[pianotech] 440/442?

[Porritt, David]

Richard:

>From my experience the ones who go on about their "perfect pitch" aren't the ones you're looking for.  It's the real musicians - and not many of them - but they're out there.

dp


David M. Porritt, RPT
dporritt at smu.edu


-----Original Message-----
From: pianotech-bounces at ptg.org [mailto:pianotech-bounces at ptg.org] On Behalf Of Richard Brekne
Sent: Friday, May 01, 2009 6:50 PM
To: pianotech at ptg.org
Subject: Re: [pianotech] 440/442?

The whole pitch thing is so full of mystic and believe its really quite 
amazing.  There is no doubt that there is a group of individuals out 
there that have a very heightened sense of pitch sense/memory that we 
know quite a bit less about then we want to think.  That said... to my 
knowledge every time someone is subjected to a very precise, isolated 
and demanding set of testing routines to establish anything really close 
to absolute pitch... they fail miserably... even the best of them.  At 
least if discerning between a pitch difference of 2 hz is concerned for 
all 12 notes in the central octave range the piano has.

Curiously enough... those who seem to have the highest accuracy rates 
are not musicians from western culture, but people from cultures where 
the language they speak relies on pitch inflection as part of how any 
given word is to be interpreted.... which can be traced wayyyyy back to 
languages that did not have any vowels per sé written into there 
structure..... which imaginably can be traced back to a pre-sentient 
time for human kind..... which is of course another tangent entirely but 
by all means has very serious minded folks totally immersed in the 
subject matter.

As far as I have been able to detect, evey time a real western music 
<<perfect pitch>> guy shows his/her stuff its more a matter of relative 
pitch sensitivity then anything else. I doubt very very seriously you 
could find a person on the planet who could 100 % of the time... or even 
a statistically signifcantly % of the time tell you which major triad 
built on a Gb root was 2 hz higher then another based on this idea of 
color.  I'm of course willing to read any tests or research published 
that says different... and have read quite a few things so far.  It ends 
up always (so far) like trying to find that real <<healer>>... the guy 
who can just touch you .... say a few mumbo jumbos in your favorite 
religious jargon.... and cure you of virtually any condition known to 
man... even those like being gay which are highly disputed as far as 
what constitutes a <<condition>>.  Every time you look close enough.... 
you see the healer is a phony.  Perhaps not the best of analogies as the 
pitch sensitivity thing has its real parameters... but taking things to 
the degree hinted at in some of these posts.... well I'm open to seeing 
it proved to be sure... but I gotta be honest with you... I've never 
seen anyone convince me.... not even close.

Cheers
RicB