Comment by linknoid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by linknoid | Hacker News Reader

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I think different individuals learn different ways. I had piano lessons from a young age, and everything was done off of sheet music. I would spend all this time reading through note by note, chord by chord, working my way through. But even after practicing reading music for over 10 years, I ALWAYS learn to play a song much, much faster by hearing it than by trying to read the music. My brain just can't automatically look at the position of black dots and translate that to which keys to press, I have to actively think about it, but once I can hear the music, my brain says, "I want to hear this note, so that's what note that dot must correspond to".

Imagine trying to learn to read English, and instead of seeing words, you see a bunch of letters and have to decipher each letter. I'd almost describe it as dyslexia for musical notation or something (which isn't a problem for me when reading text). I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble. So G-B-E (on the treble clef) is easy because I see G as the base, and then the other two notes are space by two, but if it's just B-E without the context of the G, I have to stop and figure out exactly where those notes fall. And as soon as I get below C (on the treble clef), I start having to stop to count the separator lines.

But if I can hear what I'm trying to play, I can usually just jump to the correct note/chord. Maybe I'll have to stop and experiment to get the right chord periodically, but I don't have to stop and analyze the position of each dot on the score. To me, the greatest value of sheet music for me has always been in keeping place, so I associate the location of specific patterns on a specific page, and based on all the context, and know that I'm supposed to be at this point in the song that I've already taken the time to memorize beforehand. But I'm pretty much never paying attention to the actual notes on the notation at that point.

I’ve been playing piano for over 40 years, the first 10 years through lessons. I’m not good, as in I can’t and do not want to perform for people. I play for personal pleasure which means I might play it once every few weeks.

But things like sight reading come very naturally to me. I read music the way that I read a language. I don’t have to think hard at all to recognize notes, chords, etc and then to play them. So my ability to pick up a new song is faster than even my wife, who is about an order of magnitude better than me. She can transpose songs, learn songs by listening to them, the whole gamut. But in that one small area of sight reading, I can pick up a moderately complex song pretty quickly relative to my wife, despite the fact that I practice much less frequently than her. It must have something yo do with how the brain is wired or some sort of hand eye coordination, but it’s very interesting how I perceive sheet music vs her.

> I can recognize C,D,E,F,G pretty instantly because of their position relative to the bottom bar of the treble clef, but as soon as you start getting above that, I start having to count spaces relative to a known position, because everything internal looks like a big jumble.

It was the same for me until I really started practicing sight reading (there are special books for that). Just like learning the alphabet and how to read as a child, it took a couple of years of doing sight reading many days a week before I got good enough to sight read musical pieces. Becoming fluent at reading takes a lot of practice. And like learning to read and write in any language, it's best to do it at the same time while you are learning to speak and understand.

This was the level I was at, which is why I wrote this software to begin with, it started out as a re-write of pianobooster, which is a very neat program with a bunch of hard to fix basic ideas. Now, about a year later it is very far ahead of pianobooster, and I've learned to sightread much better than I ever could have achieved with pianobooster.

I started learning piano just over a year ago and picked up reading sheet music decently in an extremely short amount of time.

The gaps is the treble clef are

    | F | A | C | E |

The bass clef is the same but shifted down one gap (and the highest note is G)

  F | A | C | E | G |

And then middle C is, well, C. Just remembering that FACE goes in two places you get:

    bass clef          (C)  treble clef
  F | A | C | E | G |   |   | F | A | C | E |

And from that it's easy to go to the closest note and the count up/down one note and gradually memorize more. This was, at least to me, a drop dead simple way to memorize where everything goes.

This is a little better, but don't do this. You still need to calculate what are the notes outside of F A C E. Just memorize each note independently, it may take longer but it is much easier after that. If you continue using clutches like this, you'll forever have to do the translation in your head, which takes a lot of time and effort.

The comparison with learning English is spot on. The way you learn your native language is by simply growing up in a context where you are forced to try to use the sounds of the language to make yourself understood. You start with the intuition; writing, spelling, and word classes come much, much later, when you’re really an expert on the language already.

For some reason when people learn a foreign language they tend to start with the written language, and actually holding a conversation or understanding a native speaker is often a less prominent part of learning. This, to me, is a lot like thinking that learning music starts with reading a score and studying up on music theory, when you actually already have an intuitive understanding of music because you’ve listened to it all your life, and should probably focus on building similar intuition for expressing yourself with an instrument.

Are you learning 50 min long difficult classical pieces by ear?

Nope, I pretty much stopped once I got to college. At some point I decided I was going to learn Rhapsody in Blue on the piano, and got the sheet music (book) and started practicing. I didn't make it too far, but I made it a lot farther by trying to imitate what I heard than trying to play it from the book.

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