Inspired by my other thread, i figured that Voice was just an altogether different instrument, which was why i didn't include it.
Over time, I've come across some that say that anyone could learn how to sing, while others say that not everyone can learn how to sing. Personally, i think that if someone puts in the time and effort, they could learn how to do anything(passion and desire of course being significant aids). Usually, in my world, the people that claim that not everyone can learn, are those that claim to have tried and tried but could never get it. And those that say that anyone can learn are experienced musicians.
Obviously, there's much more to singing than Tone/Timbre. Me, i can sing, but i don't like the tone of my voice. I think that singing has more to do with a persons ability to produce notes that are relative to each other. But what is happening in someones' brain when they are singing? What is happening in someones' brain that is singing out of tune? Do they know that they are singing out of tune? Does pitch recognition have this extra long scale, that extends from complete tone deafness, all the way to absolute pitch?
My understanding, is that tone deafness is when one is not able to tell the difference between high and low pitches. I don't understand how different pitches can sound the same, but I've heard some claim "It all sounds the same to me".
So I have concluded from my own experience that Absolute Pitch is attainable. But is it's opposite, Tone Deafness, defeatable?
I don't reckon everyone can learn. I think some people literally don't hear melodies and differential tones in the same way- it is always a source of interest to me how people hear the same thing in totally different ways. If one has the infamous "musical ear" then I think singing is easy- of course then getting pleasant timbres from the singing voice is the challenge, but it can be done.
Hard to say if "tone deafness" or its inverse "the musical ear" can be overcome/achieved, but I suspect that if you are in the camp where everything sounds the same and you can't, for arguments sake, sing back a simple melody, the issue probably isn't whether it can be learnt, but whether the perhaps massive amount of work required to even see if is it possible, is ever desirable?
i.e. is the motivation to get there ever enough for someone who feels unable to hear anything like a tune or sing it back in the first place?
Everyone can do anything they want if motivated. The only limits are the ones you put on yourself. I know that sounds like some crap motivational speaker cliche but I believe it to be true. I've seen unlikely people do wonderful things. It's just a matter of effort.
It's use it or lose it. I think most people, if not all, are able to recognize familiar nursery rhymes even when those are sung without words or played instrumentally. Complete tone deafness (IMHO) probably does not exist or is extremely rare. So, if the human brain is capable of recognizing the common tunes & songs heard early in life where do people become side tracked away from the musical/tonal/rhythmic mindset? It's a good question.
I've never met a person, when properly motivated (or lubricated) who couldn't warble out some sort of melody. I would wager that singing is one of those hard-wired emotive things humans developed over millions of years.
Now can anyone sing well? That's a more subjective horse of a different colored kettle of fish isn't it.
Some people are really tone deaf, it is kind of like color blindness. I have a friend who is afflicted with this, couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, has to refrain from singing in church because he throws people off. Other people can sing along with others, but when on their own, can't get the intervals right and wander around. Other people have tendencies to sing sharp or flat, perhaps because what they hear in their head is a bit different than what we hear coming out of them. But the vast majority of people have the basic capability to sing, and that capability can be improved by training and practice, just like instrumental ability can be.
I can sing very well, but prefer mostly to sing in groups, because the tone of my voice is rather thin. In the group I am in, except for our lead singer, and my wife, who do solos, the rest of us just join in Clancy Brother style, which works quite well. The folks I envy are those who have big voices that can command a pub even without any electronic assistance. That I think is born, not bred.
I am taking a singing workshop right now, for a few weeks, with Bridget Fitzgerald, a local sean nos singer. Very very interesting, after hearing it for years, and mimicing it with an instrument, to be involved with a group of people learning to sing it. Some of it is the opposite of what you would learn in more classical singing, much more nasal, for example. And it is good for me, because there is no hiding behind the rest of the singers in sean nos!
No, you're wrong there. Tone deaf is nothing like colour blindness. Colour blindness is a physical disability, you lack certain things in your eye which means you your eye simply does not detect colour. (It's cones and rods, I can't remember which is which) it can detect bright or dark, but not particular frequencies. But if your ear can hear then your ear can detect pitch/frequency because it's the same thing in your ear that does both. Tone deaf is purely lack of practise/focus. Likewise with vocal chords
.. and specifically to the opening post, absolute pitch (perfect pitch) really has nothing to do with being able to recognise/reproduce accurate intervals.
Well, llig, whether their ears hear the pitches or not, these few unfortunate people seem not to be able to distinguish or interpret those pitches. I have seen it, tried to work with my friend, and he literally could not understand what he needed to do to sing in a particular pitch, it just didn't work. It is you who is wrong on this one. Perhaps you are tone deaf to ideas that don't fit your preconceived notions.
"This study suggests that congenital amusia is not a myth but a genuine learning disability for music. The systematic evaluation of 11 adults, who reported themselves to be severely handicapped in the musical domain despite their efforts to learn it, largely confirms the presence of an underdeveloped system for processing music. Amusical individuals are severely impaired in music discrimination and recognition tasks. These impairments cannot be explained by hearing losses, since they all have, or grew up with, normal audiometry. The musical disorder cannot be explained by a lack of exposure since all amusical participants had music lessons during childhood and were raised in families in which a few siblings are musically normal. Finally, the musical deficit cannot be ascribed to some general cognitive slowing since all amusical participants have reached a high level of education. The musical disorder appears as an accidental disturbance in an otherwise fully normal cognitive and affective system.
One remarkable characteristic of the amusical condition is the selectivity of the disorder. The deficit appears highly specific to the musical domain. Amusical subjects retain the ability to process non‐musical material as well as their matched controls. In the present study, amusical subjects were shown to interpret intonation in speech properly, to identify well‐known figures from their voice alone and to identify and recognize common environmental sounds, such as animal cries and ringing sounds. With the exception of a single amusical subject, they all identified and recognized familiar songs when hearing the first lyrics. This high level of achievement in the auditory domain stands in sharp contrast to the rather poor level of functioning displayed by amusical individuals in recognizing and memorizing musical patterns. The disorder appears to be music‐specific. "
Llig, singing isn't just about perceiving pitch and intervals. You also have to be able to create them with your vocal cords. Lots of people have great hearing but not so great (or even disabled) vocal cords.
I'm terrible at singing, but if pressed I can carry a simple tune--not too wide a range, and the timbre is awful. Oh well.
Still, if experience is anything to go by, "Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're probably right."
Count me as a non-believer in tone-deafness, at least as anything other than a conditioned response. Simple reason: there are no speakers of Chinese, or any other tonal language, who fail to properly recognize or produce tones.
(there are more involved reasons, but I don't have the citations for them, and this is that sort of crowd)
Saying the disorder "appears to be music-specific" tells you clearly as could be that this is simply a case of people being trained to believe that they "are not musical" or that they "can't sing".
I'd call it by its right name, but Jeremy objects to plain speech, so I'll call it "nonsense".
"singing isn't just about perceiving pitch and intervals. You also have to be able to create them with your vocal cords. Lots of people have great hearing but not so great (or even disabled) vocal cords."
I can go along with this: it does take practice, and if you don't sing a lot, you're likely to not be a great singer. That doesn't mean there's anyone who can't sing, if they've got something they want to sing. If just means they have to work at it, which shouldn't surprise us at all.
I would have to agree with Llig. Yes, there are an unfortunate few for whom pitch perception is a mystery, but that surely affects their ability to play any (melody) instrument, not just the voice.
You are generally stuck with your voice but there are plenty of great singers with rubbish voices just as unfortunately there are plenty of rubbish singers with great voices (opera sings pop comes to mind). A great fiddle player will create magic on a £50 Chinese fiddle. A poor player will make a Strad sound awful.
My stock response to people who say they can't sing is "Have you tried practising?"
There was a programme on the BBC recently about this subject, where the presenter reckoned he was tone deaf. At the end of the programme, after a few lessons, he was singing quite well. Only the very few people with congenital amusia, a physical disorder of the brain, can be said to be tone deaf, rather than unable to sing well through lack of practice.
Interestingly, one of the interviwees with amusia said that while growing up he had never gone anywhere where music was played because it was too horrendous an experience. A huge gap in his social life. But as he said, he was never bothered by anyone hitting a wrong note, because he had no way of telling what the right note should be.
My experience (of others !) fits AlBrown's account, and the research described in Weejie's long quote would be consistant with it (and also negates he relevance of Jon's point about tonal languages).
The OP seems to be refering to singing as in a choir, rather than as in a classroom or congregation. In those last situations the 'no-hopers' are included. Choristers and the like may never come across them, or the challenge of singing while sharing a sheet of words with someone who is producing random pitches. In one case, at a funeral, it was someone who must have sung a hymn many times because he had the unexpected (to me) fit of the words to the rhythm spot-on.
Crossed with gam. I don't think the people I am thinking of are aware that they 'cannot sing'. So training somone who says that can't sing may be a different situation.
Belle Stewart said "if you can speak, you can sing". She didn't say "you can sing WELL", but that's subjective. I've met two people who definitely cannot sing. One cannot sing in tune, the other can sing in tune, but has zero sense of rhythm and sings in oddly disarticulated staccato bursts so, by my definition, cannot "sing".
"there are no speakers of Chinese, or any other tonal language, who fail to properly recognize or produce tones"
Not true. This study shows that amusia appears to be a general "disorder" - and of those tested Mandarin speakers who appeared to have this disorder, half were unable to recognize lexical tones - however, they were able to produce them. It's not something that could be called black and white.
"Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature. "
There are some YouTube vids showing before / after, and some of them are pretty good but the "timbre" is still there - they are still recognisably the same people. So there's probably a potential level you can get to but the voice quality is probably not going to go beyond a certain point (just as with an instrument, there's a limit to how nice it's going to sound, however well played).
Barring amusia (which would also preclude playing an instrument, I guess), I'm a strong believer in that anyone can learn to sing.
I hold myself as anecdotal proof of this. I started flute 6 years ago, after 20 years of not playing any music or singing (except in school where my asshole of a music teacher said words to the effect of "To get you to sing in tune, I would have to work with you 3 hours a week for a year").
I've always *wanted* to sing but was put off by people's obvious disapproval at my attempts. So about 3 years ago, I started singing in the car and in the shower. I could hear how off pitch I was, but couldn't get that feedback to correct my pitch (and even now, both flute and singing, if I don't magically match, I can't consciously know whether I am sharp or flat).
I realised I have two problems: my voice is naturally slightly higher pitched than average - and I tend to match timbres rather than match pitches. So if I hear another male voice singing in normal range, I will try to sing in normal range. If I hear them pushing themselves to sing a bit sharp, I will push myself (instead of matching by singing in my normal range). Singing with women is even worse.
But anyway, the long and short of it is that with practice, I can now sing most tunes reasonably in tune - some still completely ellude me, but I went from "don't ever sing under any circumstances" to "willing to sing in public" in the last few years. If I can do it, anyone can!
Actually, llig, there are some Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD) that are physical deficiencies, similar to color-blindness. And some CAPD actually make it so that people can't discern two pitches from each other, whether they be close together (like the same note, but out of tune) or far apart...
Well, color blindness is a different dimension of blindness. They can see, but they can't physically see the colors that are there. So i think that tone-deafness is comparable. They can hear, but can't discern between the different pitches that are being played.
