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Re: Perfect Pitch

Author: kdk ★2017
Date: 2016-07-19 17:39

SarahC wrote:

> .. both my 9 year old and 7 year
> old son can hear a note and say "that is a tiny bit flat of
> middle C".. they wouldn't be able to tell how many cents, but
> they both know. I ingrained pitch into them very young

It
> was a conscious decision to teach them pitch.

It's interesting that you ran across this thread, which I started in 2011, since I asked the same question then that I asked you in your recent thread about teaching (and to which I still haven't read a really clear answer).

Granted that discrete hundredths of a semitone (cents) would be hard for any human ear to discriminate. I'm still fascinated by the idea that someone with perfect pitch would call 440 Hz an in tune A and 450 Hz (a little over a quarter of a semitone) as "a tiny bit sharper than A." Does someone in (from what I've always read) Berlin hear 440 Hz as "a little flat of A?" Do Americans and Russians (where, again as I've read, the standard A is around 435 Hz) experience unremitting discomfort when they hear music played in Berlin? Or even when they listen to the Berlin Philharmonic on recordings?

Without wanting to make too dramatic or reactionary a point about this, I can't see how deliberately learning (or teaching) that a particular set of frequencies is "right" and all others that deviate from them are "a tiny bit flat [sharp]" - i.e. "wrong" - can be a benefit. Simply being able to reproduce melodies or harmonic structures by ear (or perform them accurately from notation) doesn't depend on absolute pitch if relative pitch is strongly developed - you just need to know the starting note.

I can't shake the feeling that the inconveniences and discomforts, including but not limited to the problem of playing transposing instruments that generated your more recent thread, of being bound to a specific frequency as the "correct" rendering of a given pitch outweigh whatever benefit I've read about. Nature doesn't define A4 or "middle" C.

In my humble opinion, which is probably not shared very widely and which you will probably find anathema, is that little of practical use is gained by learning absolute pitch and a great deal of difficulty can result from it that requires a lot of accommodation to resolve conflicts that needn't exist.

But then, I'm obviously prejudiced - I don't have perfect pitch so I can't know what I'm missing.

Karl

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Perfect Pitch new

kdk

2011-10-25 18:55