Re: [LAU] Qtractor vs Rosegarden

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
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