Just to confuse the issue. I once had a colleague who was not colour blind - he could pass the standard test - but was unable to put names to the colours. His best way of describing it was 'like dyslexia, but for colour'.
"One of the problems still largely unresolved* in the field of the amusias is whether, and to what extent, specific syndromes exist that correspond to selective loss of basic components of musical ability or processing, such as rhythm, pitch, timbre, loudness. This problem is particularly interesting because it is related to a more general problem: whether there is a unitary mechanism of musical cognition, or, rather, a combination of abilities which are independent of each other."
*the article is from the "Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry" 1982
For hearing people, I think that it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not. The human ear is inherently tuned to the human voice. Unfortunately this only applies to listening to other voices. When a singer is listening to oneself, this tuning instinct is diminished or even eliminated, and this leads to apparent issues, that may not be apparent to the singer.
Also, and interestingly, the human ear does not seem to have an instinctive sense of tuning for any other instrument. This is why non-musicians can instantly tell if a singer is
on or off key, while non-musicians will often be clueless as to the excellent or poor intonation of any ordinary instrumental player. (This is also why it takes a while
[sometimes a real long while] for some musicians to notice
if their own or another player's instrument is not in tune with a group.)
Back to the original question, we can all sing if we want to. Some should sing but don't. Some need more practice and some need a lot more practice.
I have the annoying habit of sitting on the fence where most debates are concerned, and this one is no exception. I agree with the assertion that (or, at least, I think it highly probable - I have no scientific evidence) that the vast majority of us have an innate connection between the ear and the voice, and that the human ear is inherently very finely tuned to (or has the innate potential to be so) the nuances of the human voice. But some people, on the other hand, have impaired hearing or no hearing at all; similarly, some people have impaired vision, or impaired motor control; others have impaired cognitive function. Any of these impairments will cause difficulties with certain everyday activities, whether they be physical, mental or communication related. Depending on the nature and severity of the difficulties, a person may be able to overcome them by compensating with some other physical or mental function; in some cases, they may be too severe to be completely overcome. So, is it not perfectly possible that the facilities to 1. perceive the pitch nuances of the human voice and 2. control the vocal chords accurately (a form of motor control) could be impaired in some people? In many cases, it probably can be overcome, with will and training; but there are bound to be a few cases where it cannot. It is worth noting also, however, that for people who are impaired in some activity on which life depends, such as mobility, feeding oneself or communicating, the incentive to overcome the impairment is likely to be greater than the incentive of a 'tone-deaf' warbler to sing; so the perceived lack of necessity for singing may also be a factor.
If I may venture a moment into the profoundly unscientific, there is an aspect to singing that I don't think has been mentioned yet in this thread: that is the ability of a good singer to channel emotion and 'meaning' through the voice. (The same is true, of course, of a good instrumentalist and their instrument). But this need not necessarily, in my opinion, be coupled with perfect tuning or a 'beautiful' voice to produce great singing. There is obviously a limit to how far off-key a singer can go before I have to excuse myself, and there are a (very) few voices I just don't like the timbre of, but I am no less likely to be gripped by a wavery, thin-toned voice than by a Paul Robeson or a Kathleen Ferrier (not that there are many of them about), if the singer is really SINGING the song. Personally, I can produce a sequence of notes with my voice in reasonable tune, but I can't SING any more than a MIDI player can PLAY a tune.
An acquaintance makes yikes money doing something in a creative field that, in theory, “anyone can do.” He has defended his “easy” profession with this analogy: “Anyone can sing, too, but how many singers will people pay to hear?”
And I hear him on that. So there’s your good planet earth measure—moolah. If no thin segment of the population will pay to hear you sing, you are not a singer. Can you learn to sing? Sure, just like Susan Alexander did.
" If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk <snip> you can sing."
That expression is normally used in contexts which are the exact opposite of what seems to be the dominant thesession.org attitude to communal music making. Inclusive ones that encourage participation.
Its like saying "if you can blow and move your fingers you can play whistle, if you can wave your arm you can hit a drum - come along and have a go"
"it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not"
Rubbish. All music is a human construct. It is learned, every last drop of it.
But it's interesting how many very successful and highly rated "musicians" there are out there who are plainly rubbish at the whole "music" thing. And all this proves is that "music" really doesn't matter much. Bob Dylan springs to mind.
@david: Yeah, there are plenty of situations where you can go make music, sing, or dance (badly) and it is ok, because sometimes it is about having fun, not about how good you are. I didn't necessarily mean in in the context of sessions, though some sessions are more forgiving and open than others.
Don't be ridiculous Trevor, you know fine well that any correlation between music and birdsong is pure anthropomorphism. Next you'll be telling us that the sound of a babbling brook is a deliberate aesthetic construct formed by the communications between water molecules and pebbles.
What defines music? to suggest that birdsong is not music is ridiculous , I mean seriously Are you suggesting that only humans can make music that if its not made by man its therefore not music? Utter nonsense, of course bird song is music, its song FFS. Bird 'song'.......
So you profess to know that Birds are communicating and only communicating? thats might knowledgeable of you. How did you discover that?
Are you also suggesting that we, as musicians can not communicate with music? That song, which encompasses both words and music, can not be used for communication? Im sure you are not. Or that when we sing, we are only communicating?
Have you translated their conversations?
You, we, no one actually knows what is going through a birds mind when it sings.
Heard of a wind chime, does it produce music? Birds singing, the CD player FFS . It has no motivation, it has no mind, it merely makes noises which we interpret as music, or not! as the case maybe.
What IS music? ... Noise, even rhythm created by a printing press or whatever, with rythm pitch, repetition. Some folk think Rammstein is music! Slip knot... Does music need Rhythm? pitch? etc etc etc
Music is a very broad concept that means different things to different people So are youse suggesting then ,that music is not music unless the mind that created that music knows what it is doing? That specific motivations must exist before something can be described as music? what?
I'm merely going with an objective definition of music. I agree, MacCruiskeen, sometimes birds make noise, & noise by definition is not music; although that too can be debated ad infinitum. Don't wish to go there.
I don't intend to anthropomorphize bird "songs" beyond a basic definition of music. I'm using human definitions since birds don't use dictionaries.
"You, we, no one actually knows what is going through a birds mind when it sings."
Nobody knows what's going through your hypothetical mind when you type, Will. However, repeated observation suggests that what's going on is you think you've thought of something clever to say ... and are wrong again. And here we have one more data point, and once again, it fits the curve.
"All music is a human construct." If we use 'music' in an aesthetic sense I think that statement could apply to birdsong (and maybe even a babbling brook). It may be music to the human ear, but it doesn't meant that to the bird it is music in the way we mean it. However, to dismiss that idea out of hand as anthropomorphism risks missing the possiblilty that there is some evolutionary/neurological link between what the bird does and our aesthetic appreciation for music. (and it could hint at a belief that man is fundamentally separate from 'the animals')
But llig was making a specific point about "it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not" and indicating why that was rubbish.
Ofer Tchernichovski: "For the male has nice colors and they can sing, and the female is grey and she cannot sing, they don’t even have a song system in their brain. This is a completely different brain. This brain is the brain that creates the songs, whereas this brain is the brain that judges the song. Their selecting males are also based on how beautiful and nice the songs are. So there is a transmitter brain and a receiver brain."
"Rubbish. All music is a human construct. It is learned, every last drop of it."
Well, to go out on a limb, how about a chimpanzee who has never been exposed to music before preferring consonant music to dissonant music? Is this instinctive or learned?
"Regular human music was also played to the monkeys, which predictably showed little response, except for a very surprising, calming response to the heavy metal band Metallica."
It seems to me that one should keep an open mind about such things. I don't get either the emphatic "of course birds make music" or the equally emphatic "of course it isn't music - music's just for our own, supremely destructive species" (last 3 words are, of course, my own way of identifying what species we're talking about).
I don't know who these folks are (coming up), but it's still an interesting article:
I don't know whether this helps, as I can't find the academic backup that I did manage to find when I started to look into this a few years ago.
I live out in the country, but this concerns one of our most common birds, common in both town and country - the blackbird. Now, male blackbirds have very interesting songs that they develop over the course of a whole season. You can hear this happening if you take the time and trouble.
The male blackbird will start, in Spring, with a few notes apparently strung together haphazardly. This then gradually changes and becomes fixed into a particular and very individual song (as in, unique to that one bird) over the course of the ensuing Spring and Summer seasons. Blackbirds listen to and incorporate the calls of other birds into their song, but, at some point, that song will become more or less fixed with, however, a final flourish at very high pitch that seems to keep varying.
The stuff I found a few years ago said that what happens is that the male blackbirds try out songs and subtly change them depending on how successful the songs are in attracting females.
I listen out for blckbird song these days, and you can actually hear this happening, year after year. Now, to me, what the blackbird does sounds like the process of composition at work. You'd have to say that, from a scientific point of view, the jury's out on that though.
There is a difference between two notes a minor second apart and two notes a perfect fifth apart that can be explained in terms of acoustics and the physiology of our ear. It would be nitpicking not to agree that at those extremes we can call one dissonance and one consonance.
We are told that the sophisticted western ear finds parallel fifths bland and uninteresting musically - but medieval monks liked doing it. We find parallel seconds jarring but Bulgarian village women find singing them a cool thing to do and even put a hard edge on their voices to increase the effect. I think those are examples of llig's "It is learned, every last drop of it."
But are there any cultures where people croon in response to immediate pain, or shreak there children to sleep ? Is that learned ? In the UK most birds have harsh alarm calls and softer contact calls.
The Blackbird male in whose territory we live has a very distinct motif in his repertoire that identifies him immediately; I've never heard another Blackbird sing this five-note sequence, and he varies it subtly sometimes.
I wouldn't worry about other people's definition of music. It's part of the arrogance of humankind to assume we're the only beings capable of creating music, learnt or otherwise.
Try listening to the recordings of Chris Watson, and hopefully you'll understand what you're missing.
Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?".
Talk of Anthropomorphizing! you don't have a clue what the birds are saying, IF they are saying anything. Thats just ridiculous , next youll be saying they talk to you ! That might explain something....
I mean using music to communicate is an age old thing, the Military for example used the trumpet, bagpipes drumms etc communicate to the lines over the noise of a bunch of loonies hacking away at each other. . Its also music. Song can have multiple functions...
untill jon can actually demonstrate that the birds talk to each other and that they have no concept of singing for pleasure I find his assertions rather ludicrous. I can accept that they might well , probably are, communicating through song, but to put ideas into their minds and to suggest their motivations and what they are communicating!?! . I dont think so! I mean they could be singing for fun, to enjoy the sound, the experience or they might be discussing philosophy. We dont know. Its that simple.
But music simply does not rely on motivation, music can be made by a little wind up box, or a computer. It has no motivation, motivation is irrelevant, what matters is the product, not why they create it. The product, bird song, is by its very nature defined by the English language as music; Song. As Seamus Ennis told us, the thrushs song influenced his father and parts of that thrushes melody come out in the tune;
The morning thrush.
***"All music is a human construct."***
And human musical preferences are remarkably consistent across cultures, so there are clearly some natural frequencies, sounds and timbres which resonate with humans better than others.
