I’ve recently gone back and pulled out both sheet music and recordings of tunes I “learned” years ago. When I was in the early stages of learning, I was eager to try out these new tunes. My fingers wern’t always moving in the right sequence or in the right tempo and I was paying more attention to hitting all the right notes. The result never sounded quite right and didn’t mimic what was played on the recording. The visual aid of notation told me what notes to play but often stumbled me on how to play them. I also factor in that I also couldn’t pick up subtle factors like “swing” or “lift” and couldn’t get the feeling into what I was trying to learn.
Now when I sit down with recording and “notation”(because it’s not really sheet music, I’m not playing a piano), my fingers know where to go and how to play. I’m not really concerned with playing a wrong note. I try to copy the way the piece is played. It’s far harder to correct a tune if you’ve learned it incorrectly, it gets mentally stuck and then it’s almost impossible to “hear” the way it is actually played. It’s not the notes that throw me, it’s the rhythm or time or pattern or whatever you might call it. Notation seems to confuse this as the tune never looks like it sounds.
I like notation because I have a hard time remembering notes in sequence(I have a hard time remembering anything in sequence).
This is just a hobby for me, as I’m sure it is for you. I enjoy trying different ways of learning but know I don’t have the time, patience, or dexterity that others have. If I can make a little progress or find a different way of tackling music, it feels like a success. I’m better than I was when I started . . . too many years ago to mention.
Sheet music is written communication and has the advantages (permanent, easily transmitted, compact) and disadvantages (non-interactive, incomplete, subject to interpretation) that any written communication has.
If I describe a bird in words or draw a picture, those communications are useful for describing the bird to others in a permanent, compact, easily transmitted form, but they are not a substitute for the bird. I have several books on bird-watching with many words and pictures in them. I keep them handy and refer to them often but I spend most of my time watching the birds.
Some people have the talent or ”gift” that enables them hear the melody in their head by reading the notation. These people can then directly make out variations, rythm changes and make additional notes without even playing the piece.
I’m at the opposite end. I don’t hear anything when I try to read sheet music, it just tells me what finger to lift, and about for how long to keep it off the tube. I have to play it, note by note, to get an idea what it is suppose to sound like. So without any recordings or prior experience of the tune I’m completely lost, and the result is usually something very far from how others will play it.
I once had abc files as my primary source for learning tunes. I ended up sounding like a living midi-file. Now I don’t even bother to try to learn a tune if I haven’t heard it a few times in person or got it on CD.
But once I got the tune in my head, the written notation gives me a good start to get on track.
I have also come to realize that there are very few tunes that I have learned to play that I actually can recall. It’s almost all muscle memory.
Once someone else gets started, my fingers start to move but I have no clue where we are going until we are about half way into the tune.
Alzheimer’s?
/MarcusR
Clear evidence of lack of commitment here.
I look at sheet music as written language and hearing music like hearing the language spoken. If a person spoke no English (or whatever language), never heard it spoken, and was told only what sound each letter represented, then proceeded to form words from the letter combinations, well, the result would be obvious. Even hearing a new language spoken, it’s difficult or impossible to speak with the native’s accent. Of course, the best result will come from as much hearing as possible. (Actually, a combination of hearing and trying.)
Tony
I can usually figure out simple melodies (like hymns) by ear. I find it amazing that one would be able to learn a jig or a reel just by hearing it. (I’m not doubting it, just marveling at it.) Honestly, I can’t even always tell the individual songs apart.
I have a hard enough time playing them when I have the music written down in front of me. All those runs of notes remind me of the finger-twisting exercises they made us play when we tried out for All-State band!
I’m a bit of a half-baked music “reader.” And the same with “listening.” But between 'em I’ve managed to learn a few tunes. Some are even starting to have a bit of “flavor.” As my wizened old granny would say, “Glory Be!”
However ye get there…
I’m starting to find out that I can play very accurately anything written in sheet music. Just give me a day and I’ll replay whatever tune at full speed. Hell, I was ecstatic when I found myself playing “Rolling in the Ryegrass” on my fourth day of ever touching a whistle.
However I know that it means nothing. My dry version sounds nothing like a finished or ‘polished’ song. But I strongly advocate to the practicioner of any musical instrument that they at least learn the most rudimentary musical theory, including how to read sheet music and what notes your instrument can produce. Everything else is sort of pick up as you go. Eventually you will learn more theory as it becomes necessary to do so. And with experience comes playing from ‘feelings’ rather than just reading something.
As for the ‘gift’ of reading music and playing it in their head I’ve never met anyone who could do that without a lot of hard work. At least for me, most of the variations that I can play in my head can only be articulated if I have a full understanding of the musical theory involved. It’s very similar to math. There’s always a reason for everything. Beethoven must have been able to look at a piece and say to himself, “This sounds very upbeat,” despite having never actually heard it. It’s all math and patterns. The more theory you learn the easier it gets.
Swallow not all that is offered, for it may choke you. 
I have found that if I learn a tune from the dots, I have to know the name of the tune before I can play it.
If I learn by ear, I can play the tune, but I don’t know the name unless someone tells me several times.
If I learn from the dots, I also listen to all the recordings I have of that tune (20 GB of tunes in ogg vorbis format, so I can usually find several versions) and I end up with a “composite” of the different versions. Then I mess with the tune, trying the ornaments I am good at and leaving out the techniques I can’t yet do and it ends up being “my version” of a tune, which seems to keep changing.
I don’t really consciously do different variations, they just seem to pop out, sometimes fitting the tune, sometimes not working at all. Then I try to eleminate the stuff that “doesn’t work”
For new players, it is very tempting to try to get as much into our heads as possible. What does it accomplish, though? We end up with a ton of information that we don’t know how to process. Something you will frequently hear from “the pros” is that it’s better to know 10 tunes really well than to sortof know 100.
