Sight Singing - Seventh Chords; Compound Meter

Preparation for Unit 10 Sight Singing

Please click on the link below to access the sight singing assignment for next week. You must bring the assignment to your sight singing lesson. You may choose to print it out, or to view it on a laptop or tablet device. Please do not attempt to read the assignment from your phone in the lesson. This seldom results in a high score.

Instructions for Preparation

Warm-Up - Seventh Chords in Context This week’s warm-up teaches an easy method to navigate between the tones of five types of seventh chords by presenting them in context with intermediary steps that guide you in finding the pitches.

Begin every line by playing the given tonic triad on the piano. Then, using your voice, find your starting pitch and begin learning the chord and its context. Memorize the solfege and contexts for easy recall in written quizzes and exams.

Increasingly Complicated Rhythms

The next exercise builds on your visual and auditory cognition of increasingly complicated rhythms in simple time and compound time. Spend a lot of time looking at the score without singing so that you can understand what a certain rhythm is supposed to look at. What is the beat note? What note values form the divisions and subdivisions of the beat? What do dotted rhythms look like in this meter?

Take especial care to practice with a subdivided metronome for precision. To extend yourself, why not write out the rhythms in an analogous time signature? For example, you could write a 6/8 rhythm out in 6/4 to improve your cognition of what the rhythm looks like when the beat note is a dotted half note rather than a dotted quarter note.