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 to 5 is larger than the distance between 1 to 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 music. Nor is it the same as "count-singing", 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.
Read more about this topic: Numerical Sight-singing
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