 The Fingering Forum
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Author: sOmeone
Date: 2003-02-11 12:06
i'm now taking a course on perfect pitch with a book and some cds written by a pianist(i forgot his name,i will post it later in the forum). Thats great because now i know that perfect pitch is not 100% born to be but can be practised and perfected. I know a lot of great composers including beethoven, mozart, bach and handel have perfect pitch. The question is, what will the ability of prefect pitch help me in any aspects of music?
Will it help me in my oboe playing? Composing?
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Author: Gnomon
Date: 2003-02-11 12:29
I know Mozart had perfect pitch but I never heard that the other composers had it. Much more important is a good sense of relative pitch. This is essential for good oboe playing.
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Author: Theboy_2
Date: 2003-02-11 23:13
wow, thats way over my head. but whats the difference from "perfect pitch" then the pitch that a band gets? or am i just getting them mixed up?
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Author: TorusTubarius
Date: 2003-02-12 02:06
I'd bet probably a lot of composers had perfect pitch besides Mozart, though I don't know of anywhere where that's been documented or anything.
Will perfect pitch help your oboe playing or any other aspect of music? Well probably... it couldn't hurt anyway. 
Anyway, I know you may think ol' Torus is jerking your chain, but I actually do have perfect pitch, so I've thought a lot about exactly what this means, and why I can hear things that other people may not be able to hear.
First of all, I think of the ability to hear pitch as sort of a spectrum from complete tone deafness on one end to the ability to hear every note in any piece and being able to name them all after only one hearing (like Mozart). I think this label of "perfect" pitch only serves to confuse, and you end up with people having all sorts of different ideas about what "perfect" pitch means.
However how most people understand this concept is with this idea of "perfect" pitch as opposed to good "relative" pitch. I think the difference between someone with perfect pitch and someone with relative pitch stems from a single aspect of the mind, <i>memory</i>.
Take someone with relative pitch. This means that given any two notes, that person can accurately tell you which note is tuned above or below the other. This allows him to make lightning-fast changes while playing his instrument in a group in order to stay in tune with the others. A lot of people with good relative pitch are also good at hearing intervals. For example given a perfect fifth, the person with relative pitch can tell whether or not the interval is in tune, and which note should be tuned which way if it is not. This is really all you need in order to play an instrument well.
On the other hand, someone with perfect pitch can, given any single note, tell you <i>which</i> note is being sounded. So give him a G, he can tell you without looking that you're playing a G. I personally am able to do this, and I can tell you how I do it is by recreating notes in my head and then relating them to the note I'm actually hearing. I think the reason I can accurately hear notes in my head is because I can <i>remember</i> the sound. If you think about it this is actually very different from just hearing a song in your head. I think it takes a different type of memory to actually remember sound as opposed to just remembering how a song goes. When I hear a song in my head, because this part of my memory has been developed, I'm hearing it in the key it's supposed to be in. This is actually how I discovered I had perfect pitch; I kept on hearing songs in my head, and then when I listened to them I noticed I was always hearing them in the right key. I've also discovered that this ability to remember sound isn't just remembering sounds in music. I can accurately remember the pitch of the sounds of engines, voices, machines, anything really that generates a tone. Sometimes this is really annoying... (for example I heard diesel engines all day today, and guess what sound is stuck in my head under the usual assortment of music...)
Really I don't think of perfect pitch as some sort of miraculous talent that only a few are blessed with, and I believe it can be developed with practice. I think the first step, and the one that takes the most training, is being able to precisely reproduce specific frequencies of sound in your head. If you want you can test yourself by singing a lot of different songs and then playing them back to see if you were singing in the right key. Once you can do this every time, it's then a simple matter to learn to connect specific frequencies you have in your mind to the note names we assign them.
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Author: Gnomon
Date: 2003-02-12 07:11
Interesting, Torus. I have a very good sense of relative pitch. In tests I could tell the difference between two notes which were only 5 cents apart. Only about 1 in 20 of the singers in our choir could do that. My pitch memory is not great, though. If I were to start singing a Mozart symphony, I might be two or three semitones out. I suppose I could develop it, but I really don't think it is a talent worth having.
I've heard of people whose sense of absolute pitch was so developed that they couldn't play with an orchestra because the orchestra was tuned sharp, even though the orchestra was perfectly in tune with itself. So absolute (perfect) pitch is not necessarily a good thing.
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Author: Heidi
Date: 2003-02-13 02:28
Scary, TorusTubarius. I can do the same thing — I thought everybody could do it. I'm just getting back into playing after 15 years away, so my sense is not as developed as yours, but it comes naturally. No wonder I'm agonizing so much over those new reeds!
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