Re: perfect pitch

Ideally, perfect pitch, or better, absolute pitch, wouldn't tie pitch
perception to a grid of fixed pitches in some tuning, but would function
more like absolute color memory. I and most others, I believe, have to
some epsilon good color memory. In other words, what I call red now I will
call red later, and I will always know when something is the color of Grey
Poupon, not just that it is darker than Hellman's. Further, Dijon mustard
a few shades lighter or darker than Grey Poupon won't bother me at all.
I have a friend who is studying one of those send away ear
training courses that pins pitch to color, and it seems to be working for
him in just the ideal way I described above. I suppose someone with
perfect pitch who always listened to music in 12tet centered at 440 may
find music centered around 420 jarring at first, but if he couldn't learn
to adjust to that or some other tuning system, it would be a mighty sorry
skill to have.

John Starrett
http://www-math.cudenver.edu/~jstarret/microtone.html

>From: John Starrett <jstarret@math.cudenver.edu>
>
>..., what I call red now I will
>call red later, and I will always know when something is the color of Grey
>Poupon, not just that it is darker than Hellman's. Further, Dijon mustard
>a few shades lighter or darker than Grey Poupon won't bother me at all.

John,

Are you able to recognize color independent of the background colors? I
vaguely remember reading about or seeing a demonstration of how color
perception is altered by the background.

John Link
ALMOST ACAPPELLA

P.S. Hey, your first name doesn't HAVE to start with "J" to send email
tonight! And Jay, by any chance is your name short for "John"?

>I suppose someone with
>perfect pitch who always listened to music in 12tet centered at 440 may
>find music centered around 420 jarring at first, but if he couldn't learn
>to adjust to that or some other tuning system, it would be a mighty sorry
>skill to have.

I have a friend who had absolute/perfect pitch based on A-440. Then he
started performing early music with A-415. At first he heard everything a
half step lower, but as he became accustomed to playing the A-415 keyboard
gig after gig, he began to associate 415 with A. After some years of this,
he can no longer distinguish them. That is, if you play a pitch for him he
will tell you that it is either A or Ab, but he doesn't know which.

Some researchers distinguish in-born perfect pitch from pitch memory. A
choral director I had trained our choir to sing an E before each rehearsal
without prompting from the keyboard. After a few weeks, everyone was able
to do it. When humming a song I have heard on the radio, I will often hum
it in the same key for days afterward. If I practice, I can use such
abilities to figure out within a semitone or so what a pitch is, but some
people distinguish this ability from the innate and naive ability to
immediately associate a sound with a named pitch as if they were seeing a
color.

I'm with those who dispute the value of such a skill. For me part of the
glory and power of music lies in the relativity of pitch. In ear training
classes when doing melodic dictation, they would have the students notate
the melody in a different key than what was played. Invariably, the perfect
pitch students would have a harder time than the others. I have played just
intonation pieces for people with perfect pitch who cringed, not at the
music, but at the dissonance it made with their expectations. That's not
the sort of skill I'd like to acquire.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^ Bill Alves email: alves@hmc.edu ^
^ Harvey Mudd College URL: http://www2.hmc.edu/~alves/ ^
^ 301 E. Twelfth St. (909)607-4170 (office) ^
^ Claremont CA 91711 USA (909)607-7600 (fax) ^
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I'm not sure of the utility of perfect pitch in itself, but when I think of
the musicians i know who have it, they are all exceptionally talented and
seem to "speak the language" of music more easily and naturally than poor
suckers like myself who struggle with relative pitch. For them, memorization
of notes is not really an issue, and they seem to have a direct link
between their inner-ear and their instrument. My friend Susan, a pianist
who was invited to attend the Curtis Institute at an early age, can play
anything shes ever heard, even once, on the piano complete with correct
voicings etc.

So while I would not say that perfect pitch is what enables these musicians
to do what they do, it seems to be a common component of exceptional musical
talent. I second the color analogy- I think a painter who could only tell
that a given color was redder than another given color, but in isolation
could not identify it at all - would be at a disadvantage. It is no doubt
due to the fact that most of our brains are heavily invested in the visual
area that it is common to be able to remember colors and identify them so
easily. (Yes, as John L mentioned, context does influence this but not
entirely).

All the claims of the superiority of relative over perfect pitch have always
sounded like sour grapes to me. Its like being able to see only in black and
white, and claiming that its better than seeing colors 'cause colors only
distract you from appreciating the linear composition of your visual field.
(Come to think of it, that >is< why black and white photography is so cool.
hmmm.) All in all, if I could I think I would have perfect pitch, not so
when the radiator hisses I can say "C#", but because of the increased
sensitivity to musical meaning that seems to accompany the ability.

dante

>I'm not sure of the utility of perfect pitch in itself, but when I think of
>the musicians i know who have it, they are all exceptionally talented and
>seem to "speak the language" of music more easily and naturally than poor
>suckers like myself who struggle with relative pitch.

This has been my experience as well. And I think it's worth noting that
there seem to be levels of absolute pitch, just as with any other skill. A
friend of mine can tell you what key a song is in, or sing any pitch on
demand. But he can't do more than one note at a time. On the other hand,
I once met a pianist who allowed me to test his ear. I could play huge
chord clusters in close and open voicings, and he would ask if I wanted the
pitches listed in ascending or descending order. He even demonstrated that
I could play all the pitches in an octave but one, and he would name the
missing pitch. He said he could often produce reasonable transcriptions of
music on one or two hearings, and I didn't doubt it. I myself have some
form of "pitch memory", where I can recall the correct starting pitch of a
tune I've heard days before. But it is very much an unconscious thing at
this point.

