Thoughts on Pitch

Many people believe that they can not "carry a tune in a paper bag." It is an unfortunate belief because the vast majority of people can be taught to improve their pitch (and therefore their singing) and only a few percent of the population are actually tone-deaf. In fact, according to systematic research it is thought that only about 4-5% of people are actually physically tone-deaf.

"While it has long been recognized that certain otherwise-normal individuals have great difficulties with music perception, only recently has systematic research begun on musical "tone-deafness" or "congenital amusia". Such individuals are estimated to comprise about 4-5% of the population. Recent psychophysical research has demonstrated that tone deafness is associated with 1) abnormally large thresholds for detecting pitch changes between tones, 2) difficulty in judging the direction of pitch change between tones, and 3) difficulty discriminating short non-musical tone sequences on the basis of pitch contour (Ayotte et al., 2002; Peretz & Hyde, 2003; Foxton et al., in press)."

http://www.nsi.edu/users/patel/ Patel_Foxton_Griffiths_in_press.pdf

Therefore, while some people may find it impossible to differentiate pitches the vast majority and learn and improve their pitch.

"While only one in 10,000 Americans have absolute pitch, most people can remember--and produce--specific pitches in special circumstances," states Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, an associate psychology professor at Canada's McGill University. (http://www.apa.org/monitor/feb05/absolute.html)

According to Roger Love, author of "Set Your Voice Free" most people who believe that they are tone-deaf area actually only tone shy.

"Q. What is tone shy?

A. You just haven't spent enough time working on hitting the right notes. You are like most people who are at the mercy of what sound just happens to come out of their mouths. If it happens to come out great, you're lucky. If it doesn't come out perfect, you think that there is no specific way to fix it at that moment--that's what I mean by tone shy. The good news is that you can be in complete control of every sound if you just work on it a bit."

http://www.twbookmark.com/authors/10/1693/interview8728.html

It is my belief that the vast majority of people who believe that they "cannot carry a tune in a paper bag," are in fact tone-shy and can improve their pitch with a few applied techniques and some practice.

Interval Ear Training

If you're interested in learning to read music...

I have developed an interval ear training web page that will allow you to find intervals by looking at and listening to those intervals in commonly-known songs. The theory here is that if you know a certain song, it will be easier for you to pull the intervals out to sing them if you reference known intervals from known songs for singing new songs.

Here are the simple intervals (simple means an octave or less) from the minor second to the Octave (we'll get to compound intervals later). You'll see that the interval is to the left, the song and phrase that illustrate the interval under song (the bold indicates the exact phrase that gives you that interval), a midi file that plays part of the melody (the part that includes the interval) for you, and a graphic representation of the interval. The words up or down indicate the direction the interval is going.

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