> > > For example, as a composer, I sometimes think in sound. Most of the > >time if > > > I hear a certain melody or harmony or tone color in my head, I can > > >translate that to written music or synthesizer settings or code in > >c-sound, but > > >sometimes I hear one of the above (especially tone colors) that I can't > >translate immediately > > >into any written, verbal, or "setting" form. >
Dan replied:
> >Why not? If it is fully formed, what keeps you from it? I'm not trying
to
> >criticize you, I just don't understand how you cannot know exactly what
you
> >want but not be able to map it onto any nominal means of recording
musical
> >thought.
I responded:
> I originally wrote that when I was pretty tired, and have two replies to
> that.
> 1) I sometimes will hear a complex orchestral timbre made of several
> instruments playing together, and sometimes it takes a bit of trial and
>error to exactly recreate the combination of sounds I'm hearing. For
>example, I may first thing a flute is playing the highest note and a
clarinet
>the next highest, and that doesn't sound quite right, so I try switching
those,
>or replace the clarinet with another flute, or have the second note be a
>clarinet and a flute together, etc. I can eventually
> get to the sound I'm looking for, but it may take a while. The same is
true
> only more so with electronic music. Complex electronic timbres can be
hard to pin
> down right away, but I can usually create the sound I'm hearing in my
head
> with some time and trial and error.
Dan answered:
I appreciate the additional response, but it only leads to more questions. :-) When I do something like that, having a flash of an idea and then work to get it down, I find that my origional idea isn't fully there. The work getting it into a presentable form is also creative, not just a matter of writing things down. This is given as one of the reasons Phd candidates are encouraged to begin writing their dissertations as soon as possible.
I do that sometimes too. I'll have a piece of an idea but it needs to be
developed before it becomes usable. But sometimes I clearly hear a sound
in my head and it just takes some trial and error to sucessfully re-create
that sound. It's a lot harder with electronic timbres (I really need to post
some of my electronic pieces so you can have a better example of what
I'm talking about) but it does happen sometimes with acoustic timbres also.
Sometimes is just a single chord, but a complex one.
There are ear-training classes that are supposed to help musicians be able to accurately put on paper the notes we are hearing in our heads (or the notes someone else is playing or singing) and also (in ear-training and in orchestration) be able to correctly attribute those notes to the correct instrument that is playing. I was pretty good at those classes (usually at or near the top of my class for ear-training), but the more complex the sound, the harder it is to figure it out. For example, if you are listening to one chord from _The Rite of Spring_ by Stravinsky and trying to determine exactly which notes in the chord are being played by specific instruments, and all of those notes have more than one instrument playing them, it can be very difficult. In that case you're talking about complex harmony and 20 or more different instruments or sections (the three trumpets would be considered as separate parts, for example, but the Violin I part is considered just 1 part no matter how many violinists are in the violin I section). It's a lot of information to process all at the same time.
Sounds that are similar being mixed together also make the process more difficult. One of my examples above was flute and clarinet. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell those apart, but there are some parts of the range of those instruments where they sound very similar and blend very well if they are both playing fairly softly. Being able to hear these differences is something that takes time to learn, and very few people really master being able to immediately translate an orchestral Stravinsky chord, for example. Mozart was a prodigy in this area, able to clearly hear and compose entire movements and sometimes entire pieces in his head before ever writing down a single note on paper, hearing each note in the specific instrument it was meant for. (Some would say he had it easier than a "modern" composer because the music of his time was typically less complex and instrument families were used as families much more and mixed with other families much less than music written even 50 years after Mozart's death, but even so, it's a prodigious feat.)
So sometimes I can hear a complex sound but can't immediately break that sound into it's component parts. You said above, "I just don't understand how you [can] know exactly what you want but not be able to map it onto any nominal means of recording musical thought." The answer is that I *can* map it, it just takes some time sometimes to make the translation from sound in my head to a representation of that sound on paper or in computer code. This is especially true of electronic music, where there is no standard notation to describe the sounds. Think of it in terms of singing a song. You might know all the words and be able to sing it note-perfect, but if I sat you down at the piano it would probably take some hunting and pecking before you were able to accurately play the melody. With training you would get better and better and eventually (if you practiced a lot) you would be able to play melody and harmony of a song correctly after just one hearing, and maybe even get to the point where you could exactly duplicate the voicings on the piano (is the C you're hearing middle C or the C one octave above? and is the E above or below the C?). What I'm talking about is just something that's further along that progression of skills.
Reggie Bautista
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