Is it possible for a tone-deaf person to..

[Bob A. Vader]

....develope their ear, so that they can sing on key...and also tell if thier guitar is in tune or not...and also be able to tell what notes/ chords are being played when they hear a song

[Vurt]

If a person is deaf, I don't think they can "hear a song".

you planning on losing your hearing anytime soon or something?

[Bob A. Vader]

Originally posted by Vurt
If a person is deaf, I don't think they can "hear a song".

you planning on losing your hearing anytime soon or something?

you obviosuly dont know what tone-deaf means

[Vurt]

Ah....

I'm obviously drinking and missed the "tone" part of it

[Layla Nahar]

Originally posted by Bob A. Vader
....develope their ear, so that they can sing on key...and also tell if thier guitar is in tune or not...and also be able to tell what notes/ chords are being played when they hear a song

i think pitch recognition can be improved. but it takes a lot of willingness on the part of the singer or musicain to work on it.

[dragonworks]

i would think that most people could sing and play to different degrees of ability if they put their efforts towards that goal.

[dafduc]

There's (1) TRULY tone-deaf, sort of the equivalent of color-blind, and then there's (2) the never-learned-to-match-pitch tonedeaf, who can usually get past it with some work.

I've had some a few of (2) pass through my choirs, and some of them quit before ever learning to match pitch, but they were making progress.

You need a patient teacher, mostly.

As far as telling "what notes" are being played, that's "perfect" pitch. David Burge claims he can teach you perfect pitch with his system - I shelled out the $50, but didn't work with it much - it's collecting dust with my "Harmonica for the Musically Hopeless" and "Rock guitar for Dummies" books.

What you CAN learn is relative pitch - learn to recognize patterns and progressions. With relative pitch, if given the starting note in a series of notes, you can figure out what the rest are. Solfege (do-re-mi) and shape-note systems are purely relative - you never define which absolute note you're singing, you just start. Of course, that wouldn't work well with instruments...

[tanlith]

Well, one of the best graphic artists I know is color blind... So I don't see why not...


- Tanlith -

[Bob A. Vader]

Originally posted by dafduc
There's (1) TRULY tone-deaf, sort of the equivalent of color-blind, and then there's (2) the never-learned-to-match-pitch tonedeaf, who can usually get past it with some work.

is there anyway of telling if you are number one or not?

[alexspetty]

well.. you know your are not tone deaf if when presented with a given pitch, you can with whatever degree of effort reproduce the tone with an instrument (eg. piano, guitar, telephone keypad or perhaps more conveniently, your voice.)

if you find that you are simply unable to reproduce the given pitch, it would be fairly safe to assume you fall under category 1.

being tone deaf does not preclude you from being an audio engineer however. the ability to discern pitch is different from the ability to discern eq.

it does however pretty much put a damper on your ability to learn and play pitch generating instruments. i am sure you could still learn to play, but it would be much harder... and singing well will be impossible.. you could still play drums, you probably couldnt tune your toms very well.

-alex

[Mike_W]

Tone deaf is just an expression, anyone who has functional ears that can hear, can here a 'tone'. But that doesn't mean they can hear the differences between tones or recognize certain tones. That requires ear training. Heres a link to a site with some basic ear training exercises.

http://www.good-ear.com/

[dragonworks]

If your tone deaf can you still be a DJ?

[dafduc]

Originally posted by Bob A. Vader
is there anyway of telling if you are number one or not?

Go find a friendly choir director or singer, explain the situation. See if they're willing to work with you ($$ help). I could probably tell pretty quick, despite my lack of expertise - but choir directing in a Catholic Church gives you a lot of opportunities to work with people who never learned to sing.

When my in-laws get together and we sing "Happy Birthday", it's a horrible cacophony - though the love still shines through. But listen to any of them individually, they're singing the melody, more or less - they're not just droning, the pitch isn't random. They go up when they're supposed to, they go down when they're supposed to. They're just all in different keys, and maybe flat on the high notes or sharp on the low ones.

They're not tone deaf. They're just not matching each other's pitch. This gets compounded in large groups, of course, when there are multiple pitches in your ear because someone ELSE isn't matching pitch.

Anyhow, hopefully that helps illustrate the difference, 'cos it's a pretty dull story...

Good luck, man.

[Bob A. Vader]

thanks Mike_W for that link...i guess i am not as tone deaf as i thought..i just need to work on it some more


thanks to everyone else for the helpgul tips and stuff

[DimChandeliers]

Hell, I'm not only tone-deaf, I'm deaf-deaf, and I do okay!