Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Sight Reading Question

First, I've been away from the forum for a while so it's good to be back. I've been continuing my playing and it is slowly coming along...though not as fast as I'd like!

My question: When did you first notice you could look at a score and "hear" what it was supposed to sound like before you played it? When I look at a song that I've never heard before, it takes me quite a while to interpret what I'm looking at into something musical. My playing is very mechanical and clunky until I've heard the song a few times or have played through it for a while.

What are you experiences?

It hasn't happened yet and I am thinking it will be many years down the track until it does.

Yes...that is what I am wondering...I know everyone is different etc etc...I'm just curious what other people's experiences are as to when they "recognized" the musicality of the score.

I usually have to have my instructor play a new score for me so I can get an idea of what the song is supposed to sound like....even then, my interpretation usually sound MUCH different!

I envy anyone that has that ability. On the other hand I feel glad that I can play a piece of music after hearing it.

I think in my limited amount of time playing (7 months) I don't think I can do it completely but, based on note patterns and location of notes when I read I can discern how the song is gonna go. As for knowing specifically how it's gonna sound in my mind, I'm not quite up to that level yet. But having a rough idea is always good

I wish I could play by ear. Maybe that's part of my problem. My son has the knack...he sat down at my piano once and started playing an ELO song after only listening to it a couple of times. He doesn't play piano!!!!

My early experience in music playing was as a recorder player. I'd read the notes on the staff, recognise a B-flat, say, recall the the fingering, play the note, and on to the next. It wasn't a great sight reading technique, but with plenty of rehearsal, it worked its way into memory and the score just became an aide-memoire. A new piece to learn was a fairly laborious task.

When I took up piano, about a year and a half ago, I was doing something similar. Reading individual notes, translating their positions on the staff into letters, then pressing the key for that note letter. I found it mentally fatiguing. When I at last found a piano teacher, the first thing she inculcated into me was 'plan before you play'. She made me look at the music, clap out the rhythm, sing the notes no matter how badly (and oh, how badly!), until I knew how the piece was likely to sound. Only then, would she let me touch the keyboard. She also stopped me translating note-symbol-to-letter on the fly, and instead taught me to recognise patterns and runs. It took a while to bed in, but now, although I've still so much work to do in sight-reading, I've noticed significant improvements. I can pinpoint when I looked at a score and "heard" what it was supposed to sound like before I played it. Yesterday! She set me a piece to sight-read, and it played very close indeed to the sound picture I had in my head on reading it with her 'plan before you play' approach.

I still can't play from sight-reading with the fluency of, say, reading a poem and reciting it, but it's definitely getting better. What I've learned is to accept small gains over time, not big leaps.

I think one doesn't acquire the skill of "hearing" the music in a score all at once. In other words, it's not a skill that just "clicks" into ones head, fully formed, at some point. It arrives gradually, piece by piece.

For me, it was fairly easy to learn to "hear" the rhythmic and interpretive qualities (i.e. I learned to hear legato vs. staccato, the phrasing of a work, the sound of the instrument(s) ) of a piece of music that I've never listened to or played. It was somewhat more difficult to learn to hear individual melodies (bass lines or soprano melodies). The last thing that arrived (and one that I'm still working on) is hearing harmonic and contrapuntal (several lines at once) qualities of a work.

If a piece has simple harmonies- and sticks mainly to triads based on the diatonic scale in the key that the piece is written in, then it's not to tough to get the "gist" of what a piece should sound like. For instance, a I - IV - V - I sequence ( Say: C, F, G, C) is not difficult to appreciate. If accidentals are thrown in, or notes are added to the triads, or the melody has "suspended" notes, or the piece changes key- except into the relative minor- then I find it very difficult to "hear" the music correctly.


Mozart is very easy to "hear" in the mind's ear. Chopin, Brahms, Ravel... not so much.

Something that comes quicker, also, is "hearing" how a piece continues once one starts a piece, then interrupts it. Once one gets the "feel" of how a piece goes, and has seen how what appears on the page matches up to what early sections sound like, it is somewhat easier to piece together the rest of the work mentally.

And, finally, just as in practicing the with the physical piano, speed comes with practice of the mental instrument. It's difficult to "hear" a fast work up-to-speed on the first go through. One must mentally work out the melodies, rhythms and harmonies at slow pace, and then build up tempo.

