What I've Seen:
I've been a music teacher for over fifteen years. I've taught students ranging from 4 to 64 years old, students who were interested in pursuing music professionally, students who were forced into taking lessons by their parents, students who had just retired from their engineering job with a desire to explore their abilities in an art form they always admired, students who simply wanted an expressive outlet, students who wanted to give the gift of music to their friends or family, and so on. I myself studied music in higher academia for nine years with the intention of becoming a professional composer and songwriter in the music industry.
In my vast experience I've come to notice something in the pursuit of musical skill and knowledge that has presented itself as a barrier to joy of the musical experience. In my view, the way music has been traditionally taught is with an aim at some kind of exceptional standard, whether it's looking to professional musicians in comparison or grappling with one's own ego about what is "good" in music. Music programs and study are designed to focus on artists who have found financial and commercial success as musicians and then to provide students with the appropriate knowledge and skill so they can become more like these commercially successful artists. I've seen students beat themselves up when they couldn't sing a vocal run like Beyoncé or if they had difficulty improvising a guitar solo as clever as Eddie Van Halen's. As I watch students listen to themselves judgmentally, struggling to meet a standard that has been set out for them or one that they themselves have set, I see them grow increasingly more tense (both physically and emotionally), frustrated and discouraged and as a result they lose their sense of joy, play, and curiosity about music and sound. To me, this only stunts a student's musical growth. It removes the emotionally expressive element of the art form. Most people describe their experience listening to music as emotional and spiritual. Shouldn't our practice of music be the same?
The Reality:
There is nothing wrong with looking to the artists we admire for inspiration. We see something beautiful come from them and we want to achieve that same sense of beauty and freedom in ourselves. However, today's modern music industry has been so overrun by a standard of digital perfectionism that it's hard to even tell which artists are genuinely creating and performing their music and which are relying on computer software to write and perform their music. The ubiquity of pitch-editing software (Melodyne, Auto-tune) in popular music recordings, singing competition TV programs, and literally everywhere else has forced us to compare the sounds of our live analog voices (and instruments) to voices being artificially nudged onto the right pitches and rhythms by computer software. As much as you might want to believe that those "live" performances on The Voice are what these singers actually sound like, I can promise you they are edited. I would estimate that 90% of contemporary recorded music uses both pitch and rhythm editing software to make the music we hear sound "perfect." The human voice comes from the human body, which is constantly fluctuating in breath, energy, muscles and blood flow. When I hear a singer sing a long note and it stays smack dab in the center of the pitch with no variation, I know it's been pitch-edited. As a musician with perfect pitch, and someone who has worked in the industry a long time, I can tell you this is the truth. The unfortunate thing about this is that many of the singers that we listen to and admire CAN actually sing. It's not their fault that the producers and recording engineers are blanketing everything in digital pitch-editing software.
The result is that since our ears are being inundated with the effects of digital editing, voice students find that they can't achieve this literally impossible level of perfect pitch control. This can be very frustrating if you don't understand that you're comparing yourself to a computer. If you listen closely to some of the great artists from the past like Freddie Mercury, The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, to name just a few, you will find that they are often not perfectly in tune and in fact are sometimes quite sharp or flat. It is exactly these imperfections that make their performances so special. When Whitney Houston sings a sustained note slightly sharp, it brings a brightness to the quality of her tone. We can hear the subtlety of her breath and the hope that little pitch lift brings. If someone were to go into Queen's catalog and square off all of Freddie's breathy glides and broken raw screams, our experience listening to Queen would be far less engaging. These artists and their fans embraced their sound and their imperfections. These singers learned to create without self-judgment and from a place of pure expression. In contemporary music culture, we are losing touch with that.
The Goal:
The goal at Sound Mind School of Music is to find YOUR authentic sound. We're not interested in your best Justin Timberlake impersonation. We want to know what makes your voice special. We are interested in hearing the frequency of your instrument and where it vibrates best. We want you to approach your musical studies with experimentation and curiosity about what sound you have inside you. If you were given the same chords and lyrics to a Mariah Carey song, how would YOU interpret it? We want you to develop an understanding of what you love about music and how you can express that love through your own instrument and your own writing. The music industry has plenty of Ed Sheeran's, but the world doesn't have any of you...yet...
