Hi all! I'm trying to wrap my head around how hearing melodies really works, would love to get your insights...
I'm an aspiring musician, my goal here is to be able to transcribe short ( 5 notes) melodies in a simple scale like pentatonic, instantly or near instantly.
I've been working on this daily for 6 months now, and I've reached another kind of roadblock.
First I got good at the interval trainer on tonedear.com, but realized this is a slow way to transcribe, because of the context switching: my interval songs are in a different key than the melody I'm transcribing.
Next I switched to scale degree identification. Using an app that sets up a tonal center with a short chord progression, and then plays a note from the scale. I sing back to the tonic and identify the scale degree. This took another 2 months but did help a bit. I'm still pretty slow though.
My question is... those of you who can do this, do you hear melodies as independent notes, where the scale degree pops into your head as soon as you hear it (2 1 3 or re do mi), or is more like hearing the notes relative to each other (one step down in the scale, two steps up).
This would help me decide whether to try to train more on recognizing melody shapes vs. more work on identifying scale degrees faster.
I've also heard one teacher recommend practicing to identify pairs of scale degrees in a tonal context, in essence developing a 2-note vocabulary internal database.
Sorry for the long post, I appreciate any feedback!