"Talk of Anthropomorphizing! you don't have a clue what the birds are saying,"
Nonsense. While it would be stupid to seriously assert that the birds are literally "saying" in the sense of human speech - just as stupid as asserting that they are "singing" in the way humans sing, in fact - it's pretty clear that the signals are used fir two main purposes. One of those purposes is to delineate territory, the other is to attract a mate - which can be summaraized in a tongue in cheek fashion as I did above.
Please don't pretend to be so blindingly stupid that you suppose I meant they are literally using a language. Even you are not such an imbecile as to believe that, I think.
No, I take that back, perhaps you are that stupid. If so, I apologize for allowing an ambiguity to creep into my language and confuse you. I was addressing Al, who has a brain in his head.
"I mean they could be singing for fun, to enjoy the sound, the experience or they might be discussing philosophy. We dont know."
In both cases, we'd see variations in the patterns of their song that we simply don't see. An individual bird's repertoire of calls is far too limited to serve either of those purposes. Even you manage to put together varied sentences, and it often seems like you have just a handful of thoughts in your head. If a bird had philosophy to discuss, they'd need more than a couple of sentences to discuss it with, and if they're just singing to enjoy the sounds, you'd again expect to hear some variation in the songs they produce.
I think you need to look into this a bit more, Jon. One of the things that's been focussing the minds of those scientists engaged in studying animal and, funnily enough, especially bird behaviour and sounds in recent years is exactly that there *are* so many variations that birds put into their song*. The blackbird is the obvious example (at least in the UK) since its song patterns seem to be almost endlessly varied, both from one bird to another and also even with one individual bird, until he's settled on his favourite song for the season, and even then, there's loads of variations. But there are loads of other birds that do this sort of thing as well.
The other problem with discussing this stuff is that it strays easily into the realms of philosophy. For instance, I think I could argue reasonably convincingly that *human* music is also all about establishing territory and attracting a mate. This seems to apply especially strongly to Irish trad as played in sessions.
* The study of animal music is called "zoomusicology". I just found that out, and thought it was a nice word.
(1) If you actually go out and listen to birds, you hear that they will happily recite the same call over and over for hours on end, with minor variation in timing.
(2) In order to be linguistic in character, bird song would have to show some simple characteristics indicative of syntax. It doesn't.
(3) In order to be anything like human music, bird song would have to show some simple characteristics indicative of musical structure. It doesn't.
(4) I honestly don't see how this enters into philosophy in any serious sense. What I'm seeing is just sophistry. Taking your point specifically, while it is freely granted that human music (and language) are often used for attracting mates and delineating territory, it is obviously not the case that either is "all about" either of those things.
"The other problem with discussing this stuff is that it strays easily into the realms of philosophy. For instance, I think I could argue reasonably convincingly that *human* music is also all about establishing territory and attracting a mate. This seems to apply especially strongly to Irish trad as played in sessions."
I would argue these are primarily the reasons people play in sessions.
Living as I do, at the end of the road, Im in a birdwatchers paradise, officially , I get to hear lots and lots of birdsong, do I try to interpret what they are saying no I enjoy the sounds they create, it is music to my ears. What they wish to achieve with their music, song, communicating, vocalisation is hardly relevant to the casual human listener. ~Just as in the motivations behind a trad musician playing tunes are of little import to the birds 'listening.
Jon says: "Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?"."
I think you are helping to make my point. Doesn't some variation on those themes pretty much make up 90 percent of the pop songs you hear on the radio?
Yes, I can sort of see where you're coming from, Jon. What you're saying *seems* sensible. But I would just add two things:
1 The experts on animal, and particularly bird, behaviour don't agree with you. (Read up on it - I promise you it's interesting stuff.) and
2 I do listen to birds all the time - I have masses of birds come visit my garden. They have, as the scientists that I mentioned above point out as often as you'll let them, huge variation in their calls. Some species have less, but the ones that do vary produce huge variation in what they do. And the fascinating this is that they do this whilst maintaining often quite complex structures in their songs.
I would encourage anyone to have a look at what's out there on this. There's plenty of it on the net, as I've found this afternoon, and a lot of it is very interesting indeed. (Ignore the creationist stuff you'll find, though. )
Oh, and serious philosophers have been discussing this sort of thing since the dawn of philosophy, so I don't think it's quite right to dismiss it as "sophistry".
Here we are arguing about whether bird songs mean anything or if it matters, and no one has yet mentioned humpback whales. I recently watched a BBC documentary about whale communication and the scientists being interviewed who were studying humpbacks said that the old theory that males sing to attract females was getting weaker as underwater technology improves and scientists can get better views of what whales are doing. This guy said the male humpbacks appeared to be singing to each other; not a female in sight. When they were after a female, they did not seem to be singing.
Unlike traditional musicians.
The biologist who was interviewed in this documentary admitted he didn't really have a clue why the whales were singing and speculated that they might even do it because they enjoy it.
Excuse my cut and paste here, to make a point regarding the depth of understanding displayed in the article and Jon here; Perhaps he has not read that far yet?
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Really, Will? Are you serious? Here's another bibliography. Is this from a parody, or from a serious paper? What internal evidence supports your claim?
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" will happily recite the same call over and over for hours on end, with minor variation in timing." Some human chant is like that. I suppose you could argue that its not music - but would that put us closer or further from the birds ?
I'm surprised no one's cut and pasted the wikipedia definition of 'music' yet! But thhat really is the crux of it isn't it. Your personal definition of what constitutes 'music'.Wind rain, ocean, birds, my dogs when they howl-all of this is music to me.
David - it's not a matter of surface characteristics. Finding that bird song exhibits some superficial similarities to human musical behavior does nothing for the claim that it is like human music in any but the most superficial way.
All of the animal "music" that's cited is closer to language than it is to human music: it's an audible communication, not an artistic endeavor. How do we know this? Simply: because as a behavior, its distribution is such that it only occurs in certain circumstances.
Bees "dance" to communicate the location of food sources. Does this mean bees have ballet? That some apiary somewhere has the next Merce Cunningham? Of course not, that would be ludicrous. A bull moose will "pose" to display evidence of his fitness and ability to defeat another moose in combat. Does this mean that the moose is anything like a model, or a gym rat? Of course not.
A bird "sings" to establish control of a certain territory. Does this mean we're hearing a little Pavorotti? Of course not.
Now, I say it's "closer to language" than it is to music. I am not saying that it's much like language at all. In fact, no animal displays anything like linguistic behavior. The fundamental characteristic of language is syntax. All human language displays an internal structure which cannot be mapped in a linear fashion; no animal "language" displays this internal structure. All human language is capable of quoting or paraphrasing itself and modifying that quoted language; no animal language displays this capacity. Human language is capable of combining words to modify meanings - I have seen nothing to suggest that any animal language is capable of this. Human language is capable of conveying ironic reversals of meaning, of sarcasm, of humor. You might say a dog barks to warn off an intruder, but you won't say it "was only joking" when it barked at you.
In a nutshell, animal communication has been examined quite carefully, and it does not resemble human language except in wishful thinking and poorly-constructed analogy.
Yes, it's actually a hilarious paper. Looks a lot like this one, as a matter of fact. Now, can you answer the question? What internal evidence reveals this as a bibliography coming from a parody of this sort of paper?
If you can't tell from the bibliography that Sokol's paper is a parody, then how can you tell from the bibliography that your paper is serious? And if the people who published the paper - presumably experts in the field - couldn't tell that it was a parody when they accepted it for publication, the only reasonable communication is that there is no detectable difference between a serious paper and a parody in this field.
This experiment has been replicated - in fact, there are computer programs that generate papers like Sokol's, complete with impressive bibliographies, and these papers are regularly accepted for presentation at colloquia. These papers are nonsense, and the only people who seem to take them seriously are the people who are paid to take them seriously.
So let's not talk about "zoosemiotics" as if it were meant as something serious, okay? It's useful for spreading on your lawn, and that's about it.
@EB: "Oh, and serious philosophers have been discussing this sort of thing since the dawn of philosophy, so I don't think it's quite right to dismiss it as "sophistry"."
I don't think the question was sophistry to begin with. In fact, considering the differences between human and animal behavior was at one point a useful exercise. Since we now have a working theory of language and we've done a lot of work on animal behavior, the question has been answered, so it's no longer a matter of philosophy, any more than the nature of color or the correct procedure for deciding the winner of an interrupted game of dice.
What I'm calling "sophistry" is specifically the arguments being made here to support the unsupportable premise: "it might be", therefore "you can't say that it isn't", therefore "it is". Pure sophistry. Laughable.
"Your personal definition of what constitutes 'music'.Wind rain, ocean, birds, my dogs when they howl-all of this is music to me. "
Okay, that's fine. As long as we all accept that words don't actually have meanings, they can mean anything we want them to. Now, back to trad music: when I fleem the doogle on my hasenpfeffer, I get a strange canary. Can anyone explain this?
@Jon. The point I am making is that some of what we use to construct our music and which we would discuss as part of music might be something that we have in common with the birds, part of a shared vertibrate pattern. If so that wouldn't make what the birds do music but it would make some aspects of our music genetic rather than cultural.
But having previously read upon it I agree with llig's original statement and think it was a succinct and appropriate response to the part of halwaythere's post that he quoted. Recognition of 'wrong notes' is not instinctive. Being startled by deliberate but unanticipated loud dissonance or harshness of tone, for example, might be. Does any culture shreak their babies to sleep ?
Certainly the word 'music' can have different meanings to different people. My kids dig Dubstep but to me it sounds like arcade noises. Punk 'noise bands' don't really fit into a defined definition of music but is music none the less to people that like it right? Unless Jon Kiparsky is the final judge on what is music and what is not?
David - I certainly think there's room for biological explanations of consonance and dissonance, as long as we accept that harmony is not a universal across cultures, to there's a fair bit that's necessarily cultural as well. For example, every culture that I know of recognizes the octave: two notes whose pitches are in a 2:1 ratio are "the same" everywhere you go, as far as I know. What we call the fifth of the scale is almost always a "privileged" note, and much more important than (say) the major six - but exactly where it's located is not universal.
So the similarities can plausibly be explained by reference to the relative simplicity of those harmonies, and there's certainly interesting stuff to look at there.
So I don't have a problem with the proposal that there's a genetic or a biological component to the makeup of our preferred harmonic systems. (Just as I don't have any objection to the idea that our facility for language is innate and not taught)
I just don't think that music is basically biologically determined, any more than I think the syntax of English or Tagalog is biologically determined, and I don't think that there's any reason to suppose that music is somethign that birds do.
Now if, like Shanty, you want music to mean "whatever random sounds happen to be going on around me" or "whatever random sounds I happen to enjoy" then yes, music is something that birds do. It's also a word without any meaning at all other than "background noise", so I don't see how that buys us any analytical leverage.
I must say, in all the heated rhetoric around here, over many years, I have never heard anyone called a "epistemic relativist." And the funny thing was, once I looked it up, it actually appeared to be appropriate! (I can't say that it WAS appropriate, as that would be making a value judgement, which, if I am following all this philosophical stuff correctly, is something I should avoid doing.)
I think I will go out and listen to some birds, at least I can understand them...
@Shanty: what a lot of misconceptions in one post!
"Certainly the word 'music' can have different meanings to different people."
People might be thinking of different things when you say the word "music". When you say "dog", I think of a German Shepherd, you might think of a Great Dane or an Akita. However, we all know what we mean by "dog" and we know what we mean by "music" and it's not "background noise".
