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Comment by john61 | Hacker News Reader

There has always been a very old method to learn music without sheet music. It is called playing by ear. It is incredible that we have a word for that. Because nobody is saying he is learning to talk by ear. Because talking and making music is an acoustic thing, and the natural thing is to use primarily your ear for that. The eye can be helpful, be it sheet music or a midi visualisation like this app. But an eye can not hear music.

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There's more to music than an "acoustic thing" because of processes such as composition, arrangement, rehearsal, and so forth. Whether those things are necessary or useful depends mostly on what genre you're interested in playing.

Some genres, like rock and folk music, involve little or no written material. There are certainly players who have never read music from a sheet. I attend a week-long folk music camp every summer, and there's no sheet music. I perform jazz "standards" in small ensemble settings entirely by ear.

But I also belong to a 19-piece jazz ensemble, that plays from sheet music. It's really not practical to expect the players to figure out their parts by ear and perform them from memory. Requiring that would greatly reduce the scope of our repertoire, and the band's ability to attract players. Sheet music literally expands the artistic palette of the composer, to the delight of both the performers and the audience.

Sheet music allows students to study and work through a large amount of literature, quickly. My kids are both studying music in college, and the amount of material they're exposed to every week is mind blowing, in lessons, class, rehearsals, and even getting together to play for fun.

Having been a part time working musician for a few decades, I've also noticed that sheet music is a band management tool. My band would be incapable of performing if we couldn't call in one or two substitutes per performance, some of whom are sight-reading on the bandstand. Same deal for a classical orchestra. In a smaller band that I play in, the bandleader is composing most of the material, and we scribble edits and rehearsal notes in our parts as we collaborate on refining each piece.

Up through the 1960s or 70s, the instrumental parts for most popular music was recorded by professional musicians who were working from written material, even if they made sometimes dramatic changes to the songs. This was just the most efficient way to manage a studio date. The touring musicians could always learn the songs by ear later on. There are stories of bands, where the first few dates of each tour still sounded rough as the band was coming up to speed on material that had already been professionally recorded.

I do not doubt the usefulness of written music, as I do not doubt the usefulness of written speech. But you have to walk before you run. Often people play music by eye before they can really hear. Written music is a useful tool, hearing is the essence of music.

A difference may be that you start speaking around age 1/2 and then the written word follows about 5 years later. If you start learning to play the piano at age 8 and wait for 5 years to be introduced to any musical notation, then this will be very late and will have cost you 5 years of training and getting used to reading (and writing) said notation.

Indeed, and this has been an area where music education has gone back and forth. Historically, the popular Suzuki teaching method started with playing by ear (and being told where to put your fingers) exclusively. Today, "Suzuki" teachers generally add reading to the curriculum, not right away, but fairly early.

An amusing bit of reverse psychology, the kids who learn to read can begin to have more fun on their own than just playing the boring stuff from their lessons. This motivated both of my kids.

These days, the person who is utterly helpless without a sheet in front of them is a rare exception, except maybe on piano. But there are two things "wrong" with the piano: Not just the notation, but the focus on playing it as a solo instrument. In my view, in addition to reading and ear training, the other component that needs to be started as young as possible is playing with other people. The Suzuki method does emphasize this quite heavily. It's hard to do with pianos.

I fully agree. Compare to natural language: Monologues have their place, but speaking to others is essential to learn, and so is interacting musically with others.

I do also think that some education philosophies focus too much on notation, but being illiterate (as in: not being able to read musical notation) is restricting quite a lot what you can do and how you can learn.

The problem with this is remembering what you want to play, for pieces of any length and complexity. The comparison in that case is not talking, but reciting a long poem/article/novel.

I mean, I can sing or whistle any song I can think of -surely thousands of tunes- without thinking about what I need to do with my lips. That same mechanism that connected tune in head to lips and mouth can also connect tune in head to fingers on piano with enough effort.

I’ve been learning piano for over a year gradually learning more and more pieces like that, and I’m starting to notice a limit to memory. The basic melody is easy to remember as you point out, but piano music often has multiple things going on at once, and it gets harder to keep track of all that in your head.

The best piano players in the world play by memory whole concerts evenings with incredible complex and hard to remember music like JS Bach. They play hundreds such of gigs a year reliable with a very big repertoire.

And of course, very often not only their own parts but to varying extents, those of their fellow musicians if they're not playing a solo composition.

I think, maybe to the OPs point, that would require you to either 1) remember the tune perfectly to recreate it, 2) or to have a recording that you can continually reference. #1 is still unreliable and sheet music was created when #2 was unavailable.

I'm personally envious of those who can play by ear but have found reading music to be easier to learn by comparison and more precise.

I learn by sheet music and ear. Ear is by far more precise because of the severe limitation of musical notation. As Mahler said: The essence of music is not in the notation.

I see your point and I think you’re right. Notation is more limited. To clarify, notation is more precise for me due to my limited ability to differentiate well enough by ear.

Yes the eye can be useful as I said, but it is not the primarily thing to use to learn music, like a lot of people and maybe app programmers think. I think a lot of bad music comes from not using your ears to full extent.

Learning by ear can be more fun and is easier to some. It is indeed a more natural process; hear something -> replicate it. But, unless you're just playing alone or jamming with friends, not being able to read sheet music is a real hindrance when it comes to collaboration.

You'd think, but I'd suggest the bulk of collaborative music making throughout human history was done without notated music. But it's undoubtedly a massive timesaver if all the musicians going into a collaborative session know what they're supposed to play ahead of time. I certainly can't imagine it being possible to perform something like a Mahler symphony or Wagner opera without the vast majority of performers being competent readers of sheet music.

Is this something you have learnt? If so, any suggestions how to go about learning music this way?

Practice. Trial & error. Playing along with the recording. I still do it regularly and it can often take a few goes to get all the chords just right, even with the relatively simple tonal/rhythmic language of most pop music.

I learned by playing along to the radio. This was in the late 70s and early 80s, and I still remember a lot of the "classic rock" repertoire for this reason. It can help to have a teacher give you a head start on easy songs before diving in head-first, and also, learning your way around your instrument independently from ear training.

You develop a reflexive connection between your ears and your hands, so the signals flow through your spinal cord and reptilian brain, while you're thinking consciously about the higher levels of musical structure and what's going on around you.

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