I've been a music teacher for over fifteen years. I've taught students ranging from 4 to 64 years old, students who were interested in pursuing music professionally, students who were forced into taking lessons by their parents, students who had just retired from their engineering job with a desire to explore their abilities in an art form they always admired, students who simply wanted an expressive outlet, students who wanted to give the gift of music to their friends or family, and so on. I myself studied music in higher academia for nine years with the intention of becoming a professional composer and songwriter in the music industry.
In my vast experience I've come to notice something in the pursuit of musical skill and knowledge that has presented itself as a barrier to joy of the musical experience. In my view, the way music has been traditionally taught is with an aim at some kind of exceptional standard, whether it's looking to professional musicians in comparison or grappling with one's own ego about what is "good" in music. Music programs and study are designed to focus on artists who have found financial and commercial success as musicians and then to provide students with the appropriate knowledge and skill so they can become more like these commercially successful artists. I've seen students beat themselves up when they couldn't sing a vocal run like Beyoncé or if they had difficulty improvising a guitar solo as clever as Eddie Van Halen's. As I watch students listen to themselves judgmentally, struggling to meet a standard that has been set out for them or one that they themselves have set, I see them grow increasingly more tense (both physically and emotionally), frustrated and discouraged and as a result they lose their sense of joy, play, and curiosity about music and sound. To me, this only stunts a student's musical growth. It removes the emotionally expressive element of the art form. Most people describe their experience listening to music as emotional and spiritual. Shouldn't our practice of music be the same?
The Reality:
There is nothing wrong with looking to the artists we admire for inspiration. We see something beautiful come from them and we want to achieve that same sense of beauty and freedom in ourselves. However, today's modern music industry has been so overrun by a standard of digital perfectionism that it's hard to even tell which artists are genuinely creating and performing their music and which are relying on computer software to write and perform their music. The ubiquity of pitch-editing software (Melodyne, Auto-tune) in popular music recordings, singing competition TV programs, and literally everywhere else has forced us to compare the sounds of our live analog voices (and instruments) to voices being artificially nudged onto the right pitches and rhythms by computer software. As much as you might want to believe that those "live" performances on The Voice are what these singers actually sound like, I can promise you they are edited. I would estimate that 90% of contemporary recorded music uses both pitch and rhythm editing software to make the music we hear sound "perfect." The human voice comes from the human body, which is constantly fluctuating in breath, energy, muscles and blood flow. When I hear a singer sing a long note and it stays smack dab in the center of the pitch with no variation, I know it's been pitch-edited. As a musician with perfect pitch, and someone who has worked in the industry a long time, I can tell you this is the truth. The unfortunate thing about this is that many of the singers that we listen to and admire CAN actually sing. It's not their fault that the producers and recording engineers are blanketing everything in digital pitch-editing software.
The result is that since our ears are being inundated with the effects of digital editing, voice students find that they can't achieve this literally impossible level of perfect pitch control. This can be very frustrating if you don't understand that you're comparing yourself to a computer. If you listen closely to some of the great artists from the past like Freddie Mercury, The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, to name just a few, you will find that they are often not perfectly in tune and in fact are sometimes quite sharp or flat. It is exactly these imperfections that make their performances so special. When Whitney Houston sings a sustained note slightly sharp, it brings a brightness to the quality of her tone. We can hear the subtlety of her breath and the hope that little pitch lift brings. If someone were to go into Queen's catalog and square off all of Freddie's breathy glides and broken raw screams, our experience listening to Queen would be far less engaging. These artists and their fans embraced their sound and their imperfections. These singers learned to create without self-judgment and from a place of pure expression. In contemporary music culture, we are losing touch with that.
The Goal:
The goal at Sound Mind School of Music is to find YOUR authentic sound. We're not interested in your best Justin Timberlake impersonation. We want to know what makes your voice special. We are interested in hearing the frequency of your instrument and where it vibrates best. We want you to approach your musical studies with experimentation and curiosity about what sound you have inside you. If you were given the same chords and lyrics to a Mariah Carey song, how would YOU interpret it? We want you to develop an understanding of what you love about music and how you can express that love through your own instrument and your own writing. The music industry has plenty of Ed Sheeran's, but the world doesn't have any of you...yet...