Perfect Pitch Course

[Wallace Scherer]

David Vanderhoofven, and others.

I too have seen the advertisements for the perfect pitch course. I think
they were in the MENC Journal a few years ago. I haven't heard anyone
comment on the course, nor did I ever buy it, so I also would be curious to
know if anyone on the list has had personal experience with it.

As far as "tone color", I suppose that it is not so much as hearing a
differing rate of "beat" in the thirds, or whatever. Rather it would be a
way of comparing visible light's wave lengths to audible sound's
wavelengths.

If we have natural color perception, we learn what the colors are by seeing
them and hearing their names. At first we notice there is a difference
between, say, red and green, but we don't know WHAT the difference is. Soon
we learn which is called which, only by repeating the names correctly
whenever we see the same color. 

As we progress in our color recognition ability, we learn to identify
different SHADES of the same basic colors. I remember when the Commodore 64
computer came out with 16 colors; WOW. Then we saw computers with 256
colors, then thousands. We may not know the names of them all, but most of
us, especially if we have ever had an art class, will be able to name two
or three dozen shades of color. Our eyes can distinguish between thousands
of colors, but we can only name a few of them.

In a similar way, our ears can distinguish between thousands of audible
wavelengths, or tones. The difference is that we have a different system of
naming them which is not compatible with the system we use for naming the
visible wavelengths.

If we used a compatible system, we might call all the notes in the first
octave of a piano, for instance, different shades of "A", or "Do", or
"Black", or whatever other system of naming them we choose. The second
octave would contain all the variations of "B", or "Re", or "Brown". The
third octave would be "C", or "Mi", or "Red", etc.

On the other hand, if we used the musical system of naming notes for naming
colors, all the shades of Brown would have the same names as all the shades
of Green or Blue. We would get confused. The musical note names repeat
every octave, but the color names don't repeat.

I'm not a physicist, but I suppose that there is some correlation between
light waves and sound waves as far as the range of them that is detected by
our sight and sound organs (eyes and ears). I'm not going to take the time
right now to research it, but I think the audible spectrum is somewhere
around 20 Hz. on the low end to 40,000 Hz. on the high end - depending on
the person. The visible spectrum, according to my dictionary, is between
4000 and 7700 angstrom units. Angstrom units are measurments of distance -
one angstrom unit is one ten-millionth of a millimeter. Hertz, however, are
not a measure of distance, but rather a measure of time - cycles per
second. 

In conclusion, in order to talk about "color" or "shades" when talking
about tones, we need to find the correlation between the two systems of
measurements. 

An easy way to identify the "colors" in music is to simply assign the
lowest wavelength of commonly visible light to the lowest commonly audible
tone, and do the same with the highest. Then assign each color in between
on the light spectrum to each tone in between on the sound spectrum. Each
tone would then be called by the name of its corresponding color. Once we
had a NAME for each frequency, we could learn them. (We already can hear
the difference, just as we see the difference in colors.)

I don't know if this is anything like what David Burge has in his course,
but it sounds logical to me.

Now, what do we do about naming "Keys"?

It's been fun, but I've got to get to bed. Goodnight world.

Wally Scherer
E-mail: WallyTS@compuserve.com
Web page: http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/2411
"Speak to strangers - all your friends once were!"