other 5000 it just becomes so boring.

I need a way to use my deepmind 12 to play a random note via midi so i can change up this stupid piano rofl! At least with the deepmind I could listen to some far out synth tones.

Ok so I am able to kinda do it via midi ox by using the laptop keyboard to activate the deepmind which makes it harder to discern between white and black keys when reaching blindly. So for now I will utilize this when I am at the house. Mobile I will grind on the website.

Ok here we go. Random 50 note chromatic whole note on the slowest bpm generated midi file into audacity with midi on deepmind 12 ahh finally my ears get a vacation.

https://random-music-generators.herokuapp.com/melody

it has a custom pitches as well so this will be good for my variations but you gotta sign up.

Im starting to perceive this isnt that complicated in a single tone melody isolated. Its just a matter of hearing all the tritones in a big group, with the practice of shifting through them all. Basically 6 tones each with a tritone. Maybe thats why they have the hexachord as six notes.

Do
Major/Major (Tetrachord makeup)
Red

Do Tritone
Fi
In between Fa and So
Lydian/Major/Major/Minor
Purple/Red/Orange

Re
Minor/Minor
Yellow

Re Tritone
Si
In between So and La
Major/Minor/Minor/Phrygian
Orange/Yellow/Green

Mi
Phrygian/Phrygian
Blue

Mi Tritone
Li
In between La and Ti
Minor/Phrygian/Phrygian/b5Lydian
Green/Blue/Indigo

Fa
Lydian/Major
Purple

Fa Tritone
Ti
In between Li and Do
Phrygian/b5Lydian
Indigo

So
Major/Minor
Orange

So Tritone
Di
In between Do and Re
Major/Major/Minor/Minor
Red/Orange/Yellow

La
Minor/Phrygian
Blue

La Tritone
Ri
In between Re and Mi
Minor/Minor/Phrygian/Phrygian
Yellow/Green/Blue

Maybe this is the reasoning for six tones in the hexachord? The tritone?

Like listening for six tones, and their evil brothers rofl!

Maybe this tritone paradox has to do with peoples fixed do note.

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/psychology/pages.php?i=206

Another surprising consequence of the Tritone Paradox concerns absolute pitch - the ability to name a note in the absence of a reference note. This ability is generally considered to be very rare. But the Tritone Paradox shows that the large majority of people possess an implicit form of absolute pitch, since on listening to this pattern they hear tones as higher or as lower depending simply on their pitch classes, or note names.

If anyone can find any information on this test she did with the Tritone so that I can see if F# is why I hear the scale on Do in atonality perfect pitch games.

I have a feeling if i isolate out these sets of tones for grinding do re mi, fi si li, and fa so la, ti di ri this game will be game over.

So in a way a Barry Harris was right its like a hierarchy of scales.

The other minor/wholetone tetrachord scale resides in melodic minor.

Its a matter of being really patient and trying to decipher in which set your note resides in do re mi or fa so la, but at the same time knowing it is ti di ri or fi si li also.

So the other good variations reside in both whole tone scales of the chromatic.

So it should be practiced with this in mind for beginner

Do

Do Re Mi

Do Re Mi So La

Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do

Then maybe Octatonics, and Major and Melodic Minor with upper tetrachord filled variations, maybe even setup phrygian and fill its upper tetrachord also.

Then both wholetone scales of the chromatic, and ending at the full chromatic.

Its like playing plinko your note gets thrown into this shifter it starts at chromatic then in the whole tone and gets segmented down through the 4 groups of 'do re mi’s, I wont get to much more complex but we could add the minor and phrygian aspect to this also do, re, ri and do, di, ri. Then you have to be able to aurally decipher upon which of the four do re mi set your note resides. But it requires some grinding and singing all your syllables to get to this point to use as a crutch when feeling stymed.

Like if I put the notes in B C F and F#, b is fa and f is ti, there is no way to unhear this, i cant be the only one. What gives! Rofl! These are all the main Do syllables. But we know C D E F G A B and F is Fa and B is Ti. So some how I am flipped.

C D E
F# G# A#
B C# D#
F G A

And maybe riding off this do re mi logic it would be best to use these syllables.

Do Ra Re Me Mi Fa Fi So Si La Li Ti

Ra and Me because thats where they fall in Do Re Mi.

So I was looking at these tritone pairs and this is what I discovered when I hear B to F its descending which is probably why i don’t hear B as Ti cause the resolution to the tonic is Ti Do this ascended cadence. But since I hear F to B that is ascended, that could be why. These are my pairs that I hear ascended.

D#,A
E,A#
F,B
F#,C
C#,G
G#, D

So if I try each one of these notes as the Ti Do only F to F# works. Freaky! The descending tritone pairs are just the opposite. And by Ti Do I mean like you are suppose to hear it from B to C. But it is so strong that without a doubt I know F# is my Do. ROFL! I can try every Ti Do pair, and nothing else has this quality to it but this specific pair.

tonesavvy.com if you guys put b and c you hear it as ti do right? or is this guy messing with my perception! f to f# is ti do for me and i believe it be because of the tritone paradox pairs. holy moley wish i couldve found this out when i was in my teens! rofl! my ear must be twisted up big time! mind blown! :laughing:

Whats even crazier is I only hear it mainly listening, if I actually play it they sound the same like in movable do… i can kinda sense it when I play and if I play the do re mi fa so la so fa mi re do ti do sequence in both keys C and F# I can sorta sense it but it fades fast when I am playing. But its clear as day only if I am listening. @.@