"My kids dig Dubstep but to me it sounds like arcade noises."
Arcade noises typically are simplistic little tunes, and obey the same rules as Beethoven or Paddy Fahy. (just not as many of them)
"Punk 'noise bands' don't really fit into a defined definition of music but is music none the less to people that like it right?"
Most punk music also fits into any ordinary definition of music. Whether someone likes it or not is irrelevant - unless that person is the final judge of what music is and what it is not.
There are some bands like Sunn 0))) which spend a lot of time making pure pitched noise, without any apparent regard for harmony. We might discuss whether a band that perpetrates this sort of thing is "making music" or simply "performing theater". But for the most part, a band like NoMeansNo or Fugazi is doing stuff that's well within any ordinary definition of music, unless you mean my grandmother's. (wihch was pretty much "Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and Henry Mancini on a good day".
" Unless Jon Kiparsky is the final judge on what is music and what is not?"
If we're going to avoid having a single arbiter on what is music, it is necessary to accept that there's a common definition and that it's a little more rigorous than simply "whatever the speaker means at the moment of speech". So unless you want to pick someone and give them the job of making the decision, we might as well talk as though the word has a meaning and we know what it is. Which it does, and which we do.
Firstly; <<birds make music" hypothesis?>> Its not a hypothesis?! its an observable fact. What is debatable s the definition of music. But the self evident fact is that that birds vocalise with musical tones,.
Now if youd like to explain your definition of music that does not include a series of musical tones in patterns?
Secondly you say ;'' there is no detectable difference between a serious paper and a parody in this field. ''
which field is that , science? physics?
thirdly you said this;Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?".
So your argument is precisely the opposite of your words... hmm , then you say this;
<<All of the animal "music" that's cited is closer to language than it is to human music: it's an audible communication, not an artistic endeavor. How do we know this? Simply: because as a behavior, its distribution is such that it only occurs in certain circumstances. >>
<< In a nutshell, animal communication has been examined quite carefully, and it does not resemble human languageand except in wishful thinking and poorly-constructed analogy. >>
So its not music, its not language its 'audible communication', according to you , but its closer to language than music.
Is mathematics a language? what are the "core attributes" of language? What are the criteria you use to define language ? What about body language, its not language?!? Its communicating using movements...
Language is a form of communication, it does not need to be verbal[sign language]
But perhaps sign language is , ahh, not language? according to jons definition. Body language?.
Humans have many languages; A system of communication.
But perhaps jon with his big degree in linguistics can elucidate for poor little old me .
"The biologist who was interviewed in this documentary admitted he didn't really have a clue why the whales were singing and speculated that they might even do it because they enjoy it."
Words derive meaning through the process of cultural consensus. The word 'music' simply defies consesnus even within a single culture. This is pretty easy to understand and doesn't require annotated bibliographic references or discussions on harmony, consonance and dissonance, genetics , biology or any other science to prove.
If someone mimicked whale song or bird song in a musical performance would it be music ?
I keep meaning to check, but I think that the use of song for what birds and whales do is sematically correct and I wonder if when 'song' is used rather than 'tune' by psychologists it may be deliberate rather than because they are part of the iTunes generation.
"Now if youd like to explain your definition of music that does not include a series of musical tones in patterns"
Have you looked up "assuming the consequent" lately? If not, you might want to do that. However, if you're suggesting that "a series of tones in patterns" is a definition of what constitutes music, I'm afraid we're not going to get anywhere with this.
"So your argument is precisely the opposite of your words"
Was this supposed to make sense? If so, you should try again. Maybe after the drugs wear off.
"So its not music, its not language its 'audible communication', according to you , but its closer to language than music. "
Yes. As I said (and you could read this for yourself, it's right there) it's closer to language in the sense that it's a concrete communication, of a sort. It's not abstract, as music is. However, it has none of the things that make human language interesting, so it's not like language.
I can explain it again if you're still dumber than a bag of rocks.
And here we have your series of stupid questions:
"Is mathematics a language?"
No. Various branches of math define domain languages for representing the problems they deal with, but these are not "languages" in that they have no syntax, no semantics, and no speakers. They're systems of notation used for precision and brevity.
"what are the "core attributes" of language?"
Go read a book. I'm not going to run through a first-year linguistics course for you.
"What are the criteria you use to define language ?"
Again, you're going to have to actually do a little work for yourself here.
"What about body language, its not language?!? Its communicating using movements..."
No, it's not. Is grunting a language? It's communicating using sound...
"But perhaps sign language is , ahh, not language? "
Where do you get that? Of course sign language is a language - it's a very interesting family of languages, which actually confirms much of the theoretical basis for linguistics - which all goes to tell us that animals don't do language.
"Humans have many languages; A system of communication."
Is this a line from a poem? Or what is it meant to be? Yes, humans have many languages. If you like, you can learn a lot about them. However, you can't just make stuff up about them and expect anyone to take you seriously.
(I'm afraid at this point, you simply can't expect anyone to take you seriously, period, but that's your grave you've dug for yourself)
Well, I said I was going to go listen to birds, but sadly was not successful. My walk was pretty, but unsatisfying on the bird front. I only saw a pair of sparrows, which is surprising, since I live in an area where both sea and land birds mix in great numbers.
But I knew when I returned, I would still find some squawking going on here! And who would have thought I could hear a parrot doing James Brown horn lines!
Ok, jon just getting it clear; body language is not language, A domain language is not a language. The language of mathematics is not also a language after all despite what those pesky mathematicians call it eh?. and bird song ...... is not. Bird song is not music ... cheers
Jon- I still think it's interesting that you think your definition of music is the only legitimate definition. Of course most punk bands are musical. I played in punk bands for over twenty five years but I'm not talking about your average punk stuff. That's why I said noise bands. If feed back and shrill screaming with no melodic form can be defined as music than certainly a bird's call can likewise be defined as music.
If on the other hand you say that feed back with shrill screaming is not music than you are setting yourself up as the arbiter of what is music and what is not.
". . . operational definition for music:
Music is temporally organized sound and silence, a-referentially communicative within a context."
. . .
"Sounds alone do not constitute music or sound art. The listener is the agent through whom sounds and sound combinations are elevated into music/art; the composer of a work can be considered its first listener and, in some respects, this may be where his/her privileged status ends."
Just to clarify, do you mean a place where numpties are born and raised? Or do you mean a place where numpties are kept away from non-numpty society like a poor farm or a loony bin? (or is like the farm where my parents took my incontinent cat when I was seven?)
As a voice researcher and professional voice coach, I confirm that anyone with a structurally functional voice can sing.
I identify 12 elements within the human body that affect how we produce phonation - as long as these twelve elements are functional, nothing is stopping the singer from learning how to make a surprising number of sounds (including changing their timbre considerably) - the muscular manipulations necessary can be learnt by everyone - thus everyone can sing.
The question about tuning ability is most easily answered by splitting people into three groups :
1. Those who sing out of tune because one of the twelve elements isn't working properly (most usually down to ventricular constriction)
2. Those who are unable to hear the different pitches easily and struggle to reproduce them
3. Those who are clinically unable to differentiate pitches
Group one's problems are best solved by working on vocal technique, and preferably with a physiologically competent teacher rather than the usual 'sing from your diaphragm' nonsense.
Group two usually require technique alongside ear training (I particularly like Kodaly for this)
Group three are, as far as science tells us up to know, stuffed.
Most tuning problems fall into category 1, a small percentage into category 2 and almost none at all into 3.
Can anyone learn how to sing?
Can anyone learn how to sing?
Inspired by my other thread, i figured that Voice was just an altogether different instrument, which was why i didn't include it.
Over time, I've come across some that say that anyone could learn how to sing, while others say that not everyone can learn how to sing. Personally, i think that if someone puts in the time and effort, they could learn how to do anything(passion and desire of course being significant aids). Usually, in my world, the people that claim that not everyone can learn, are those that claim to have tried and tried but could never get it. And those that say that anyone can learn are experienced musicians.
Obviously, there's much more to singing than Tone/Timbre. Me, i can sing, but i don't like the tone of my voice. I think that singing has more to do with a persons ability to produce notes that are relative to each other. But what is happening in someones' brain when they are singing? What is happening in someones' brain that is singing out of tune? Do they know that they are singing out of tune? Does pitch recognition have this extra long scale, that extends from complete tone deafness, all the way to absolute pitch?
My understanding, is that tone deafness is when one is not able to tell the difference between high and low pitches. I don't understand how different pitches can sound the same, but I've heard some claim "It all sounds the same to me".
So I have concluded from my own experience that Absolute Pitch is attainable. But is it's opposite, Tone Deafness, defeatable?
# Posted on September 29th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I don't reckon everyone can learn. I think some people literally don't hear melodies and differential tones in the same way- it is always a source of interest to me how people hear the same thing in totally different ways. If one has the infamous "musical ear" then I think singing is easy- of course then getting pleasant timbres from the singing voice is the challenge, but it can be done.
Hard to say if "tone deafness" or its inverse "the musical ear" can be overcome/achieved, but I suspect that if you are in the camp where everything sounds the same and you can't, for arguments sake, sing back a simple melody, the issue probably isn't whether it can be learnt, but whether the perhaps massive amount of work required to even see if is it possible, is ever desirable?
i.e. is the motivation to get there ever enough for someone who feels unable to hear anything like a tune or sing it back in the first place?
# Posted on September 29th 2011 by Rollmop
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Everyone can do anything they want if motivated. The only limits are the ones you put on yourself. I know that sounds like some crap motivational speaker cliche but I believe it to be true. I've seen unlikely people do wonderful things. It's just a matter of effort.
# Posted on September 29th 2011 by shanty
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
It's use it or lose it. I think most people, if not all, are able to recognize familiar nursery rhymes even when those are sung without words or played instrumentally. Complete tone deafness (IMHO) probably does not exist or is extremely rare. So, if the human brain is capable of recognizing the common tunes & songs heard early in life where do people become side tracked away from the musical/tonal/rhythmic mindset? It's a good question.
# Posted on September 29th 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I've never met a person, when properly motivated (or lubricated) who couldn't warble out some sort of melody. I would wager that singing is one of those hard-wired emotive things humans developed over millions of years.
Now can anyone sing well? That's a more subjective horse of a different colored kettle of fish isn't it.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Jusa Nutter Eejit
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
This is from the references on the Wikipedia entry for Tone Deafness; The Tone Deaf Choir: http://listeningbookaudio.com/tonedeaf.htm
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Of course anyone can learn to sing. It's preposterous defeatist nonsense to contemplate otherwise.
However, you are stuck with the timbre of your voice.
However, I can think of a few singers I really like who do wonders with a truly horrible voice.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by ...
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Some people are really tone deaf, it is kind of like color blindness. I have a friend who is afflicted with this, couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, has to refrain from singing in church because he throws people off. Other people can sing along with others, but when on their own, can't get the intervals right and wander around. Other people have tendencies to sing sharp or flat, perhaps because what they hear in their head is a bit different than what we hear coming out of them. But the vast majority of people have the basic capability to sing, and that capability can be improved by training and practice, just like instrumental ability can be.
