[alarge]

I have what (may be?) a counter-example. I'm a moderately accomplished amateur musician. I play the trumpet in an orchestra and sing in a chorus. Both the orchestra and the chorus consist primarily of amateurs.

The director of the chorus is adamant about having it be open to anyone in the community, regardless of their musical background. To support that (laudable, IMO) position, he attempts to teach the music by ear. He makes sheet music available, but highly discourages using it during rehearsal. What I have found is that I simply cannot learn music by ear - at least not in any reasonable length of time. I eventually memorize the music, but my memory of it is as visual (I remember what the written music looked like) as it is aural.

When digging into this further, I realize that there's a pattern here - tell me a name and I'll immediately forget it. But if I see it (also?) on a name tag, I'm much more likely to remember it. I have many other similar examples.

Other members of the chorus have thus labeled me as a "visual learner" rather than an "aural learner".

[jjaredsimpson]

I'm not sure this is a counter example. It sounds to me like you are learning faster by unifying 2 streams of information. You read the music notes and you listen to the performance.

How would you perform just studying sheet music the night before and not playing at all.