Lesson One: Listening and Pitch
“I wish I could play the piano.”
I’ve heard this a thousand times.
I am here to grant your wish. We will start at the very beginning, and we’ll go as far as we can. I believe that everyone has music inside them. Making music is very different from just listening to music, though of course you listen to the music you make.
So the first thing to do is to listen: Listen to the doorbell, your car horn, sounds in nature. Listen to the pitches of a telephone number on your phone. The numbers go by very rapidly if you are phoning someone, but there are only three different sounds, four if you count the dial tone. Can you sing the sound of the dial tone? This is called matching the pitch. Pitch is the highness or lowness of the sound. Some people say they are tone-deaf, but in the many years I have taught piano I have never found anyone who was tone deaf.
A foghorn usually has a low pitch. Most bird sounds involve high pitches. Sirens move up and down from pitch to pitch. As a train moves away from you, the pitch of its horn will seem to grow lower.
Can you sing a tune? (You don’t have to do it out loud.)
You may have a musical gift, or you may have an ear which yearns to be educated. One way to find out is to listen and try to imitate.
If you can sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, you can do the first exercise. You won’t need a keyboard until Lesson 2, and then I’ll give you a link to a virtual keyboard to start with. If you are a monotone, we will teach your ear as we go along. If you can already sing, notice the following:
“Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream”
This tune uses five different sounds. The first three sounds are the same. You might think of them as Sound One.
“your” uses a higher sound, Sound Two.
“boat” uses a higher sound, Sound Three.
So if we use numbers for the first part of the song, they would be
1-1-1-2-3
3-2-3-4-5.
Now, if you are able, sing 1-2-3-4-5.
This is a pentachord and it is the basis for so much music that once you learn it, you can learn to read and play music on the piano or any other instrument. And that is where we’re headed.
Vocabulary, Lesson One:
Pitch: The highness or lowness of sound, caused by the rate of vibration.
Tone-deaf: Unable to differentiate different pitches
Keyboard: the black and white keys of a piano, electronic keyboard, organ, etc. Monotone: same as tone-deaf
Pentachord.: five consecutive notes, the first five notes of a scale
