On Mon, 15 Sep 2008 22:06:00 +0100 Nick Bailey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'd be a bit careful about teaching absolute pitch accuracy. I'm not > a musician, but it is a common mistake by us engineers and computer > scientists to consider individual notes important. Relative pitch accuracy can still be done -- after the note segmentation, take the average pitch[1] of the first note, then compare all other note pitches to the first one. The student could then perform the exercise at whatever pitch was comfortable. [1] however we define "average" in this case -- whether we ignore outliers, take a weighted average over time, etc. That said, (classical) singers *do* need accurate pitch accuracy when singing with a piano. Of course, the piano helps the singer's pitch a lot. To mimic that on a computer, I'd propose something like a midi piano (listened via headphones) to accompany the student's singing (to be picked up via a microphone). ... Now, this still doesn't specify what our hypothetical program should do when it detects a note badly out of tune. If the student sings a single note out of tune, we don't necessarily need to warn them (or give them a bad grade). As a cello teacher, I'd still want the program to warn students (and perhaps scale the grade penalty based on the duration of the note), but a singing teacher may have different requirements. > You might find they prefer your daughter to work from a primer > which develops pitch accuracy alongside other musical skills. > Again, IANAMusician, but I suspect you are doing a lot of good > in getting your daughter to interact with other players (you) > instead of a mechanical device, so perhaps it's a case of "be > careful what you wish for, you might get it". This is one advantage of highly targeted exercises (like MEAWS), as opposed to some other Computer-Assisted Instruction projects which attempt to do everything at once -- if your exercises only consist of 8 quarter notes, then nobody (be it teachers, parents, or students) could possibly mistake the computer program as covering all aspects of music. That fact that this enormously simplifies the audio analysis as well is simply a nice bonus. My main concern, like you, is that some people might rely on the computer program to cover all aspects of music instruction, and we're at least 50 years away from *that* happened. > You should also not underestimate the importance of rhythmical > accuracy. Perhaps it is better to impose a tempo, even a slow > one, from scratch. Give a pro and a less experienced musician a > piece to play, and I bet the difference will manifest itself > more in rhythmic accuracy than in intonation. Definitely! By the way, Tim, the rhythmic portion of MEAWS will work just fine with singers. We all sound the same when we clap! :) http://web.uvic.ca/~gperciva/meaws/ Cheers, - Graham _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
