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
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