Musical Auditory Therapy, Session 2

This time, Amanda and I met at the church. We decided not to sit at the piano, just sat in the sanctuary. That is certainly a very different acoustical space than the living room at my house. We can't really tell how that affected things, as there are other factors such as doing practice between times we met.

She observed my pitch matching was better. I can't really tell, which is why I have her helping me in the first place. So it's good to have feedback that I'm improving. Lower pitches continue to be easier for me to match. She sings a pitch, on a chosen vowel (ooo, eeee, ahhh, ohhh) then I try to match it. This works best when she keeps singing the note while I fish around to find it. She indicates if I'm high or low and when I match. I can pretty much only tell if she's gone higher or lower than the last pitch. But I can tell if a pitch is very low, or very high, so I guess I'm getting more familiar with range again.

We worked on intervals this time. Greater intervals, like a fourth or fifth, are harder. We worked quite a bit with matching a whole step interval. She sang the interval alone, then I matched each pitch, then I sang the interval alone. It's a lot of work! Then we tried a half-step, and that was more challenging. Higher intervals are harder than lower intervals, but that makes sense.

We ended with singing "Jesus Loves Me" and "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" again, and she said I'm doing better on them. Still lots of work to do, of course. But I had a very unquantifiable improvement in my enjoyment of singing in church the Sunday after our first session--perhaps just because I know I'm working on it, and because I'm told I don't sound nearly as bad as I thought I was sounding.