Perfect Pitch

[Zen Reinhardt]

----------
> 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?