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... I don't know. To me, if you don't hear it in your brain first, how on earth do you know it's gonna be good? But then you write it and have a doodad render it for you and then you know. But then how do you know how to make it better/fix errors if you can't audiate what you WANT to hear? But I guess some compositions are more about the process than the sound? :veryunsure:

Some people think this. Some people just don't care since it doesn't matter in the end. After all, would you like Mozart less if you learned he couldn't do melody dictation or sight-read melodies? The output from a composer is all that matters in the end, and it's not really relevant how they got to it. I mean, there's people who couldn't even read or write music and were fantastic musicians. Narrow-mindedness with scraggy like this is PRECISELY the reason why it's so pointless as it overlooks that it MAY be useful, but it may also not be.

Not necessary at all. I mean even if you're writing good'ol tonal music, there's so much that at a composer can only really learn by writing and hearing what they wrote, that any of the typical ear-training crap makes no difference. Then there's of course the deal with why bother learning how to "sing melodies" when your music doesn't use them that way. I mean I doubt anyone would berate Schoenberg because he couldn't sight-sing his 12 tone pieces. On that note, I only learned how to sight-sing for an exam, after that I never, ever, used it again. Likewise with 99% of the "training" you have to endure in the typical ear-training courses. I have never, ever, thought "Oh thank god I did that course!" at any moment, ever. Instead I hated wasting time. And of course the practice of melody dictation was maybe a great thing to have in 1700, but it's entirely pointless these days for a composer. I mean if you want to figure out something by ear, you're MOST likely going to be able to if you keep trying. Hell I used to play a lot of music by ear on guitar, and it didn't help at all in my exams. I still play a lot of stuff by ear and improvise/jam with people frequently, but THESE "ear" skills aren't appreciated by any of the ear-training courses I had to take. Quite irritating.

A certain CSI episode springs to mind... To be quite honest, I'm no fan of Bieber and I never were. He's a pop singer, so that kind of defaults him to my "ignore list", so to speak. I've listened to a few of the songs he's performed & I think I can safely say that there is nothing new or interesting going on here, and that we should all move along.

I think she's a top bloke.

If you can't sight sing an atonal melody in 31 tone equal temperament, you aren't a REAL composer.

Learn you ear training. If you can't sight-sing a melody AND dictate melody (i.e. go from score to sound and from sound to score), then you're doing yourself a terrible disservice, not only compositionally, but as a musician in general.