I can sing very well, but prefer mostly to sing in groups, because the tone of my voice is rather thin. In the group I am in, except for our lead singer, and my wife, who do solos, the rest of us just join in Clancy Brother style, which works quite well. The folks I envy are those who have big voices that can command a pub even without any electronic assistance. That I think is born, not bred.
I am taking a singing workshop right now, for a few weeks, with Bridget Fitzgerald, a local sean nos singer. Very very interesting, after hearing it for years, and mimicing it with an instrument, to be involved with a group of people learning to sing it. Some of it is the opposite of what you would learn in more classical singing, much more nasal, for example. And it is good for me, because there is no hiding behind the rest of the singers in sean nos!
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
No, you're wrong there. Tone deaf is nothing like colour blindness. Colour blindness is a physical disability, you lack certain things in your eye which means you your eye simply does not detect colour. (It's cones and rods, I can't remember which is which) it can detect bright or dark, but not particular frequencies. But if your ear can hear then your ear can detect pitch/frequency because it's the same thing in your ear that does both. Tone deaf is purely lack of practise/focus. Likewise with vocal chords
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by ...
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
.. and specifically to the opening post, absolute pitch (perfect pitch) really has nothing to do with being able to recognise/reproduce accurate intervals.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by ...
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
We have auto-tune now. Everyone can sing. :(
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by kennedy
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Interesting:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070823214755.htm
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=tone-deafness-bad-singing
http://www.laurenscharff.com/courseinfo/SL02/tone-deafness.htm
http://news.healingwell.com/index.php?p=news1&id=527737
etc.
I would think that doing a simple google search might give you a better idea of what this is about than asking on this board.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Wyogal
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Well, llig, whether their ears hear the pitches or not, these few unfortunate people seem not to be able to distinguish or interpret those pitches. I have seen it, tried to work with my friend, and he literally could not understand what he needed to do to sing in a particular pitch, it just didn't work. It is you who is wrong on this one. Perhaps you are tone deaf to ideas that don't fit your preconceived notions.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/125/2/238.full
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
From the abpve:
"This study suggests that congenital amusia is not a myth but a genuine learning disability for music. The systematic evaluation of 11 adults, who reported themselves to be severely handicapped in the musical domain despite their efforts to learn it, largely confirms the presence of an underdeveloped system for processing music. Amusical individuals are severely impaired in music discrimination and recognition tasks. These impairments cannot be explained by hearing losses, since they all have, or grew up with, normal audiometry. The musical disorder cannot be explained by a lack of exposure since all amusical participants had music lessons during childhood and were raised in families in which a few siblings are musically normal. Finally, the musical deficit cannot be ascribed to some general cognitive slowing since all amusical participants have reached a high level of education. The musical disorder appears as an accidental disturbance in an otherwise fully normal cognitive and affective system.
One remarkable characteristic of the amusical condition is the selectivity of the disorder. The deficit appears highly specific to the musical domain. Amusical subjects retain the ability to process non‐musical material as well as their matched controls. In the present study, amusical subjects were shown to interpret intonation in speech properly, to identify well‐known figures from their voice alone and to identify and recognize common environmental sounds, such as animal cries and ringing sounds. With the exception of a single amusical subject, they all identified and recognized familiar songs when hearing the first lyrics. This high level of achievement in the auditory domain stands in sharp contrast to the rather poor level of functioning displayed by amusical individuals in recognizing and memorizing musical patterns. The disorder appears to be music‐specific. "
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Should read "above" (fat finger syndrome).
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Llig, singing isn't just about perceiving pitch and intervals. You also have to be able to create them with your vocal cords. Lots of people have great hearing but not so great (or even disabled) vocal cords.
I'm terrible at singing, but if pressed I can carry a simple tune--not too wide a range, and the timbre is awful. Oh well.
Still, if experience is anything to go by, "Whether you think you can, or think you can't, you're probably right."
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Count me as a non-believer in tone-deafness, at least as anything other than a conditioned response. Simple reason: there are no speakers of Chinese, or any other tonal language, who fail to properly recognize or produce tones.
(there are more involved reasons, but I don't have the citations for them, and this is that sort of crowd)
Saying the disorder "appears to be music-specific" tells you clearly as could be that this is simply a case of people being trained to believe that they "are not musical" or that they "can't sing".
I'd call it by its right name, but Jeremy objects to plain speech, so I'll call it "nonsense".
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"singing isn't just about perceiving pitch and intervals. You also have to be able to create them with your vocal cords. Lots of people have great hearing but not so great (or even disabled) vocal cords."
I can go along with this: it does take practice, and if you don't sing a lot, you're likely to not be a great singer. That doesn't mean there's anyone who can't sing, if they've got something they want to sing. If just means they have to work at it, which shouldn't surprise us at all.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I would have to agree with Llig. Yes, there are an unfortunate few for whom pitch perception is a mystery, but that surely affects their ability to play any (melody) instrument, not just the voice.
You are generally stuck with your voice but there are plenty of great singers with rubbish voices just as unfortunately there are plenty of rubbish singers with great voices (opera sings pop comes to mind). A great fiddle player will create magic on a £50 Chinese fiddle. A poor player will make a Strad sound awful.
My stock response to people who say they can't sing is "Have you tried practising?"
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by DonaldK
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
There was a programme on the BBC recently about this subject, where the presenter reckoned he was tone deaf. At the end of the programme, after a few lessons, he was singing quite well. Only the very few people with congenital amusia, a physical disorder of the brain, can be said to be tone deaf, rather than unable to sing well through lack of practice.
Interestingly, one of the interviwees with amusia said that while growing up he had never gone anywhere where music was played because it was too horrendous an experience. A huge gap in his social life. But as he said, he was never bothered by anyone hitting a wrong note, because he had no way of telling what the right note should be.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by gam
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
My experience (of others !) fits AlBrown's account, and the research described in Weejie's long quote would be consistant with it (and also negates he relevance of Jon's point about tonal languages).
The OP seems to be refering to singing as in a choir, rather than as in a classroom or congregation. In those last situations the 'no-hopers' are included. Choristers and the like may never come across them, or the challenge of singing while sharing a sheet of words with someone who is producing random pitches. In one case, at a funeral, it was someone who must have sung a hymn many times because he had the unexpected (to me) fit of the words to the rhythm spot-on.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Crossed with gam. I don't think the people I am thinking of are aware that they 'cannot sing'. So training somone who says that can't sing may be a different situation.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Belle Stewart said "if you can speak, you can sing". She didn't say "you can sing WELL", but that's subjective. I've met two people who definitely cannot sing. One cannot sing in tune, the other can sing in tune, but has zero sense of rhythm and sings in oddly disarticulated staccato bursts so, by my definition, cannot "sing".
m.d.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by emmdee
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"there are no speakers of Chinese, or any other tonal language, who fail to properly recognize or produce tones"
Not true. This study shows that amusia appears to be a general "disorder" - and of those tested Mandarin speakers who appeared to have this disorder, half were unable to recognize lexical tones - however, they were able to produce them. It's not something that could be called black and white.
"Congenital amusia is a neurogenetic disorder that affects the processing of musical pitch in speakers of non-tonal languages like English and French. We assessed whether this musical disorder exists among speakers of Mandarin Chinese who use pitch to alter the meaning of words. Using the Montreal Battery of Evaluation of Amusia, we tested 117 healthy young Mandarin speakers with no self-declared musical problems and 22 individuals who reported musical difficulties and scored two standard deviations below the mean obtained by the Mandarin speakers without amusia. These 22 amusic individuals showed a similar pattern of musical impairment as did amusic speakers of non-tonal languages, by exhibiting a more pronounced deficit in melody than in rhythm processing. Furthermore, nearly half the tested amusics had impairments in the discrimination and identification of Mandarin lexical tones. Six showed marked impairments, displaying what could be called lexical tone agnosia, but had normal tone production. Our results show that speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin may experience musical pitch disorder despite early exposure to speech-relevant pitch contrasts. The observed association between the musical disorder and lexical tone difficulty indicates that the pitch disorder as defining congenital amusia is not specific to music or culture but is rather general in nature. "
http://www.brams.umontreal.ca/plab/publications/article/149
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
There are some YouTube vids showing before / after, and some of them are pretty good but the "timbre" is still there - they are still recognisably the same people. So there's probably a potential level you can get to but the voice quality is probably not going to go beyond a certain point (just as with an instrument, there's a limit to how nice it's going to sound, however well played).
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Mark Harmer
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
...and above, I'm talking about improvements in singing, with people who could "basically" sing before getting any training.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Mark Harmer
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
With work anyone can probably be as good as this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h4f77T-LoM
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by RichardB
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
That was cruel, RichardB, I am traumatized!
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Hey RichardB, when I heard this I had to buy a sofa, just so I could hide behind it!
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Mark Harmer
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Barring amusia (which would also preclude playing an instrument, I guess), I'm a strong believer in that anyone can learn to sing.
I hold myself as anecdotal proof of this. I started flute 6 years ago, after 20 years of not playing any music or singing (except in school where my asshole of a music teacher said words to the effect of "To get you to sing in tune, I would have to work with you 3 hours a week for a year").
I've always *wanted* to sing but was put off by people's obvious disapproval at my attempts. So about 3 years ago, I started singing in the car and in the shower. I could hear how off pitch I was, but couldn't get that feedback to correct my pitch (and even now, both flute and singing, if I don't magically match, I can't consciously know whether I am sharp or flat).
I realised I have two problems: my voice is naturally slightly higher pitched than average - and I tend to match timbres rather than match pitches. So if I hear another male voice singing in normal range, I will try to sing in normal range. If I hear them pushing themselves to sing a bit sharp, I will push myself (instead of matching by singing in my normal range). Singing with women is even worse.
But anyway, the long and short of it is that with practice, I can now sing most tunes reasonably in tune - some still completely ellude me, but I went from "don't ever sing under any circumstances" to "willing to sing in public" in the last few years. If I can do it, anyone can!
Greg
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Tirno
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Actually, llig, there are some Central Auditory Processing Disorders (CAPD) that are physical deficiencies, similar to color-blindness. And some CAPD actually make it so that people can't discern two pitches from each other, whether they be close together (like the same note, but out of tune) or far apart...
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Reverend
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Well, color blindness is a different dimension of blindness. They can see, but they can't physically see the colors that are there. So i think that tone-deafness is comparable. They can hear, but can't discern between the different pitches that are being played.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by fiddlelearner
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Just to confuse the issue. I once had a colleague who was not colour blind - he could pass the standard test - but was unable to put names to the colours. His best way of describing it was 'like dyslexia, but for colour'.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by David50
Amusia
Oliver Sacks ~ Musicophilia
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPRW0wZ9NOM
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
another *googled* article on non-congenital amusia >>
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC491481/pdf/jnnpsyc00051-0080.pdf
"One of the problems still largely unresolved* in the field of the amusias is whether, and to what extent, specific syndromes exist that correspond to selective loss of basic components of musical ability or processing, such as rhythm, pitch, timbre, loudness. This problem is particularly interesting because it is related to a more general problem: whether there is a unitary mechanism of musical cognition, or, rather, a combination of abilities which are independent of each other."
*the article is from the "Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry" 1982
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
For hearing people, I think that it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not. The human ear is inherently tuned to the human voice. Unfortunately this only applies to listening to other voices. When a singer is listening to oneself, this tuning instinct is diminished or even eliminated, and this leads to apparent issues, that may not be apparent to the singer.
