Perfect/Tone Deaf

[Tom Cole]

"Patrick C. Poulson" wrote:
> 
> ...I have talked to many people who have had to
> overcome early negative experiences of being shamed by someone else about
> their childhood attempts to sing or play the piano, and have only come back
> to music as an adult after overcoming those early negative imprints.  There
> are probably many more people who have never overcome this "brainwashing",
> and have come to believe this.

My first wife sang off key, I recall with chagrin. She was asked to hum
when the rest of her grade school class would sing songs, which didn't
exactly increase her confidence level any. 

I noticed that when she sang off key, she was off by a forth or fifth or
some musical interval and discovered that this would happen when she was
out of her narrow comfort range. She could sing on pitch in a certain
register and above that, she would shift down into a lower gear, so to speak.

I did work with her for a while and got her to expand her range a
little, but she didn't have the discipline to stay with it.

The point being that she wasn't tone deaf - she just thought she was
("brainwashed", as you say).

Tom