Klarinet Archive - Posting 000075.txt from 1999/02

From: "Karl Krelove" <kkrelove@-----.com>
Subj: Re: [kl] Perfect Pitch
Date: Tue, 2 Feb 1999 18:42:31 -0500

----- Original Message -----
From: Neil Leupold <nleupold@-----.edu>
Subject: RE: [kl] Perfect Pitch
>
>Everybody I've ever met who had perfect pitch has had the degree of
>sensitivity described above. They describe it not as "memory", but
>rather as an intuitive perception over which they exercise no con-
>scious control. It is akin to most people's natural ability to i-
>dentify colors of the rainbow. We know what red looks like, whether
>or not any other color is present in what is being viewed. This is
>a form of "absolute" vision, with no point of additional reference
>beyond the color itself...

Color perception, too, is learned, as parents and nursery school teachers
know. The fact that we all agree that a particular area of the spectrum is
"red" and can all (if we aren't visually impaired, i.e. colorblind)
recognize it accurately is a testament to our parents and other early
teachers. Perhaps back in an earlier evolutionary stage, the ability to
learn and _communicate about_ different colors was more useful for survival
than was the ability to communicate about the identity of any particular
sound frequency. Most of us can and do learn to associate names with colors.
Most of us never learn aurally to associate specific names (alphabetic or
sol-fa syllables) with specific pitches (as perceived aurally, not visually
by way of notation). Both kinds of recognition seem on their face to be the
same kind of learned outcomes; it seems that among humans visual
identification is for some reason more easily and universally learned than
is aural ID.

My 2 cents FWIW

Karl Krelove

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