---------- > From: Phil Bondi <tito@peganet.com> > To: pianotech@ptg.org > Subject: Perfect Pitch > Date: Thursday, July 10, 1997 6:56 PM > > ..i'll keep it short.. > > ..until someone comes up with a better *term* for what some of us are > blessed with, it will always raise questions..perhaps Relatively Perfect Pitch? > > ..if someone asks me to sing a *A*, i can, in *reletive* terms..if someone > asks me to name the 4-5 notes in that chord, i can..if someone asks me to > tell them what key this song is in, i can.. > > ..if it ain't perfect, then what should we call it..relative?..can someone > with *good* relative pitch sing an *A* on command?..i don't think so. > > ..i invite your comments..publicly or privately. > This is the PitchBitch, Diskladame. Yes, I too have an unusually accurate sense of pitch. It's something I've had all of my life -- I don't remember a minute without it. Some people argue that it is a learned trait. The only "learning" I remember doing was learning the names of the notes I already knew the sounds of, and much later on, what those notes looked like in sheet music. Over 40 years later, I still cannot play from a piece of sheet music without "pre-hearing" it in my mind's ear. A couple of years ago people sent me clippings from the New York Times and the Boston Globe about some research done on people with perfect pitch, and found that it does show up in brain scans. People with perfect pitch had a larger "information processing" center in the area that controls speech and sounds, in the left side of the brain. Left side? But music is an art -- or so many people thought until this was discovered. I've always thought of it as another language, much like math is a language of analysis. Curious note -- talents in math and music often come as a packaged deal. We musicians carry on lively "discussions" when we're jamming on the bandstand. We pick up and play on interesting points ... we tell jokes, dirty and otherwise ... we think back to things that delighted us as children and play on that delight .... ... but the real musicians are always mindful of what the others on the bandstand are "talking" about in their playing. OK, back to what to call that phenomenon if it can't be called Perfect Pitch? I suspect that a lot of the arguments about its "non-existence" are based upon the definition of the word "perfect." We piano people are bombarded every day with variations of each note in the piano even on a "perfectly tuned" instrument simply because every piano has a different stretch factor based on its inharmonicity. Other instruments have other tunings and other factors affecting tuning. The result of all this is that we have nothing to calibrate our sense of pitch by apart from the internationally-understood A=440. All the calibration is, is the identification of which tone belongs to which name. Maybe we should call this Accurate Pitch, since there are degrees of accuracy as expressed by the range of tolerence. Many of us who have this innate sense, know what note we just heard was without referencing it to anything else, plus or minus a few cents or whatever. Others who possess Relative Pitch can hear and identify a note only in its relation to another note. If I hit E5 after the previous note was correctly identified as A4, the person with Relative Pitch would know it was E5 as the note a 5th above A4. The person with Accurate Pitch would know that the note was E5 whether or not they heard previous note at all. And yes, some of us have a more accurate sense of pitch than others. This depends on how readily we can calibrate our hearing, the quality of the calibration source (a well-tuned high-quality instrument as opposed to a seriously neglected approximation of an instrument), and how well this calibration withstands the assault of "non-tuned" sounds. Does any of this make sense?
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