Re: OT: singing training

[Nick Bailey]

We did some work on Rosegarden which might interest you:

        http://www.n-ism.org/Papers/Nick_Bailey/icmc2008_19ETrehearsal.pdf

The software described in that paper was for training expert  
musicians to sing microtonal songs which have more than 12 divisions  
of the scale such as Graham Hair's "Three Microtonal Songs: Dance".  
There is a video of a successfully trained (and, if I might say so,  
rather brilliant) Soprano here:

	http://www.polonius.uklinux.net/dance.mp4 (which is more often down  
than up I'm afraid)

The score is here:

        http://www.n-ism.org/People/graham.php#microtonal

Dance starts on page 9 (not Lilypond!!! Sorry!!!).

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. They aren't. They  
are like sub-atomic particles, and are only make sense when formed  
into molecules (motifs). I'd look into the teaching aspect a bit more  
if I were you. I'm sure a singing teacher would be able to advise you  
what would be best to do first. 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". 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.

Of course, the Rosegarden approach means you can get beautify  
Lilypond output as a by-product. Naturally, the extension works with  
normal scales also, but you'll need a Linux machine to run it, and we  
are only distributing a patch against an old Lilypond version right  
now (although this will change hopefully quite soon).

I'm sure others on the list will have suggestions which are of more  
immediate help, but I couldn't resist the plug :)

Nick/.


On 15 Sep 2008, at 6:21 pm, Tim Litwiller wrote:

> This is not specifically on the topic of lilypond but my daughters  
> love of singing and trying to help her learn to sing is one of the  
> things that got me interested in lilypond in the first place.
>
> She loves to sing and I would love to help her learn to hear when  
> she hits a pitch. We are 2 hours away from a city of any size so  
> getting her to a school with singing training is not possible at  
> this time.  She has some singing training in the church school she  
> is in but the teacher doesn't have time for 1 on 1 with her  
> personally.  Most of the training is focused on getting the kids  
> ready for the times they have a program and some singing numbers  
> for the parents etc.
>
> back to my question:
> I found some programs that play tones and she is getting a lot  
> better at telling how far apart the tones played are and what the  
> pitch played is. So her hearing of the sounds is getting better.  
> Her singing has improved a bit from that excessive but not very much.
>
> What I would like to find is some kind of program that would play a  
> note or tone and she would try to sing that note or tone back into  
> a microphone and then it would continue to the next note when she  
> hits it.  Just dreaming now it would be nice if i could  use  
> lilypond files of the children songs I have entered as the source  
> of these notes. then as she gets better at hitting the correct  
> note. it should start going faster and train her on timing also.
>
> I am not a good singer myself but I spend a few hours per week  
> trying to do this manually in the evening. But if there was a  
> program available that she could use several hour per day before I  
> get home from work I think we could accelerate her learning on this.
>
> I figured if there was any group of people on the net that would  
> know of such a program as this it would be this group.
>
>
>
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