I swore off dots for learning irish music altogether about a year and half ago. Initially, my rate of learning went down from several a week to maybe one or two a month. The music goes by so fast, that it became really difficult… but I persevered. When I went to sessions or listened to recordings, if I heard a tune I wanted to know, I would pay more attention to it rather than just making note of the name and looking up the dots on thesession.org (and learning the crappy version some self-designated expert posted there).
I was forced to get over my beginnerish insecurity about how few tunes I knew and what people might think of me if I wasn’t playing all of the tunes. Eventually. I realized that the big shots don’t seem to mind me at all and treat me as an equal, because if I don’t know a tune, I don’t play, and when I do know one, I play it pretty well.
I’m not going to say that after a few months of struggling that I started learning dozens of tunes a day with my improved attention-paying skills. But I feel like I am learning tunes at a comfortable pace, that I know them better than I knew the ones that I learned from dots, and that I play them better, too.
Ultimately, I regret learning so many tunes from dots, because the ones that I’ve forgotten seem to be gone, and if I want to learn them again I will be starting over from (almost) scratch. The ones that I learned by ear, I retain better as long as I enjoy them, and even if I haven’t played them in a while, they are mostly still there.
I also regret that early on, I was so resistant to the cliche tunes and only wanted to learn the “cool” ones, which were usually too complex for my not-so-dextrous beginner fingers. I would have been better off learning The Mountain Road and the Kesh Jig and spending all that time getting the rhythm and tone just right… Just like I wish that all the time and money that went into researching and purchasing “good” whistles had been spent learning how to play the “bad” feadog that I bought first (which is now my favorite D whistle)
It’s exactly the same skill, it just takes practice. Eventually you’ll be able to tell them apart, eventually you’ll be able to learn them by ear… Just don’t try to rush through things that take time to develop or you’ll stunt your growth.
After a while, you learn how to listen faster and sometimes, a tune will just jump under your fingers without having to learn it.
That’s when you know your ears are better for music than are your eyes.
I’ve been thinking about this for a while and have recently started trying to learn The South Wind by ear alone.
It seems to me that, when learning by ear, there is at least one less step that needs to be made in getting the song from your brain to the instrument:
People who can read (text, not music) by seeing several words at once and interpreting them as a complete idea, read much faster than those who have to look at each word, translate it into a sound in their head, put a few of those sounds together and then come up with a single idea.
That’s sort of a reverse analogy to what goes on when you read music: You look at a dot, convert that to a fingering, figure out how to get your fingers from where they are to where they need to go and then move your fingers. If you “memorize the dots” you will always have this inefficient translation going on in your head.
When you learn by ear, I think that you end up not so much memorizing the individual fingerings for each note, but rather the movements of your fingers between the notes. It becomes a much more fluid and cohesive whole.
Or, I could be completely wrong.
No, not really. But I think it’s risky to make broad assumptions about what goes on in people’s heads when they’re reading or playing music. Different people may have different cognitive styles and process the same input differently to achieve the same result. When I read dots, I hear the music in my mind’s ear, and that’s a big part what gets translated to the instrument. It’s less mechanical than a “that dot equals that note” sort of thing.
I agree! But I’d go further to say that can be true whether you’re learning by ear or eye. I also think good musicians tend to learn and internalize the intervals and contours of a melody as much as the notes themselves. When that gets tied to the flow of finger movements you describe, it makes for a powerful, multi-pronged approach.
We should maybe define “learning by ear.” If we “learn by ear” while listening to Grandpa play the whistle, we learn not only by hearing the music but also by watching Grandpa’s fingers, hearing Grandpa’s critique of our own playing and listening to Grandpa slow down his playing so we can catch the ornament and see his fingers move. In short, we are participating in a multi-faceted learning experience - which is generally the best way to learn things.
People all over the world have “learned by ear” from Grandpa and Uncle George and Aunt Mabele and Grog the Neanderthal in the cave next door. That’s how trad/folk music got here. If we don’t have a Grandpa or a Grog in our family, we go to a session or find a teacher or a mentor. (What’s the difference between a teacher and a mentor? About $50 per hour.)
If we don’t have a session handy or a whistle teacher in town, we can learn just by listening to a tune over and over and over then playing it, listening some more, playing some more, etc. Some people can pick up a tune quickly this way but most of us need more help. We slow down the tune with software, watch videos of experts playing the tune and, yes, look at the dots to see where the tune goes.
Learning any complex task is usually best accomplished by attacking it with as many senses from as many directions as possible. Sitting at Gandpa’s knee or on Grog’s rock would be great. Hanging out at sessions and finding a mentor among the musicians is a close second. For the rest of us, videos, mp3s, software, dots, concerts and books can all help.
The comparison Mr. Higgins did in his mail between spoken language and music is very interesting and true. Even though I have a music education I often find i hard to “pronounce” some musical genres if I first haven´t heard the piece or if I´m not familiar with the genre. Some languages are easier to pronounce “on sight” - spanish and finnish for example. If you are familiar with the rules for spanish pronounciation there are seldom or never any question on how to pronouncate the word. English on the other hand is a bit trickier - imagine someone seeing the word “ENOUGH” (I´nAf) for the first time! Both with foreign langauages and foreign musical genres I think one should try to absorb a general feel for the language or the music and then try to develope your own style. My own background is in classical music and swedish folk music. I speak english with an accent and I play ITM with an accent too! I often use the same kind of embellishments I use in swedish folk music and often with phrasing and rythmical accents too.