Also, and interestingly, the human ear does not seem to have an instinctive sense of tuning for any other instrument. This is why non-musicians can instantly tell if a singer is
on or off key, while non-musicians will often be clueless as to the excellent or poor intonation of any ordinary instrumental player. (This is also why it takes a while
[sometimes a real long while] for some musicians to notice
if their own or another player's instrument is not in tune with a group.)
Back to the original question, we can all sing if we want to. Some should sing but don't. Some need more practice and some need a lot more practice.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by halfwaythere
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I have the annoying habit of sitting on the fence where most debates are concerned, and this one is no exception. I agree with the assertion that (or, at least, I think it highly probable - I have no scientific evidence) that the vast majority of us have an innate connection between the ear and the voice, and that the human ear is inherently very finely tuned to (or has the innate potential to be so) the nuances of the human voice. But some people, on the other hand, have impaired hearing or no hearing at all; similarly, some people have impaired vision, or impaired motor control; others have impaired cognitive function. Any of these impairments will cause difficulties with certain everyday activities, whether they be physical, mental or communication related. Depending on the nature and severity of the difficulties, a person may be able to overcome them by compensating with some other physical or mental function; in some cases, they may be too severe to be completely overcome. So, is it not perfectly possible that the facilities to 1. perceive the pitch nuances of the human voice and 2. control the vocal chords accurately (a form of motor control) could be impaired in some people? In many cases, it probably can be overcome, with will and training; but there are bound to be a few cases where it cannot. It is worth noting also, however, that for people who are impaired in some activity on which life depends, such as mobility, feeding oneself or communicating, the incentive to overcome the impairment is likely to be greater than the incentive of a 'tone-deaf' warbler to sing; so the perceived lack of necessity for singing may also be a factor.
If I may venture a moment into the profoundly unscientific, there is an aspect to singing that I don't think has been mentioned yet in this thread: that is the ability of a good singer to channel emotion and 'meaning' through the voice. (The same is true, of course, of a good instrumentalist and their instrument). But this need not necessarily, in my opinion, be coupled with perfect tuning or a 'beautiful' voice to produce great singing. There is obviously a limit to how far off-key a singer can go before I have to excuse myself, and there are a (very) few voices I just don't like the timbre of, but I am no less likely to be gripped by a wavery, thin-toned voice than by a Paul Robeson or a Kathleen Ferrier (not that there are many of them about), if the singer is really SINGING the song. Personally, I can produce a sequence of notes with my voice in reasonable tune, but I can't SING any more than a MIDI player can PLAY a tune.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by CreadurMawnOrganig
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
An acquaintance makes yikes money doing something in a creative field that, in theory, “anyone can do.” He has defended his “easy” profession with this analogy: “Anyone can sing, too, but how many singers will people pay to hear?”
And I hear him on that. So there’s your good planet earth measure—moolah. If no thin segment of the population will pay to hear you sing, you are not a singer. Can you learn to sing? Sure, just like Susan Alexander did.
# Posted on September 30th 2011 by NEW Pure Drop® Ear Canal Oil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
http://famewatcher.com/highest-paid-singers-musicians-the-top-twelve.html
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk (and hear pitch) you can sing.
Becoming a professional though, that takes talent and dedication.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by banshee misfortune
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
" If you can walk, you can dance. If you can talk <snip> you can sing."
That expression is normally used in contexts which are the exact opposite of what seems to be the dominant thesession.org attitude to communal music making. Inclusive ones that encourage participation.
Its like saying "if you can blow and move your fingers you can play whistle, if you can wave your arm you can hit a drum - come along and have a go"
Fortunately, such things do happen.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not"
Rubbish. All music is a human construct. It is learned, every last drop of it.
But it's interesting how many very successful and highly rated "musicians" there are out there who are plainly rubbish at the whole "music" thing. And all this proves is that "music" really doesn't matter much. Bob Dylan springs to mind.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by ...
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
@david: Yeah, there are plenty of situations where you can go make music, sing, or dance (badly) and it is ok, because sometimes it is about having fun, not about how good you are. I didn't necessarily mean in in the context of sessions, though some sessions are more forgiving and open than others.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by banshee misfortune
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"All music is a human construct". Not quite, talk to an ornithologist.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Trevor Jennings
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Don't be ridiculous Trevor, you know fine well that any correlation between music and birdsong is pure anthropomorphism. Next you'll be telling us that the sound of a babbling brook is a deliberate aesthetic construct formed by the communications between water molecules and pebbles.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by ...
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
How would birdsongs not be considered music? IMHO that is ridiculous.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
What defines music? to suggest that birdsong is not music is ridiculous , I mean seriously Are you suggesting that only humans can make music that if its not made by man its therefore not music? Utter nonsense, of course bird song is music, its song FFS. Bird 'song'.......
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
cross post , hi Babs.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Anyone who interprets the noises birds make as 'music' or 'song' is merely putting a human construct upon an ornithological means of communication.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I meant 'ornithic' rather than 'ornithological', but the point remains the same.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
So you profess to know that Birds are communicating and only communicating? thats might knowledgeable of you. How did you discover that?
Are you also suggesting that we, as musicians can not communicate with music? That song, which encompasses both words and music, can not be used for communication? Im sure you are not. Or that when we sing, we are only communicating?
Have you translated their conversations?
You, we, no one actually knows what is going through a birds mind when it sings.
Heard of a wind chime, does it produce music? Birds singing, the CD player FFS . It has no motivation, it has no mind, it merely makes noises which we interpret as music, or not! as the case maybe.
What IS music? ... Noise, even rhythm created by a printing press or whatever, with rythm pitch, repetition. Some folk think Rammstein is music! Slip knot... Does music need Rhythm? pitch? etc etc etc
Music is a very broad concept that means different things to different people So are youse suggesting then ,that music is not music unless the mind that created that music knows what it is doing? That specific motivations must exist before something can be described as music? what?
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I'm merely going with an objective definition of music. I agree, MacCruiskeen, sometimes birds make noise, & noise by definition is not music; although that too can be debated ad infinitum. Don't wish to go there.
I don't intend to anthropomorphize bird "songs" beyond a basic definition of music. I'm using human definitions since birds don't use dictionaries.
Regarding an actual ornithologist's perspective here's my latest Googledygook >>
http://www.bl.uk/listentonature/specialinterestlang/langofbirdscontents.html
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"You, we, no one actually knows what is going through a birds mind when it sings."
Nobody knows what's going through your hypothetical mind when you type, Will. However, repeated observation suggests that what's going on is you think you've thought of something clever to say ... and are wrong again. And here we have one more data point, and once again, it fits the curve.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"All music is a human construct." If we use 'music' in an aesthetic sense I think that statement could apply to birdsong (and maybe even a babbling brook). It may be music to the human ear, but it doesn't meant that to the bird it is music in the way we mean it. However, to dismiss that idea out of hand as anthropomorphism risks missing the possiblilty that there is some evolutionary/neurological link between what the bird does and our aesthetic appreciation for music. (and it could hint at a belief that man is fundamentally separate from 'the animals')
But llig was making a specific point about "it is instinctive for the human ear to hear if a singer is staying in key or not" and indicating why that was rubbish.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by David50
Bird brains ~ Zebra finches
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/musicinstinct/video/music-and-evolution/ofer-tchernichovski-on-birds-songs/64/
Ofer Tchernichovski: "For the male has nice colors and they can sing, and the female is grey and she cannot sing, they don’t even have a song system in their brain. This is a completely different brain. This brain is the brain that creates the songs, whereas this brain is the brain that judges the song. Their selecting males are also based on how beautiful and nice the songs are. So there is a transmitter brain and a receiver brain."
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"Rubbish. All music is a human construct. It is learned, every last drop of it."
Well, to go out on a limb, how about a chimpanzee who has never been exposed to music before preferring consonant music to dissonant music? Is this instinctive or learned?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8174000/8174534.stm
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Or how about tamarins and Mettalica?
"Regular human music was also played to the monkeys, which predictably showed little response, except for a very surprising, calming response to the heavy metal band Metallica."
http://news.discovery.com/animals/monkey-music-sounds-communication.html
It doesn't say whether they tried playing Dylan recordings or not.
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Or Metallica even...
# Posted on October 1st 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I suspect it is the birds that developed music first, and us humans are the poor copy of what they do...
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?".
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
It seems to me that one should keep an open mind about such things. I don't get either the emphatic "of course birds make music" or the equally emphatic "of course it isn't music - music's just for our own, supremely destructive species" (last 3 words are, of course, my own way of identifying what species we're talking about).
I don't know who these folks are (coming up), but it's still an interesting article:
http://www.dana.org/news/cerebrum/detail.aspx?id=74&p=1
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by ethical blend
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I don't know whether this helps, as I can't find the academic backup that I did manage to find when I started to look into this a few years ago.
I live out in the country, but this concerns one of our most common birds, common in both town and country - the blackbird. Now, male blackbirds have very interesting songs that they develop over the course of a whole season. You can hear this happening if you take the time and trouble.
The male blackbird will start, in Spring, with a few notes apparently strung together haphazardly. This then gradually changes and becomes fixed into a particular and very individual song (as in, unique to that one bird) over the course of the ensuing Spring and Summer seasons. Blackbirds listen to and incorporate the calls of other birds into their song, but, at some point, that song will become more or less fixed with, however, a final flourish at very high pitch that seems to keep varying.
The stuff I found a few years ago said that what happens is that the male blackbirds try out songs and subtly change them depending on how successful the songs are in attracting females.
I listen out for blckbird song these days, and you can actually hear this happening, year after year. Now, to me, what the blackbird does sounds like the process of composition at work. You'd have to say that, from a scientific point of view, the jury's out on that though.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by ethical blend
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
There is a difference between two notes a minor second apart and two notes a perfect fifth apart that can be explained in terms of acoustics and the physiology of our ear. It would be nitpicking not to agree that at those extremes we can call one dissonance and one consonance.
We are told that the sophisticted western ear finds parallel fifths bland and uninteresting musically - but medieval monks liked doing it. We find parallel seconds jarring but Bulgarian village women find singing them a cool thing to do and even put a hard edge on their voices to increase the effect. I think those are examples of llig's "It is learned, every last drop of it."
But are there any cultures where people croon in response to immediate pain, or shreak there children to sleep ? Is that learned ? In the UK most birds have harsh alarm calls and softer contact calls.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
The Blackbird male in whose territory we live has a very distinct motif in his repertoire that identifies him immediately; I've never heard another Blackbird sing this five-note sequence, and he varies it subtly sometimes.
I wouldn't worry about other people's definition of music. It's part of the arrogance of humankind to assume we're the only beings capable of creating music, learnt or otherwise.
Try listening to the recordings of Chris Watson, and hopefully you'll understand what you're missing.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Sugarfoot Jack
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?".
Talk of Anthropomorphizing! you don't have a clue what the birds are saying, IF they are saying anything. Thats just ridiculous , next youll be saying they talk to you ! That might explain something....
