[LAU] Qtractor vs Rosegarden

[Matthew Smith]

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


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Matthew Smith
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