Music Performance Skills

How To Develop Your Tonal Memory
.
Join Free at www.musapp.club
.

In music, tonal memory or "aural recall" is the ability to listen a tone or melody and sing or play it from memory. Tonal memory helps you sing or play an instrument in tune with correct intonation.

When we listen to music, short-term memory plays an important role. Without tonal memory, we would not be able to tell how the different tones in a musical phrase are related to each other.  Thus, working to develop your short term tonal memory is a necessary and valuable skill.

There is a long debate on whether you are born with an ear for music or whether you develop it over time through practice and training. Studies have shown that people with musical ability have certain regions of the brain more developed than those of other people. Recent scientific studies suggest that experience, not genetics, affects the musicians' neural responses and development.

If you think of musical performance as a set of developed skills, you begin to understand that repeated musical experiences are essential to musical development. Some skills that contribute to the ability to perform music include: pitch recognition, rhythmic accuracy, and tonal memory. If we think of a skill as muscle memory, and we assume that muscle memory can be developed through accurate repetition of a task, we can conclude that tonal memory involves more than just thinking the pitches.  Watch this demonstration video.

If we accept the premise that tonal memory is the ability to listen to a tone or melody and sing or play it from memory, then tonal memory must involve more data than a simple audio recording made by your brain. To be able to sing or play from memory must require a sequencing of physical commands sent from the brain (memory center) to muscles that reproduce the the sounds. This suggests that repeated musical experiences are essential to the development of tonal memory.

This is the hypothesis on which the MusAPP Tonal Memory activity is based.   Join the Musapp Club and experience a new way to learn and teach music performance skills.