Great words Purkoy! Something that seems so intuitive probably escapes most of us. I have lessons tonight and will bring up the idea of looking at the phrases, patterns and runs first instead of the individual notes.

Thanks

Same here. But I've heard of people who could sit and read a score and enjoy it much like we can read books and magazines. But this was in the 19th and early 20th century before recorded sound became inexpensive and of high quality.

Part of my exams require me to do aural training, but so far it is limited to being able to sing other notes in a chord when given a root, say sing the minor 4th or major 6th when given the root of G. What you are describing is call sight-singing. This is different from sight-reading. Sight singing is the ability to sing the whole chord usually with emphasis of the top note, so the given a C chord C-E-G, the first step is to recognize the G and sing that or see C-E-#G and sing the G#.

My teacher is very good at it, and when I play a wrong chord, she would sing me the right one printed on the page. There are various aural training methods you could use to gain this skill. Like everything else in music, you could spontaneously gain some skills, but you do much better if you actually train for it.

I think (for me anyway) it is like putting the emPHAsis on the wrong SyLLAble. My instructor routinely has to play a song through before I can even attempt to get anything musical to come from the keys.

I can't hear the song the way it's supposed to be played just by looking at it, but I can sing the notes close enough that I can hear a very very rough draft what it might sound like. Though I would consider "sing" to be a relative term here, since I only sing at the most within one octave ... no matter where on the keyboard the notes are. It does help round out the ideas though, so my fingers start to follow the sound of what I'm "singing". In turn, when I hit the notes, my voice adjusts to get closer to the actual note.

When I jumped back in a few months ago, I made a really BIG effort to concentrate on my sight-reading. Everyone I spoke with, including a lot of advice on these forums kept recommending Solfege and singing along so I forced myself to do that by singing the letter name as opposed to do re mi. I used a lot of iPad sight-reading games, drills and apps to really work on my sight-reading and you can generally hear the notes from the iPad games and apps, so that also re-enforced the Solfege. Even if it's a regular songbook, I try to sing along as I read the notes. It's a bit of an extra effort, and I still feel a little funny trying to sing along, if somebody else is in the room, but I am amazed that I can actually read a score while "singing" it, so I can hear a very very rough draft of what it might sound like. Once again, "sing" is a relative term here.

On a side note, all this "singing" practice has made the Victor Borge skit about not singing along while performing that much funnier. I'm finding myself unconsciously "singing" along to any music I hear, even to my scales when I'm practicing them.

There are at least two things one can do to improve the ability to 'hear' the music when reading the score.

The most obvious one is to listen to performances (YouTube or whatever), while looking at the score, and following the music along. Pretty soon, you'll recognize similar patterns, familiar harmonies, rhythms etc.

The second is simply to pick up the score of a song you've never heard before, and try to 'sight-sing' through the vocal part. Then listen to the song on YouTube. Best to use 'art songs' (Lieder) rather than pop songs, which you're likely to know anyway - you can pretty much get all the scores for free from imslp. Examples of simple (and lovely) ones to try by Schubert: Litanie, Du bist die Ruh, An die Musik, Gute Nacht, Die Forelle, Ave Maria.

Joining a choir is even better.....

I now better understand why my teacher thought me singing the notes along with the piano. He always says that hearing it in your head before you play it is very important. Not that I am able to do it already, but it sure improves. I can now sing simple piece before I play them on the piano.

First try to sing "Do" and repeat it on the piano. It should sound the same. In fact if you are 100% correct, you shouldn't hear your own produced voice as it blends together with the piano's sound (very weird if you first experience this)
2nd try to do the same with "Mi", 3rd same with "Sol" and next "Do" an octave higher. You should give it a few months to develop.

Than you can play Do, Mi Sol, Do, and you should than sing the beginning Do without piano. You can use the piano to check once you produce sound. It should be spot on.

All these singing exercises settles the sound of the notes in your mind and I believe it will be a lot easier to hear a song in your head before you played it.

Later on you can try to sing from "Do" to "Do", and even include the sharps and flats in your singing exercises. At first it might sound boring, but if you do it a while, you can enjoy the fact that you can do the same as the piano, without the pîano :-) (very basic stuff)

Even now when I learn a simple piece, I sing the melody together and without the piano, to get those sounds and intervals in my head.

some more

My 2 cents

I remember my teacher told me to find the melody part of the score first and it does help me to "hear" what the music sounds like.