Author: mschmidt
Date: 2008-08-21 21:56
I've recently been having similar thoughts about "bright," "dark," and intonation.
When I was first playing oboe, it wasn't common to have ready access to tuners. My band director had a stroboscopic one that he hauled out on occasion, but my oboe teacher just decided whether a reed was in pitch by playing the same thing on every reed and "knowing" whether it was sharp or flat. Well, I just assumed he had something like "perfect" pitch (which is more accurately called "absolute pitch.")
Now that I have a handy and pretty robust tuner, I am finding out that people who think they have a good sense of pitch don't really. Won't mention any names, but someone recently would tell members of a certain ensemble whether they were flat or sharp (when playing solo) and the judgment seemed to have more to do with timbre than with pitch as measured by my tuner. Trumpets were said to be sharper than they really were while some other instruments were more likely to be judged flatter than they really were. Maybe this had something to do with the fact that the judger's main instrument was trumpet?
Well, if people can confuse pitch with timbre, is it not also possible to confuse timbre with pitch? When playing solo (no beats to hear), and without any recent pitch reference, do we hear sharpness as brightness? My recent experience suggests this may be true, at least for me. When my embouchre adjusts to sound "darker," the pitch goes down. Now, it may well be that the adjustments that make for a "darker" sound also make for a lower tone. But I don't have any OBJECTIVE measurement of darkness--only a subjective one. So it seems to me certainly possible that what I subjectively perceive as darkness and lightness could be, to some extent, a misinterpreted perception of pitch.
Now, all this may well be due to the relative unsophistication of my ear. I am sure some of you can cite plenty of instances in which you simultaneously perceived brightness and flatness, or darkness and sharpness. Reaching back in my memory, I'd probably say that I can, too. But I am fairly convinced that, at times, I may well have been confusing pitch with timbre, and vice versa. And I'd wager that at least a few other people out there have made the same mistake on occasion.
Mike
Still an Amateur, but not really middle-aged anymore
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