I mean using music to communicate is an age old thing, the Military for example used the trumpet, bagpipes drumms etc communicate to the lines over the noise of a bunch of loonies hacking away at each other. . Its also music. Song can have multiple functions...
untill jon can actually demonstrate that the birds talk to each other and that they have no concept of singing for pleasure I find his assertions rather ludicrous. I can accept that they might well , probably are, communicating through song, but to put ideas into their minds and to suggest their motivations and what they are communicating!?! . I dont think so! I mean they could be singing for fun, to enjoy the sound, the experience or they might be discussing philosophy. We dont know. Its that simple.
But music simply does not rely on motivation, music can be made by a little wind up box, or a computer. It has no motivation, motivation is irrelevant, what matters is the product, not why they create it. The product, bird song, is by its very nature defined by the English language as music; Song. As Seamus Ennis told us, the thrushs song influenced his father and parts of that thrushes melody come out in the tune;
The morning thrush.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
***"All music is a human construct."***
And human musical preferences are remarkably consistent across cultures, so there are clearly some natural frequencies, sounds and timbres which resonate with humans better than others.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Bren
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"Talk of Anthropomorphizing! you don't have a clue what the birds are saying,"
Nonsense. While it would be stupid to seriously assert that the birds are literally "saying" in the sense of human speech - just as stupid as asserting that they are "singing" in the way humans sing, in fact - it's pretty clear that the signals are used fir two main purposes. One of those purposes is to delineate territory, the other is to attract a mate - which can be summaraized in a tongue in cheek fashion as I did above.
Please don't pretend to be so blindingly stupid that you suppose I meant they are literally using a language. Even you are not such an imbecile as to believe that, I think.
No, I take that back, perhaps you are that stupid. If so, I apologize for allowing an ambiguity to creep into my language and confuse you. I was addressing Al, who has a brain in his head.
"I mean they could be singing for fun, to enjoy the sound, the experience or they might be discussing philosophy. We dont know."
In both cases, we'd see variations in the patterns of their song that we simply don't see. An individual bird's repertoire of calls is far too limited to serve either of those purposes. Even you manage to put together varied sentences, and it often seems like you have just a handful of thoughts in your head. If a bird had philosophy to discuss, they'd need more than a couple of sentences to discuss it with, and if they're just singing to enjoy the sounds, you'd again expect to hear some variation in the songs they produce.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I think you need to look into this a bit more, Jon. One of the things that's been focussing the minds of those scientists engaged in studying animal and, funnily enough, especially bird behaviour and sounds in recent years is exactly that there *are* so many variations that birds put into their song*. The blackbird is the obvious example (at least in the UK) since its song patterns seem to be almost endlessly varied, both from one bird to another and also even with one individual bird, until he's settled on his favourite song for the season, and even then, there's loads of variations. But there are loads of other birds that do this sort of thing as well.
The other problem with discussing this stuff is that it strays easily into the realms of philosophy. For instance, I think I could argue reasonably convincingly that *human* music is also all about establishing territory and attracting a mate. This seems to apply especially strongly to Irish trad as played in sessions.
* The study of animal music is called "zoomusicology". I just found that out, and thought it was a nice word.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by ethical blend
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
(1) If you actually go out and listen to birds, you hear that they will happily recite the same call over and over for hours on end, with minor variation in timing.
(2) In order to be linguistic in character, bird song would have to show some simple characteristics indicative of syntax. It doesn't.
(3) In order to be anything like human music, bird song would have to show some simple characteristics indicative of musical structure. It doesn't.
(4) I honestly don't see how this enters into philosophy in any serious sense. What I'm seeing is just sophistry. Taking your point specifically, while it is freely granted that human music (and language) are often used for attracting mates and delineating territory, it is obviously not the case that either is "all about" either of those things.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"The other problem with discussing this stuff is that it strays easily into the realms of philosophy. For instance, I think I could argue reasonably convincingly that *human* music is also all about establishing territory and attracting a mate. This seems to apply especially strongly to Irish trad as played in sessions."
I would argue these are primarily the reasons people play in sessions.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Interesting article; http://www.library.utoronto.ca/see/SEED/Vol5-1/Martinelli.htm
no I enjoy the sounds they create, it is music to my ears. What they wish to achieve with their music, song, communicating, vocalisation is hardly relevant to the casual human listener. ~Just as in the motivations behind a trad musician playing tunes are of little import to the birds 'listening.
Living as I do, at the end of the road, Im in a birdwatchers paradise, officially , I get to hear lots and lots of birdsong, do I try to interpret what they are saying
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Jon says: "Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?"."
I think you are helping to make my point. Doesn't some variation on those themes pretty much make up 90 percent of the pop songs you hear on the radio?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Yes, I can sort of see where you're coming from, Jon. What you're saying *seems* sensible. But I would just add two things:
)
1 The experts on animal, and particularly bird, behaviour don't agree with you. (Read up on it - I promise you it's interesting stuff.) and
2 I do listen to birds all the time - I have masses of birds come visit my garden. They have, as the scientists that I mentioned above point out as often as you'll let them, huge variation in their calls. Some species have less, but the ones that do vary produce huge variation in what they do. And the fascinating this is that they do this whilst maintaining often quite complex structures in their songs.
I would encourage anyone to have a look at what's out there on this. There's plenty of it on the net, as I've found this afternoon, and a lot of it is very interesting indeed. (Ignore the creationist stuff you'll find, though.
Oh, and serious philosophers have been discussing this sort of thing since the dawn of philosophy, so I don't think it's quite right to dismiss it as "sophistry".
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by ethical blend
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Al - that might be the case, but that's the linguistic part of them. So you're actually making my case: the birds are not doing music.
Wheter they're doing language is the next question, and the answer is, they're not.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Nice article, Will. I enjoyed that.
Here we are arguing about whether bird songs mean anything or if it matters, and no one has yet mentioned humpback whales. I recently watched a BBC documentary about whale communication and the scientists being interviewed who were studying humpbacks said that the old theory that males sing to attract females was getting weaker as underwater technology improves and scientists can get better views of what whales are doing. This guy said the male humpbacks appeared to be singing to each other; not a female in sight. When they were after a female, they did not seem to be singing.
Unlike traditional musicians.
The biologist who was interviewed in this documentary admitted he didn't really have a clue why the whales were singing and speculated that they might even do it because they enjoy it.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by DrSilverSpear
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I enjoyed it too, until I realized that it wasn't intended as a parody.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Excuse my cut and paste here, to make a point regarding the depth of understanding displayed in the article and Jon here; Perhaps he has not read that far yet?
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No its not Parody.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Really, Will? Are you serious? Here's another bibliography. Is this from a parody, or from a serious paper? What internal evidence supports your claim?
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# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
" will happily recite the same call over and over for hours on end, with minor variation in timing." Some human chant is like that. I suppose you could argue that its not music - but would that put us closer or further from the birds ?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I'm surprised no one's cut and pasted the wikipedia definition of 'music' yet! But thhat really is the crux of it isn't it. Your personal definition of what constitutes 'music'.Wind rain, ocean, birds, my dogs when they howl-all of this is music to me.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by shanty
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
LOL google it.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
David - it's not a matter of surface characteristics. Finding that bird song exhibits some superficial similarities to human musical behavior does nothing for the claim that it is like human music in any but the most superficial way.
All of the animal "music" that's cited is closer to language than it is to human music: it's an audible communication, not an artistic endeavor. How do we know this? Simply: because as a behavior, its distribution is such that it only occurs in certain circumstances.
Bees "dance" to communicate the location of food sources. Does this mean bees have ballet? That some apiary somewhere has the next Merce Cunningham? Of course not, that would be ludicrous. A bull moose will "pose" to display evidence of his fitness and ability to defeat another moose in combat. Does this mean that the moose is anything like a model, or a gym rat? Of course not.
A bird "sings" to establish control of a certain territory. Does this mean we're hearing a little Pavorotti? Of course not.
Now, I say it's "closer to language" than it is to music. I am not saying that it's much like language at all. In fact, no animal displays anything like linguistic behavior. The fundamental characteristic of language is syntax. All human language displays an internal structure which cannot be mapped in a linear fashion; no animal "language" displays this internal structure. All human language is capable of quoting or paraphrasing itself and modifying that quoted language; no animal language displays this capacity. Human language is capable of combining words to modify meanings - I have seen nothing to suggest that any animal language is capable of this. Human language is capable of conveying ironic reversals of meaning, of sarcasm, of humor. You might say a dog barks to warn off an intruder, but you won't say it "was only joking" when it barked at you.
In a nutshell, animal communication has been examined quite carefully, and it does not resemble human language except in wishful thinking and poorly-constructed analogy.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"LOL google it."
Yes, it's actually a hilarious paper. Looks a lot like this one, as a matter of fact. Now, can you answer the question? What internal evidence reveals this as a bibliography coming from a parody of this sort of paper?
If you can't tell from the bibliography that Sokol's paper is a parody, then how can you tell from the bibliography that your paper is serious? And if the people who published the paper - presumably experts in the field - couldn't tell that it was a parody when they accepted it for publication, the only reasonable communication is that there is no detectable difference between a serious paper and a parody in this field.
This experiment has been replicated - in fact, there are computer programs that generate papers like Sokol's, complete with impressive bibliographies, and these papers are regularly accepted for presentation at colloquia. These papers are nonsense, and the only people who seem to take them seriously are the people who are paid to take them seriously.
So let's not talk about "zoosemiotics" as if it were meant as something serious, okay? It's useful for spreading on your lawn, and that's about it.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrkyYVf0wQM
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Weejie
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
@ Weejie - This is the best evidence for the "birds make music" hypothesis presented so far in this discussion.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
@EB: "Oh, and serious philosophers have been discussing this sort of thing since the dawn of philosophy, so I don't think it's quite right to dismiss it as "sophistry"."
I don't think the question was sophistry to begin with. In fact, considering the differences between human and animal behavior was at one point a useful exercise. Since we now have a working theory of language and we've done a lot of work on animal behavior, the question has been answered, so it's no longer a matter of philosophy, any more than the nature of color or the correct procedure for deciding the winner of an interrupted game of dice.
What I'm calling "sophistry" is specifically the arguments being made here to support the unsupportable premise: "it might be", therefore "you can't say that it isn't", therefore "it is". Pure sophistry. Laughable.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
For anyone wondering about Jon's references to Allan Sokal:
1) here's the original article - http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html.
2) and here's a comment upon it - http://best-hoaxes.blogspot.com/2011/04/transgressing-boundaries-towards.html.
Poor old Jig's clearly an epistemic relativist.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by MacCruiskeen
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Yes, Shanty ~ in a nutshell.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"Your personal definition of what constitutes 'music'.Wind rain, ocean, birds, my dogs when they howl-all of this is music to me. "
Okay, that's fine. As long as we all accept that words don't actually have meanings, they can mean anything we want them to. Now, back to trad music: when I fleem the doogle on my hasenpfeffer, I get a strange canary. Can anyone explain this?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Laughing out loud, JK.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
@Jon. The point I am making is that some of what we use to construct our music and which we would discuss as part of music might be something that we have in common with the birds, part of a shared vertibrate pattern. If so that wouldn't make what the birds do music but it would make some aspects of our music genetic rather than cultural.
