Quoth David: >> IMHO, that is your greatest limitation right there. Learning to read >> musical notation is very easy. I'd change that to _can_ be very easy - for some people, in the same way that some people find learning languages easy and some people find mathematics easy. Quoth Bob: > The sad thing is that folks have a conception of music reading be "very > hard". It really isn't Once again, for some people. I have tried to learn to read musical notation on a few occasions and have given up every time. I have to count the position of every note on the staff every time; whatever mechanism is needed in the brain to be able to work it out at a glance is either not there or broken. The only other things with which I have had similar difficulties are mathematics and card games. But then I can write Perl regular expressions and complex SQL queries in my sleep (literally - a lot of my problem-solving comes from dreams) and I would say that these are also very easy - for me. I fully appreciate, however, that other people struggle with them. The problem arises when the people who say "it's easy" are teachers; they can't fathom that some people may not think in the same way and may struggle with concepts which, to them, are intuitive. The worst maths teacher I have ever head was a mathematician, the best was an engineer who himself struggled with the subject, but could thus understand the problems for others. I'm not saying that people who excel in a subject can't teach it, but they also need to be good teachers too. OK, that's me done with making the case that learning music - or any other subject - is not necessarily easy for everyone. I won't deny the need for musical notation - it certainly has its uses - but would point out that no symbolic notation is truly essential, either in music or in any other form of language. Consider oral tradition - a great story-teller can be completely illiterate. (I refrain from saying "novelist" as per Bob's example because this term implies a written medium whilst story-teller does not.) At this point, I have no intention of having another go at reading musical notation. Mathematics is higher on my personal-development list, at least as much as is needed for the VCO, VCA, VCF design required for the synth I'm thinking of building. (Digital control, analogue sound. I'm a digital electronics man dabbling in the black art of analogue design.) Maybe one day. Cheers M -- Matthew Smith Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/ Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/mailman/listinfo/linux-audio-user
