Melodic Pitch Primer
Navigating Parts 1-8 of the Melody Series
Long Way from Home
The first 8 parts of the Melody series are done, and looking back from this milestone, it’s fair to say that we’ve covered a lot of ground. It’s certainly way more than I had anticipated at the beginning.
Could it have been simpler? Possibly. And I will continue to try to make it simpler.
Could it have been more complicated? Definitely! But thankfully, I’m no masochist.
Initially, I had thought I would finish the entire Melody series in 4 parts, but even as I published the first part, I saw that Pitch itself would run into multiple parts — talk about bad estimation!
Fortunately though, I’ve been able to convey the essence of my personal experience of pitch (albeit in 8 parts). I’ve learnt a lot about music and myself while writing, and since I’ve been writing this for you, the interested reader, I am immensely grateful for your encouragement.
There are so many more aspects to just pitch alone that we could talk about, but the point of this series has been to explore the basics. I intend to explore these other facets of pitch either in standalone articles or a separate series, depending on which works better.
It’s Personal
I’m sure there are as many ways to connect to pitch as there are musicians. The best I could ever hope for when talking about pitch was to give a glimpse into my own subjective experience.
Just like with any other field of subjective inquiry, I think we can help each other by sharing our perception of some aspect of our experience — in this case, music.
Of course, since our experiences are so personal, it’s difficult to know if we’re each talking about the same thing. But sharing our experiences with honesty and care, we might find that despite being barricaded from each other by subjectivity, we’re still able to experience something that unites us.
It might turn out that we’re just looking at the same thing, but from a different perspective. We might even discover as-yet-hidden or forgotten corners of our lives where our experiences converge. Hopefully, all of this could give us a deeper and clearer understanding our own experiences.
Just as I have shared my personal experience, I would love to hear about yours:
How do you connect to music?
How do you perceive what you hear?
What do you notice in the music that you listen to?
Why do you like or dislike something?
I believe that these and similar questions make us not just better listeners but also vastly better musicians. I always look forward to hearing from you privately or in the comments!
Visual Aids
Now, to really convey my experience of music, I feel I have to express it in its natural domain: sound. At the same time, I understand that it takes a fair amount of familiarity and practice before someone (especially with little musical training) can perceive these sounds as comfortably as, say, the words of a language. That’s the reason I’ve tried to give visual parallels to these essentially musical concepts.
Even with no musical training, it shouldn’t be too hard to follow the musical thread by leaning on the visual representations. At the very least, visuals work as a good analogy, and at their best, they can inspire a sound-based pursuit of music while also acting as an aid to practice.
If you’d like to skip to the next part…
Melody: Parts 1-8 in Points
So pitch is covered for now. Next, we’ll be moving to another fundamental aspect of melody: rhythm, or the element of time.
Before we move on though, let’s broadly sketch what we’ve accomplished with pitch so far. You can use this as a kind-of table of contents or just as a way to remind yourself of what we’ve done with pitch up until now.
Save this article if you want a handy reference for later.
Introducing The Melody
Experiencing Pitch
Naming Pitch
Using Intervals to Experience Relative Pitch
Relative Pitch with A Reference (Sa)
Line Lengths ←→ Intervals
7-Line Dictionary
Naming Pitches Relative to Sa
Visually Decoding Pitches of The Melody
Line Dictionary ←→ Pitch Dictionary
Part 4, Hearing Melodic Syllables:
Beginner-friendly Pitch Recognition
Not-so-beginner-friendly Pitch Recognition
Melody Cylinders
Front View vs. Top View of The Melody
Pitch as a Spiral
Front View vs. Top View of 7-Pitch Dictionary
Locating Octaves on the Pitch Spiral
Experiencing Octaves
Experiencing Equal Pitch Contours
Interval Shift → Unchanged Contour in Front View
Octave Shift → Unchanged Contour in Both Views
Experiencing Octave Symmetry
Extending Beyond a Single Octave
Incorporating Octaves into Front View Using Sa-Lines
3-Octave Dictionary
Recognising Pitches Using Sa-Octaves
2-Octave Pitch Recognition
Mid-Series Table of Contents, Melodic Pitch Primer:
A Bunch of Stuff Nobody Asked for
Musical Subjectivity
Visual Aids
Broad Sketch ←→ Essay
Thanks for reading!
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