 The Clarinet BBoard
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Author: Filipe
Date: 2001-10-15 23:35
how come I hear almost everybody saying that perfect pitch is a curse?????
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Author: Bob Arney
Date: 2001-10-15 23:46
Filipe, it's like that famous old Chinese Curse " May You Live In Interesting Times." Analogy: You are first chair with perfect pitch and I am ANYWHERE in the section. You would soon know why it is a curse.
Bob A
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Author: ginny
Date: 2001-10-16 16:01
I have two children, one with excellent relative pitch, the other with perfect pitch. They both can play melodies 'by ear' with great ease, sight read well, transpose freely and such. I know that the perfect pitch guy can 'hear' sheet music when he looks at it. I have never seen any particular down side to perfect pitch, and anyone struggling with their ear could easily be envious.
Once the perfect pitch guy got very confused because I was 'showing' him a tune on a guitar like instrument and was tuned about 20 cents flat. He was very flustered, I would say but that's a B, he'd say sounds like a Bb, and then began to think his ppitch had gone away, since he was having trouble. When he was very little he really only knew the key of C, and playing a tune in another key would really confuse him about which note was which (he'd claim the tonic was both C and its actual pitch) Hardly a disability, however.
I would say it is a nice advantage, but both are fine musicians. Neither recalls developing their ears, since mommy started eartraining for them between age 0 and 3, as a first language. One thinks in intervals primarily and the other thinks fixed, even when reading music. Perfect pitch is certainly no curse, they both transpose freely and easily, sing in tune and play well.
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Author: Stacie
Date: 2001-10-16 17:58
Filipe,
I posted to your other thread about perfect pitch. My husband has perfect pitch, and while I don't think he would say it's a curse, it can be annoying in certain circumstances. For example, if he ever plays in a band or orchestra that tunes to other than A=440, it drives him nuts. Also, playing with a lot of amateur groups as he does, having a very good ear can sometimes diminish your enjoyment of the experience. Also, he's a double bassist, and the bass is notoriously difficult to play in tune (since there's such a distance on the fingerboard between pitches) -- so sometimes even his own playing makes him crazy when he's struggling to play in tune. Playing in a bass section can drive him totally crazy. Plus, as someone else mentioned, people are fascinated by perfect pitch, and he's always being asked when people find out he has it to name this pitch or that, or to "give me an A." Or whatever. It makes him feel a little bit like a carnival freak.
That said, it's also an amazing gift. He can hear any score in his head with much less effort than it takes for me to do the same, he can sight-sing anything -- even modern stuff where there's no reference to a tonic, and it's very useful to him in his sidelight as a recording technician. He certainly doesn't regret having perfect pitch -- it's made a lot of things easier for him during his lifetime as a musician. But sometimes he wishes he knew what it was like not to "just know" what a pitch is. He also worries constantly that his internal pitch-sense is somehow "off" (it isn't, I've tested him at his request a number of times).
He doesn't regard perfect pitch as a curse. It's a blessing AND a curse.
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Author: Dave Beal
Date: 2001-10-16 18:31
Many years ago, my elementary school music teacher told us that when she was a kid, her younger brother, who had had absolutely no musical training, could name the notes as she played them on her violin.
She obviously thought that he was born with this ability, which I find very hard to believe. How could this be wired into a person's brain, when not only the names of the notes but the pitches themselves are an arbitrary human convention?
I can certainly believe that a person can be born with the aptitude to learn perfect pitch, but I can't understand how someone could actually have the ability at birth.
Does anyone else have experience with a person who was apparently born with perfect pitch?
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Author: Gordon (NZ)
Date: 2001-10-16 21:18
Your statements make perfect sense to me.
Perhaps I am getting a bit pedantic here but my concept of perfect pitch is that the person has (probably born with) a well-developed pitch spectrum 'line' in their mind, and any note they hear they can locate precisely on this line. Perhaps this is the 'aptitude'.
What is learnt is;
1. That with our (arbitrary) scale occupies specific locations on this spectrum, and the person learns these locations, without thinking, just by exposure to the western music.
2. That these locations have names.
Yes it would be irritating to play out of tune with the 'electronic tuner' in one's mind in order to play in tune with other players at a different pitch. Yes, it could be irritating to hear music that is out of tune with the 'sounds' of the tuner in one's mind. And yes, the person may be so distracted by the nuances of a player's pitch that the communication and pleasure from the music may be lost.
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Author: Hiroshi
Date: 2001-10-17 02:09
Violinist or singers tend to play on 'perfect scale' or 'just scale' . They feel irritated when they hear equal tempered playing along their own playing. This is making matters more complicated other than perfect pitch.
http://www.larastjohn.com/essays/intonation.html
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Author: David Pegel
Date: 2001-10-18 00:10
Isn't perfect pitch so complicated (for each note to be in tune in each chord) that there is next to no possible way for anyone to have on-the-dot perfect pitch?
I regard my semi-perfect pitch as a blessing because it helps me "hear" what music should sound like and I can play along with tunes on CDs and whatnot without looking at music.
Also, I seemed to have mine almost at birth too, except I needed to know the names of the notes first!! It scared my mom when she played a note on the piano and I told her it was a G.
Now she always asks me for key signatures to guitar songs she likes...
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Author: Stacie
Date: 2001-10-18 13:17
Yes, David, my husband also has the sense that he had perfect pitch almost from birth -- at least, he doesn't remember not having it. Both of his parents are music teachers, so he certainly had lots of early exposure to note names and such. His parents didn't figure out that he had perfect pitch, though, until he was 8 or 9 years old -- he had never mentioned it because he just assumed that everyone could do what he did.
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