craigb
I've got that course.  Both actually (Perfect Pitch and Relative Pitch).  Someday I may actually finish them! 

Hi,
 
It is partially helpful, specially for folks that know music better and already have reached a measure of intuitive awareness of the basic notes and such. Unffortunately I don't even have that and got caught in between the DoReMi and the ABC when I was 15 yrs old and no English, and that left me hung out to dry having to relearn all this.
 
I'm a bit frustrated with the music thing right now, and having a hard time getting things setup, so I have pretty much put it aside for now. I, sometimes, think, that all I need is someone to come around and kick me in the butt, but I'm tired of fighting crap in the programs and computers, simply because everything is hidden and no one knows anything else to help anyone.

I stopped when they started wanting you to detail the colors that you sense with each key...

craigb
I stopped when they started wanting you to detail the colors that you sense with each key...

Actually that works, but the presumption is that every one sees "colors" in notes, and not everyone does. I DON'T. AND I'm a very visual person, so each note and chord has a tendency to open up a movie in my head. That has very little to do with "color". Now you can see how different things can be and the same note/chord might have a different visual next time depending on the context of its usage. Something that he does NOT take into consideration. It's no wonder that his work is so well loved in academic circles!
 
The problem with that association is that it has a tendency to force people to invent things that might not be there, and you get comfortable with a color, and call it "warm", and for others that is not "warm".
 
All of a sudden, a good exercise gets wasted in the translation.
 
His only problem, if I may say so, is that he is not smart enough to find a couple of really good psychics to help him develop what he already has even better. He's too stuck on some mechanics, and not all music is about the mechanics, specially nowadays with the DAW's that have thrown out "composition" to the dogs, so to speak! But it explains why academics love it. Mechanics. You can teach that!
 
But yeah, I can see where folks would stop at that.

slartabartfast
...
If you do not feel any emotional response to music (some people do not) then you are at a great disadvantage. If you do, then you have all of the knowledge you need to evaluate your own music, and if you can evaluate it you can shape it. Music psychology is an interesting study, but again you are confusing an explanatory model with the thing itself. You can have a PhD in the psychology of love, but it is neither necessary nor particularly helpful if you are falling in love. The emotional ear is what you need to listen to, and practice listening to your feelings is helpful, but you do not need perfect pitch.
 

I'm not sure about this. Saying that a deaf person is at a disadvantage because they can not hear music in the way that we know and understand. That's actually not true.
 
One of our friends in Santa Barbara, had a huge collection of music, and he was almost all deaf, sort of like Beethoven if you will, and he said that there was something in the albums that he got out of it, that was hard to express. My contention, still is, that he had another vibration of feeling that is not something that we know or understand. Remember that "blind" people, often have the other senses amplified to do more than we normally do. Samething for someone that is blind, and yet the music is not an issue.
 
Music "psychology" is a good thing. But it is limiting to the "top ten" and academic pursuits have a tendency to take out the top 5% and the bottom 5% because they distort their "results". This was the case with autistic children in a series of tests at the Speech Dept at UCSB when I was there, and only the visual folks, like us theater students, could "communicate" with them ... and they decided to not use those results because they could not finger them and define them as it was way too individualistic!
 
Advantages and disadvantages, is something that we have created in our heads, I tend to think. Likewise, another blind freind we had, used to hitchhike to Moby Disk and get the new Tangerine Dream, or Klaus Schulze and then hitchhike back to Santa Barbara ... and we think that being blind is an issue? Not for Loren! And he could wire black phones, then! Go figure! That suggests that they see something else that we don't know what it is! Likewise for feeling music, touch or anything else.

Mozart Link
When it comes to music, emotion and getting that emotion across to the audience is the most important thing to me....... 

Music offers almost infinite tools to express emotion. I'm sure great composers, arrangers and musicians have found out ways from which you can learn.
 
Some ideas:
 
Listen to commercials: Music in commercials is always targetted to the the audience. Commercials selling teabags or sanitary pads have (in my country) cheerfull songs with grils singing accompanied by simple chord progressions on a ukelule.
 
Listen to film music: When the killer climbs the stairs with his butcher knife to the attic where the girl is hiding, you will hear a whole tone scale. This builds tension...............
 
Listen to solos in any genre: When a soloist play notes within the chords it will create a more classical feel. When they play a lot of notes, like hardrock guitarist do, it wil sound symphonic, bombastic. When a trumpet player plays a few long 4th, 6th or 9th notes in a modal jazz piece, it sounds....cool?....
 
Just a few examples.
 

Zonno
Music in commercials is always targetted to the the audience. Commercials selling teabags or sanitary pads have (in my country) cheerfull songs with grils singing accompanied by simple chord progressions on a ukelule.
 

God I hate that generic "jolly" ukelele music in commercials. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd set a nursery rhyme to. Between TV commercials and hipsters, ukeleles have been ruined for me.

sharke

Zonno
Music in commercials is always targetted to the the audience. Commercials selling teabags or sanitary pads have (in my country) cheerfull songs with grils singing accompanied by simple chord progressions on a ukelule.
 

God I hate that generic "jolly" ukelele music in commercials. It sounds like the kind of thing you'd set a nursery rhyme to. Between TV commercials and hipsters, ukeleles have been ruined for me.

Pain is an emotion, ya? 

It's called "Avant-garde" and a lot of people will probably think it is weird unless done in a proper venue, like a movie.
Otherwise more people would probably listen to this kind of music. After-all he did end up somewhere with his paintings like in New York or somewhere and one of his albums (which is really weird) ended up in the top 500 albums made (according to some) - "Trout Mask Replica" - of all albums ever done.
Early days:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HyZtlgnu9nw
 
Even Ry Cooder played some with him.
Later it was even this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vb9AU6_pTv4
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqRHr5pEIFU
single track of the name of the album.
 
Nowadays it is just beat the bass-drum on the beat and trance music, I guess, who knows. Creativity ends up ending up at the medium, less resistance.
 
And then there is other music that has been done, but anyone usually going out there (wherever that is - outer space I guess) too much, ends up waiting years to finally be recognized if at all.
 
Just one of a few over the years, perhaps the strangest one to some with the way he did music.
Depending on perhaps where you live and how you were brought up.
Old blues music can be similiar in that respect.
 
In the end, most people can not play his music, or anyone like that, and sound like he did (or she - whomever).
(if they wanted to anyway).
 
Where else can you hear a song with him and Zappa with words like "I woke up with beer and puke in a banana bin".
 
 

One common trend I'm noticing, although it's been around for a long long time, is music that really makes no meaningful sense to the average listener, yet it conveys  emotion. Usually in artsy poetic circles, I come across some darned strange lyrics, set to pretty good music. Where else can you get away with that and have it be accepted? In almost anything else I can imagine we expect something at least understandable. 
 
I have read authors of this say, " I really can't tell you what it means". Apparently the emotional impact of music generally supersedes the importance of meaning, yet an understandable lyric with wide understanding coupled with the associated emotion is greater. If the musician can't feel something and then convey that to someone else, then the music has no reason to be shared.
 
The way to convey emotion is simply to feel it first and then let the music happen. This is the core of it. Training in music  is always helpful because it gives you the tools you need to make that happen, but if you don't feel it you don't have any basis for creation. 

Starise
Usually in artsy poetic circles, I come across some darned strange lyrics, set to pretty good music. Where else can you get away with that and have it be accepted? In almost anything else I can imagine we expect something at least understandable. 

 
Have you even tried to read Pedro's posts?