>All the claims of the superiority of relative over perfect pitch have always
>sounded like sour grapes to me.

Again, this has been my experience. How could the abilities described
above not be useful?

>Some researchers distinguish in-born perfect pitch from pitch memory. A
>choral director I had trained our choir to sing an E before each rehearsal
>without prompting from the keyboard. After a few weeks, everyone was able
>to do it.

I believe this pitch memory is just the unconscious demonstration of a
dormant skill. A skill which, like most other skills, should be much more
difficult, but certainly possible, to learn after puberty. There was a guy
who wrote some ear training software for the Amiga, and I played with it
while I was in Berkeley last year. The software had an absolute pitch
section, and the manual cited JASA articles which apparently showed how
adults can learn absolute pitch. I'll try to find the citations.

>I have played just intonation pieces for people with perfect pitch who
>cringed, not at the music, but at the dissonance it made with their
>expectations. That's not the sort of skill I'd like to acquire.

I cringed the first time I heard JI, but it didn't have anything to do with
absolute pitch. :) I've also noted a very suspicious show-off type vibe
when certain people cringe at a concert because "the orchestra is flat".
In short, like John Starrett, I don't believe there's anything in perfect
pitch that ties one to a specific set of pitches.

-Carl

Jay here,
Don't remember now what all I said in the previous snow flurry on this
subject, but my final thoughts:
the whole issue is so biased to emphasize _pitch. Fact is, when people
jokingly ask me "What note's this?" and then bang on a garbage can, I may
not be able to define all the pitches in terms of our known scales, but,
I'll remember that particular garbage can's "chord" if I hear it later. Ya
know the movie "Sneakers?" Although I've not been called upon yet to give
this kind of evidence, I'm a virtual audio-speedometer in a car where I'm
familiar with its mechanical noises or, when crossing one of those "wake-up"
things in the highway, the pitch tells me what speed we're going.
When I'm building electronic equipment, I use audible test instruments. My
"sound memory" means that I can use an extremely simple circuit that changes
pitch with a changing value of voltage, resistance etc. to get a reading of
practical use.
I do a lot of modifications of recordings. If I want to filter out noise
that has obvious formants, I can immediately set the filters for the
frequencies that my sound memory tells me are the ones to be reduced.
And, of course, while waiting for trains or boats or planes, I'm not bored.
I have my choice of things to play literally in my head. It could be
Machaut, Schubert, or a Stockhausen electronic thing. I can reproduce any of
it in my head with equal clarity.
As I mentioned before, the down side takes some practice to overcome. By now
I can play on a keyboard that's not tuned to standard pitch without too much
hesitation, and when singing in a choir I have no trouble adjusting to pitch
fluctuations. So in conclusion, most of the stuff I hear about perfect pitch
seems to be what we've been conditioned to believe according to the emphases
found in our musical tradition. Pretty fun discussion.
At 11:42 AM 11/6/99 -0500, you wrote:
>From: Carl Lumma <clumma@nni.com>
>
>>I'm not sure of the utility of perfect pitch in itself, but when I think of
>>the musicians i know who have it, they are all exceptionally talented and
>>seem to "speak the language" of music more easily and naturally than poor
>>suckers like myself who struggle with relative pitch.
>
>This has been my experience as well. And I think it's worth noting that
>there seem to be levels of absolute pitch, just as with any other skill. A
>friend of mine can tell you what key a song is in, or sing any pitch on
>demand. But he can't do more than one note at a time. On the other hand,
>I once met a pianist who allowed me to test his ear. I could play huge
>chord clusters in close and open voicings, and he would ask if I wanted the
>pitches listed in ascending or descending order. He even demonstrated that
>I could play all the pitches in an octave but one, and he would name the
>missing pitch. He said he could often produce reasonable transcriptions of
>music on one or two hearings, and I didn't doubt it. I myself have some
>form of "pitch memory", where I can recall the correct starting pitch of a
>tune I've heard days before. But it is very much an unconscious thing at
>this point.
>
>>All the claims of the superiority of relative over perfect pitch have always
>>sounded like sour grapes to me.
>
>Again, this has been my experience. How could the abilities described
>above not be useful?
>
>>Some researchers distinguish in-born perfect pitch from pitch memory. A
>>choral director I had trained our choir to sing an E before each rehearsal
>>without prompting from the keyboard. After a few weeks, everyone was able
>>to do it.
>
>I believe this pitch memory is just the unconscious demonstration of a
>dormant skill. A skill which, like most other skills, should be much more
>difficult, but certainly possible, to learn after puberty. There was a guy
>who wrote some ear training software for the Amiga, and I played with it
>while I was in Berkeley last year. The software had an absolute pitch
>section, and the manual cited JASA articles which apparently showed how
>adults can learn absolute pitch. I'll try to find the citations.
>
>>I have played just intonation pieces for people with perfect pitch who
>>cringed, not at the music, but at the dissonance it made with their
>>expectations. That's not the sort of skill I'd like to acquire.
>
>I cringed the first time I heard JI, but it didn't have anything to do with
>absolute pitch. :) I've also noted a very suspicious show-off type vibe
>when certain people cringe at a concert because "the orchestra is flat".
>In short, like John Starrett, I don't believe there's anything in perfect
>pitch that ties one to a specific set of pitches.
>
>-Carl
>
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Jay,

I really enjoyed this last ("And, of course, while waiting for trains
or boats or planes, I'm not bored.") post of yours immensely... I
think it's the most telling and reasonable stuff I've ever read on the
topic - Thanks!

Dan