But having previously read upon it I agree with llig's original statement and think it was a succinct and appropriate response to the part of halwaythere's post that he quoted. Recognition of 'wrong notes' is not instinctive. Being startled by deliberate but unanticipated loud dissonance or harshness of tone, for example, might be. Does any culture shreak their babies to sleep ?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Certainly the word 'music' can have different meanings to different people. My kids dig Dubstep but to me it sounds like arcade noises. Punk 'noise bands' don't really fit into a defined definition of music but is music none the less to people that like it right? Unless Jon Kiparsky is the final judge on what is music and what is not?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by shanty
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
David - I certainly think there's room for biological explanations of consonance and dissonance, as long as we accept that harmony is not a universal across cultures, to there's a fair bit that's necessarily cultural as well. For example, every culture that I know of recognizes the octave: two notes whose pitches are in a 2:1 ratio are "the same" everywhere you go, as far as I know. What we call the fifth of the scale is almost always a "privileged" note, and much more important than (say) the major six - but exactly where it's located is not universal.
So the similarities can plausibly be explained by reference to the relative simplicity of those harmonies, and there's certainly interesting stuff to look at there.
So I don't have a problem with the proposal that there's a genetic or a biological component to the makeup of our preferred harmonic systems. (Just as I don't have any objection to the idea that our facility for language is innate and not taught)
I just don't think that music is basically biologically determined, any more than I think the syntax of English or Tagalog is biologically determined, and I don't think that there's any reason to suppose that music is somethign that birds do.
Now if, like Shanty, you want music to mean "whatever random sounds happen to be going on around me" or "whatever random sounds I happen to enjoy" then yes, music is something that birds do. It's also a word without any meaning at all other than "background noise", so I don't see how that buys us any analytical leverage.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
I must say, in all the heated rhetoric around here, over many years, I have never heard anyone called a "epistemic relativist." And the funny thing was, once I looked it up, it actually appeared to be appropriate! (I can't say that it WAS appropriate, as that would be making a value judgement, which, if I am following all this philosophical stuff correctly, is something I should avoid doing.)
I think I will go out and listen to some birds, at least I can understand them...
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
@Shanty: what a lot of misconceptions in one post!
"Certainly the word 'music' can have different meanings to different people."
People might be thinking of different things when you say the word "music". When you say "dog", I think of a German Shepherd, you might think of a Great Dane or an Akita. However, we all know what we mean by "dog" and we know what we mean by "music" and it's not "background noise".
"My kids dig Dubstep but to me it sounds like arcade noises."
Arcade noises typically are simplistic little tunes, and obey the same rules as Beethoven or Paddy Fahy. (just not as many of them)
"Punk 'noise bands' don't really fit into a defined definition of music but is music none the less to people that like it right?"
Most punk music also fits into any ordinary definition of music. Whether someone likes it or not is irrelevant - unless that person is the final judge of what music is and what it is not.
There are some bands like Sunn 0))) which spend a lot of time making pure pitched noise, without any apparent regard for harmony. We might discuss whether a band that perpetrates this sort of thing is "making music" or simply "performing theater". But for the most part, a band like NoMeansNo or Fugazi is doing stuff that's well within any ordinary definition of music, unless you mean my grandmother's. (wihch was pretty much "Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, and Henry Mancini on a good day".
" Unless Jon Kiparsky is the final judge on what is music and what is not?"
If we're going to avoid having a single arbiter on what is music, it is necessary to accept that there's a common definition and that it's a little more rigorous than simply "whatever the speaker means at the moment of speech". So unless you want to pick someone and give them the job of making the decision, we might as well talk as though the word has a meaning and we know what it is. Which it does, and which we do.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Firstly; <<birds make music" hypothesis?>> Its not a hypothesis?! its an observable fact. What is debatable s the definition of music. But the self evident fact is that that birds vocalise with musical tones,.
.
Now if youd like to explain your definition of music that does not include a series of musical tones in patterns?
Secondly you say ;'' there is no detectable difference between a serious paper and a parody in this field. ''
which field is that , science? physics?
thirdly you said this;Al: Birds don't have music. They have "hey, get off of my lawn" and "hey, baby, wanna make sweet avian love all night long?".
So your argument is precisely the opposite of your words... hmm , then you say this;
<<All of the animal "music" that's cited is closer to language than it is to human music: it's an audible communication, not an artistic endeavor. How do we know this? Simply: because as a behavior, its distribution is such that it only occurs in certain circumstances. >>
<< In a nutshell, animal communication has been examined quite carefully, and it does not resemble human languageand except in wishful thinking and poorly-constructed analogy. >>
So its not music, its not language its 'audible communication', according to you , but its closer to language than music.
Is mathematics a language? what are the "core attributes" of language? What are the criteria you use to define language ? What about body language, its not language?!? Its communicating using movements...
Language is a form of communication, it does not need to be verbal[sign language]
But perhaps sign language is , ahh, not language? according to jons definition. Body language?.
Humans have many languages; A system of communication.
But perhaps jon with his big degree in linguistics can elucidate for poor little old me
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"The biologist who was interviewed in this documentary admitted he didn't really have a clue why the whales were singing and speculated that they might even do it because they enjoy it."
Posted on October 2nd 2011 by TheSilverSpear
Re: A penguin goes into a bar...
Posted on August 10th 2006 by TheSilverSpear
http://www.thesession.org/discussions/display/10853/comments#comment224274
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Words derive meaning through the process of cultural consensus. The word 'music' simply defies consesnus even within a single culture. This is pretty easy to understand and doesn't require annotated bibliographic references or discussions on harmony, consonance and dissonance, genetics , biology or any other science to prove.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by shanty
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
If someone mimicked whale song or bird song in a musical performance would it be music ?
I keep meaning to check, but I think that the use of song for what birds and whales do is sematically correct and I wonder if when 'song' is used rather than 'tune' by psychologists it may be deliberate rather than because they are part of the iTunes generation.
Just stirring the mud.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Listen to the spots at 0:45 and 1:06 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2SvnVGtMVc
And I wish I could play fiddle like this, mimicking every instrument in the session with nothing but a bow and four strings: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2SvnVGtMVc
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
LOL
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30ooei1yJYc&feature=related
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Hahahaha
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Azeo6DglZcY&feature=related
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Will Harmon
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"Now if youd like to explain your definition of music that does not include a series of musical tones in patterns"
Have you looked up "assuming the consequent" lately? If not, you might want to do that. However, if you're suggesting that "a series of tones in patterns" is a definition of what constitutes music, I'm afraid we're not going to get anywhere with this.
"So your argument is precisely the opposite of your words"
Was this supposed to make sense? If so, you should try again. Maybe after the drugs wear off.
"So its not music, its not language its 'audible communication', according to you , but its closer to language than music. "
Yes. As I said (and you could read this for yourself, it's right there) it's closer to language in the sense that it's a concrete communication, of a sort. It's not abstract, as music is. However, it has none of the things that make human language interesting, so it's not like language.
I can explain it again if you're still dumber than a bag of rocks.
And here we have your series of stupid questions:
"Is mathematics a language?"
No. Various branches of math define domain languages for representing the problems they deal with, but these are not "languages" in that they have no syntax, no semantics, and no speakers. They're systems of notation used for precision and brevity.
"what are the "core attributes" of language?"
Go read a book. I'm not going to run through a first-year linguistics course for you.
"What are the criteria you use to define language ?"
Again, you're going to have to actually do a little work for yourself here.
"What about body language, its not language?!? Its communicating using movements..."
No, it's not. Is grunting a language? It's communicating using sound...
"But perhaps sign language is , ahh, not language? "
Where do you get that? Of course sign language is a language - it's a very interesting family of languages, which actually confirms much of the theoretical basis for linguistics - which all goes to tell us that animals don't do language.
"Humans have many languages; A system of communication."
Is this a line from a poem? Or what is it meant to be? Yes, humans have many languages. If you like, you can learn a lot about them. However, you can't just make stuff up about them and expect anyone to take you seriously.
(I'm afraid at this point, you simply can't expect anyone to take you seriously, period, but that's your grave you've dug for yourself)
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Jon Kiparsky
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
If a parakeet sings Happy Birthday in public in the USA does the owner have to pay royalties ?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Well, I said I was going to go listen to birds, but sadly was not successful. My walk was pretty, but unsatisfying on the bird front. I only saw a pair of sparrows, which is surprising, since I live in an area where both sea and land birds mix in great numbers.
But I knew when I returned, I would still find some squawking going on here! And who would have thought I could hear a parrot doing James Brown horn lines!
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Ok, jon just getting it clear; body language is not language, A domain language is not a language. The language of mathematics is not also a language after all despite what those pesky mathematicians call it eh?. and bird song ...... is not. Bird song is not music ... cheers
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by piobagusfidil
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Jon- I still think it's interesting that you think your definition of music is the only legitimate definition. Of course most punk bands are musical. I played in punk bands for over twenty five years but I'm not talking about your average punk stuff. That's why I said noise bands. If feed back and shrill screaming with no melodic form can be defined as music than certainly a bird's call can likewise be defined as music.
If on the other hand you say that feed back with shrill screaming is not music than you are setting yourself up as the arbiter of what is music and what is not.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by shanty
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
"Art" is another one of those words that will defy a common consensus.
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by shanty
These are random tangential links . . . or larks > >
The Beatles ~ "& Your Bird Can Sing" Revolver Session
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApI7YXQTVZQ
"The Morning Thrush" ~ Mick O'Brien
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6n9VVZS6TLY
Introduction to Psychoacoustics and Sound Perception
http://acousticslab.org/psychoacoustics/PMFiles/Module01.htm#1c
". . . operational definition for music:
Music is temporally organized sound and silence, a-referentially communicative within a context."
. . .
"Sounds alone do not constitute music or sound art. The listener is the agent through whom sounds and sound combinations are elevated into music/art; the composer of a work can be considered its first listener and, in some respects, this may be where his/her privileged status ends."
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by Batgirl has left the GPL ;)
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Well, if we are being tangential:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by David50
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
When are we not tangential?
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by AlBrown
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Just to clarify, do you mean a place where numpties are born and raised? Or do you mean a place where numpties are kept away from non-numpty society like a poor farm or a loony bin? (or is like the farm where my parents took my incontinent cat when I was seven?)
# Posted on October 2nd 2011 by airport
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
As a voice researcher and professional voice coach, I confirm that anyone with a structurally functional voice can sing.
I identify 12 elements within the human body that affect how we produce phonation - as long as these twelve elements are functional, nothing is stopping the singer from learning how to make a surprising number of sounds (including changing their timbre considerably) - the muscular manipulations necessary can be learnt by everyone - thus everyone can sing.
The question about tuning ability is most easily answered by splitting people into three groups :
1. Those who sing out of tune because one of the twelve elements isn't working properly (most usually down to ventricular constriction)
2. Those who are unable to hear the different pitches easily and struggle to reproduce them
3. Those who are clinically unable to differentiate pitches
Group one's problems are best solved by working on vocal technique, and preferably with a physiologically competent teacher rather than the usual 'sing from your diaphragm' nonsense.
Group two usually require technique alongside ear training (I particularly like Kodaly for this)
Group three are, as far as science tells us up to know, stuffed.
Most tuning problems fall into category 1, a small percentage into category 2 and almost none at all into 3.
Allan
# Posted on December 2nd 2011 by rosfrog
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
*up to now*
# Posted on December 2nd 2011 by rosfrog
Re: Can anyone learn how to sing?
Just now seeing the last post, thanks rosfrog
# Posted on February 14th 2012 by fiddlelearner