Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Learning to sing should be easier than learning the alphabet

As I was driving to my voice lesson, I considered that there were only 25 sounds in a two-octave range: C-Db-D-Eb-E-F-Gb-G-Ab-A-Bb-B-C-… and 12 to the next C. If you work at it, you can memorize a few notes, sing one of them, walk to a piano, press that note, and find you are right on.

Well, why not work on memorizing all 25? Since as a struggling kindergardener you memorized 26 letters in the alphabet, shouldn't you as an intelligent adult be able to memorize all 25 sounds in a two-octave range. Even fewer sounds if you can't manage two octaves, yet!

A trick is to memorize a song and use the starting note as your first "memorized note". I can do it with the first note of Arirang, maybe three out of four times. Only 24 to go!