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[Beyond]

Hello
I have recently purchased Sibelius, and since then I have started writing music without listening to it. That is, I turn off "play notes when edit" and then I go ahead.

I find I surprise myself sometimes (in a good way), but it is still very hard, and I do listen to what I have written every now and then, though maybe that will change in the future?

I'm just wondering how you people do. Do most people have "helping" sound or go... zen ?

[Josh Haskell]

Back when I was in music theory class, we would write out our counterpoint without listening to it, as sort of a mathematical approach to composition.

Although I don't do this when writing music today, I can see the potential usefulness to writing without listening immediately. If what you are going for is some kind of complex motif based on counterpoint, then listening to what you are writing during the process may spoil the surprise of what you come up with.

I believe orchestrators still use this method, as well., when they are writing a score by hand. It's for this reason that I think they are one of the best at auralizing their music in their head.

As for myself, I will stick to that playback button.

[Shine Klevit]

It's an interesting concept but wouldn't be a personal preference for me. I mean, if I wanted something out of my control I'd just randomize notes or set up a process which randomizes them in real time. Otherwise, I am the type that neurotically has to play things back tweaking every single knob until I get the sound I want. I mean, in a world where pitch is emphasized ten billion times more than it should be and timbre is emphasized ten billion times less it seems a rather counterproductive approach.

[Yellowjacket]

In my experience, composers who are adept at writing on manuscript are also very good at 'hearing' what is on the page.

[Beyond]

Yeah. I had this music teacher once who said he could hear 'anything' written on a piece of paper. I think I've gotten a little obsessed by that

[Yellowjacket]

Yes.  It's kind of like trying to 'see' those magic eye creations in the news paper, right? 

[Chaotrope]

I'm guessing that could really make your ear better. Sounds like a great exercise.

[HoffmanIV]

I've thought about this a lot as a composer and as a musician looking to fall back on a more improvisation-based process. The thing that's been on my mind is that we rely on technology ... a lot. As the OP mentioned, lots of notational software gives you constant playback/feedback when you input notes. It's weird that we're the ones supposed to be doing the hearing, and yet, we've got our computers to do the hearing for us in most cases. Shouldn't we definitively know that what we're inputting is the right note, based on a combination of internally hearing functional harmony and knowing what components of theory give us -those- sounds?

(I personally think that I could probably start doing things this way right now if I wanted to, but it would be painfully slow and fraught with self-doubt over the intrinsic 'correctness' of the notes that I think I'm putting in ...)

Don't get me wrong ... it's good to hear what you're doing as a means of affirming that you're taking your work in the right direction. But a lot of the greats of the 20th Century never had someone constantly factchecking their work as they were making it. Maybe -after- completing a manuscript and getting it sent off to the press to be mass-printed would they have editors swoop in and address any little oddities. But so the stories go, guys like Bela Bartok would go out into the country to record folk music on gramophones, then transcribe the recordings to sheet music without needing to consult the piano for every single note.

I guess the pressing analogy is this: a painter shouldn't need to check his palette to remember what red looks like. Musicians/composers shouldn't have to check their instrument (or computer as the case may be), either.

Ron Gorow's got a great book that pretty much addresses these points in full, if anyone's interested in developing their ears. You will get through the first part that gets you to sing intervals with probably not that much difficulty, if you do the drills properly and you're willing to take the time and learn. Then you'll get to the first section on chords ... then cry. I'd know ... I'm still stuck on the first part of the chords chapter. His philosophy is that modern education has too much of an emphasis on major/minor/extended distinctions, and that this just makes the simple problem of dissociating simultaneous groups of notes into a overly complicated textbook classification problem. So basically he has you do things like tetrachords. Not for the purposes of identification, necessarily, but perceiving chord "depth" and intervallic distances within the chords.

TL;DR: music's hard, and not sucking at hearing it is harder.