Numerical sight-singing, an alternative to the solfege system of sight-singing, is a

musical notation Music notation or musical notation is any system used to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice through the use of written, printed, or otherwise-produced symbols, including notation fo ...

system that numbers the

diatonic scale In music theory, a diatonic scale is any heptatonic scale that includes five whole steps (whole tones) and two half steps (semitones) in each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole st ...

with the numbers one through eight (or, alternately, one to seven, with the

octave In music, an octave ( la, octavus: eighth) or perfect octave (sometimes called the diapason) is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency. The octave relationship is a natural phenomenon that has been refer ...

again being one). In this system, 1 is always the root or origin, but the scale being represented may be major, minor, or any of the diatonic mode. Accidentals (sharps and flats outside the

key signature In Western musical notation, a key signature is a set of sharp (), flat (), or rarely, natural () symbols placed on the staff at the beginning of a section of music. The initial key signature in a piece is placed immediately after the clef a ...

) are noted with a + or - when the numbers are written, but are often skipped when they are spoken or sung. In some pedagogies involving numerical sight-singing notation students are not taught to modify vowels to represent sharp or flat notes. In these cases the students usually name the note and whether it is flat or sharp.Humphries, Lee
''Learning to Sight-Sing: The Mental Mechanics of Aural Imagery.''
Minneapolis: Thinking Applied, 2008, No. 1. For example, an augmented unison ("ouey") might be called "one sharp," and in some other pedagogies this same pitch may also simply be called "one."

Comparison with other systems

There is a continual debate about the merits of this system as compared to solfege: it holds the advantage that when dealing with abstract concepts such as interval distance a student may easily recognize that the distance between 1 and 5 is larger than the distance between 1 and 4 because of the numerical values assigned (as compared to Solfege, where comparing Do to Sol and Do to Fa remain completely abstract until sung or played). A drawback often pointed out is that numerical numbers are not always "singable," for example, scale degree 7 (ti, in solfege) contains vowels that are hard to tune. Numerical sight singing is not the same as integer notation derived from musical set theory and used primarily for sight singing

atonal Atonality in its broadest sense is music that lacks a tonal center, or key. ''Atonality'', in this sense, usually describes compositions written from about the early 20th-century to the present day, where a hierarchy of harmonies focusing on a ...

music. Nor is it the same as "

count singing Count singing is a choral rehearsal technique that involves singing the correct pitches, but replacing the lyrics with each note's position within a measure. In time, this would mean a sequence of quarter notes would be sung as "one two three fou ...

", a technique popularized by Robert Shaw in which the numbers sung represent the rhythms of a piece in accordance with the beat of a measure.

References

{{reflist Musical notation Ear training Music education Singing