Student’s question:
How do you deal with chromaticism when singing melodies in tonal numbers? For example the notes 4, #4, 5. Would you sing “four, sharp 4, five” or just sing “four, four, five” and raise the pitch of the second four with your voice? Saying the sharp or flat in front of the number make sense but it gets clumsy sometimes especially at faster speeds.
How we think about this in IFR:
Thank you for taking the time to clarify this. You should always say the “sharp” or the “flat” before those notes, no matter how clumsy it feels. If you don’t say these alterations, then you’ll be training your mind to associate the word “four” with the sounds of both 4 and #4. This can cause important problems down the road.
Remember that we’re building an awareness and a skill set that we’ll be using for the rest of our lives. So the most important thing is to get our underlying thinking perfectly clear and correct. Once you’ve done that, you’ll hardly ever actually sing these numbers out loud anymore. So it won’t even matter how clumsy the syllables are.
Singing the tonal numbers out loud is an exercise in training your consciousness. The goal is to learn where each sound lives within the tonal octave. For this purpose, the clumsiness of the syllables can even be an advantage. Every time you sing that phrase “sharp four” in your melodies, you’re pausing to notice the unique sensation of #4 and to appreciate how different it feels from note 4.
This is how IFR is different from solfege. Solfege was designed to allow choir directors to communicate with their singers. This is why it was so important to have single syllable names. But IFR is a totally different system, designed for improvising musicians who need a crystal clear vision of the musical landscape. For us, the speed of singing the syllables isn’t what we’re optimizing for. What we’re optimizing for is a visually clear label that we can instantly picture as a precise location on our tonal map. This clarity about the musical landscape is what we need when we are improvising. It’s okay if some of these symbols have multiple syllables because we’re not going to be singing these numbers out loud during our performances.
So whenever you’re in your IFR singing practice, I would encourage you to always articulate the full name of each tonal number including any accidentals. This might require you to go more slowly or to sing simpler phrases, but that’s a value in itself. So don’t let this worry you.
