"perfect pitch"

[Dave Nereson]

<<I have perfect pitch.  But you want to know something?  It's not so
perfect
that I hear a temperament in my inner ear when writing a piece away from the
keyboard.  Is my mental pitch memory tempered?  NO.  It's in just
intonation.
    --Tom Sivak >>

    I also have what people call "perfect pitch".  It's the biggest misnomer
in the world of music.  Nobody has perfect pitch.  Turn on your ETD, set it
to some note.  Now hum or sing that note and see how long the lights stay
absolutely stopped.  It's very hard to hold a perfectly steady pitch with no
wavering, kinda like trying to hold your car exactly at 25 mph with no
variance at all.  Or, with the ETD set to some note, put it where you can't
see the display but can still press the "measure" button.  Sing the note the
ETD is set to for a second or two while you measure.  Now check the display.
Do it again in an hour or tomorrow, or when you first wake up or after
you've been listening to music, either on TV or the stereo or the ditty from
the ice cream wagon that just went down the street.  Check your A or C or
whatever against the ETD again.  Still dead nuts on pitch, not even a few
cents deviation?  I doubt it.  Get a frequency counter, go to someone who
supposedly has perfect pitch and ask them to hum a note and see if they're
dead on every time.  Unlikely.
    Now, singing is one thing and playing in tune on an instrument is
another, but still, if you ask a "perfect pitch" violinist or whatever other
instrumentalist to hit a note, and measure it with a frequency counter, not
just comparing it to the nearest piano which you hope is close to being in
tune, it's highly unlikely they'll be EXACTLY on that frequency every time.
    What I (and everybody else who has "perfect" pitch) actually have is
"very close pitch".  When I hear music on the radio or in a concert hall, I
can tell what key they're in.  When I walk into a piano store and someone's
tuning, I can tell what notes he/she's hitting without looking at the keys.
When my phone rings, I can hear the A flat and C tones of the two bells
without having to compare them to the piano to see what they are.  It's just
from having taken piano lessons since kindergarten and playing cello in
orchestra since fourth grade.  Everyday the conductor would have us hum 'A',
first thing, then he'd go to the piano and play A, and we'd tune.  Everyday.
Since age 9.  Practicing piano every day since age 5.  After a while, your
brain just memorizes middle C or A or both, along with many other notes.
But
there's nothing in nature that makes a baby's brain have a calibrated pitch
source or measurement device.  As we tuners know, A 440 or C 523.3 are
arbitrary pitches set by man, not the universe.  Pitch is an infinite
spectrum.
    Many people also have very good "relative pitch", that is, once you give
them a note (a reference), they can then sing any other note you ask them to
(within a reasonable range).  Or once you tell them what a certain note is,
they can then hear what the other notes are.  Whether that relative pitch is
in just intonation or meantone or Werckmeister, I just don't know --
probably pretty close to just, unless they've played an instrument for a
long time and are used to equal temperament.
    But "perfect", in terms of Hertz or fractions of a Hertz, or in terms of
cents?  Nah!  That'd be like being able to make two marks on a piece of
paper exactly one inch apart, without the help of a ruler, and no deviation
by even a few thousandths, every time.  Or being able to tell how loud a
sound is, to the nearest tenth of a deciBel, with no meter, or exactly how
bright the light in the room is to the nearest lumen, with no meter.  I know
there are veteran machinists who can look at the thickness of a small piece
of metal, or piano technicians who can look at a center pin and tell you its
thickness in thousandths, just from having done it for 20 or 30 years, and
sometimes I amaze myself by the smallest difference in key dip I can detect.
But perfect, every time, to the nearest thousandth?  I doubt it.  I'm sure
many of us can set A, then set a quick temperament just with 4ths and 5ths,
then check it with the ETD and it's damn close.  But every time?  Dead nuts
on,  to the nearest tenth of a cent?  Maybe if you're bionic or god.
    I really don't like the term "perfect pitch" because it implies that the
higher powers above somehow installed a crystal oscillator in some people's
brains before they were born, or that pitches on pianos or tuning forks are
somehow determined by some immutable standard out in the universe somewhere,
like the speed of light or the mass of a hydrogen proton.
        --Dave Nereson, RPT, Denver

<<However, I do understand the great sense of discomfort that occurs when
someone discovers that long held beliefs that had no basis in fact are shown
to be false, with no foundation, even if they do reflect the most common
thinking.  This also happened when scientists announced that the world was,
in fact, round, not flat and heads rolled for it back then too.
Bill Bremmer RPT
Madison, Wisconsin >>

    Yes, it's like people who think if you go outside without a jacket,
you'll "catch cold", as though you can "catch" a certain temperature
("cold"), and that's what makes you sick.  You catch A "cold", not just
"cold" -- it's a virus you catch that causes the "cold",  which is an
illness, not a lack of heat.  Perhaps walking around in cold weather can
lower your resistance to viruses, but it's not the cold air per se that
makes you
ill.
    There are lots of other terms that should be abandoned, like "practice
piano", "baby" grand, "upright grand" (yes, I know manufacturers used it),
"high tech" (high compared to what?  What's high tech today will be low tech
in a few years), "loud pedal", "tone deaf"  (I don't know how many
customers, or, usually customers' husbands, claim to be "tone deaf").  I
play
a note, then a different note, then ask them if the two notes were different
or the same.  If
they reply "Different", then I can tell them they're not "tone deaf".
    I know, I know -- this is way too long.  Bye.   --Dave Nereson