How do French and other Romance language speakers cope with the movable do system?
A user with perfect pitch reminded me that applying relative doremi will be torture like he had to read the word “green” in red letters.
How can I develop relative pitch if I have perfect pitch?
I must agree that I see this conflict in all languages that don’t use cdefg the absolute names and name the notes in all keys doremi for cdefg.
How do they cope with this problem?
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I'm working the other way round right now, and it's horrible! For me, do has always been the tonic of the key at the time. But now, do is always C, no matter what key. The bandleader quotes in fixed do, and that goes for transposing instruments too. So he sings a line in solfege using the actual notes, not the ones that come out of a trumpet, for example. Although in fairness, his voice gets transposed to the appropriate note that sounds. So, in a way, he's using fixed do in a moveable way!
It gets more complicated with ♯ and ♭, as the words diese and bemol get added to the solfege, although when singing the line, he uses singular words - even more confusing when trying to follow an orch.
How to cope? Slowly, and translating back to real letter names.
"Do re mi..." is used in many Romance languages, although "ti" is sometimes "si."
Korean uses something with similar consonants.
Japanese uses a katakana that is unrelated.
So these languages all have a moveable "do."
The only language in this table that I don't know the pronunciations for is Thai.
Ascribing Latin letters to particular numerical frequencies (C D E...) is peculiarly Western, and not uniformly so (Bach called B "H," and B flat "B"). Nonwestern languages may see no more of a problem than Western ones.
(Edit: if you call Turkish Western, as Uncle Bob found in the comments.)
I was taught fixed-do solfège as a child, and only found out a few years ago that there is such a thing as movable-do. I have also been familiar with the A-G letter system for many years, and in my head the two systems were simply two different languages describing the same thing.
When I come across movable-do descriptions of musical concepts, in posts here or in websites and YouTube videos by English speakers, I find it fairly easy to think of do-re-mi... as simply a numbering system, i.e. notes 1-2-3... in a certain key. It's similar to how, if someone says ii-V-I about a song in C, that automatically translates to Dm-G-C in your head, without requiring much thinking.
I have seen many comments online assuming that movable-do is a problem for people from fixed-do cultures, but I can't say that I have experienced this myself. And I assume that any person who has been making music for a long time, or is studying music, would be able to adjust easily. After all, being able to transpose music into another key is a skill that is often needed, and movable-do is a similar concept. It's also similar to the way you translate a barre chord of a certain open-chord-shape on a guitar to the actual chord being played as you move up the neck. People who play a transposing instrument will be even more likely to see the naming of notes as something that is inherently movable.
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