Author: HCR
Date: 2011-10-26 20:45
TianL, part of the test I took in college was to sing a note the prof. told me to sing, without an instrument to guide me. I could (and can). One more indication that Tobin is right: there are multiple kinds of “perfect pitch.” If my kind is “absolute perfect pitch,” then my kind is learned, too, but with a genetic advantage. I don’t remember, though, having any difficulty in switching to clarinet-named notes, as opposed to concert-named notes. My piano and clarinet years overlapped, and I unthinkingly went back and forth between the two. It means I absorbed ‘em both. When I got bored with the junior high band music and began fiddling with flute and oboe, I listened and then muttered, “same pitch as the piano,” and adjusted my expectations accordingly. Alto sax and French horn (fiddling in college) were harder, because I was older and/or they were built in pitches farther from C. But if I’d had occasion to keep at them – I didn’t – I probably could have learned instant identifications for them, too. Instead, when I hear others play them, I identify the pitch and then mentally transpose it before naming it (“concert C, sax’s G”).
TianL, I fear I have to disagree with you about most clarinet players starting too late to learn “perfect pitch.” For one thing, many kids are introduced to simpler instruments in grade school and go on to clarinet later as a “serious” instrument, so exposure to pitches and intervals comes early. For another, I’m successfully relearning to tune my ear, and I’m a senior citizen. For yet another, take note of Dave’s comment, based on the ScienceDaily article, about speakers of tonal languages having a leg-up on perfect pitch; it would be because of learning to speak their languages “properly,” regardless of genetic predisposition: again, a learning process. It may come a bit harder later in life, as it does with languages, but we can still do that learning. The brain of Dear Old Homo Sap is capable of such feats.
Dick, I’ve never noticed any difficulty in identifying piano notes except in the lowest and highest octaves. I don’t have more difficulty, moving outward from Middle C; only difficulty in those two octaves.
One last response to TianL: like you, I learned the pitches all at once, and they “always” sounded different to me. Not only that, but in my mind they have different colors [e.g., D = yellow] and different personalities [e.g., Bb minor is not only serious but portentious]. I suspect that I picked up these impressions because of the key choices of the classical composers I grew up hearing. So that leads me to a question for the ClarinetBB at large: do you suppose that the composers themselves “saw” pitches and keys as quite different from one another, which in turn influenced their choices in writing music? Does anybody know of historical evidence about it? I’ve wanted to know the answer to that one for a long, long time.
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The Clarinet BBoard
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