Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!husc6!brauer!elkies
From: elkies@brauer.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: perfect pitch
Keywords: perfect pitch, ear training
Message-ID: <3289@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 29 Nov 89 20:30:55 GMT
References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <365@bbxsda.UUCP>
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: elkies@brauer.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)
Organization: Harvard Math Department
Lines: 16

In article <365@bbxsda.UUCP> scott@bbxsda.UUCP (Scott Amspoker) writes:
>I remember music theory class back in college.  We would have to do musical
>dictation.  The professor would play something on the piano and we would 
>write it down.  The professor would start by playing a note and saying
>something like, "this is G#".  It was never the note he was actually playing.
>This was to annoy the "perfect pitch" students so they would be forced to
>hear the intervals rather than the absolute pitches.

So what's to stop them from writing down the notes they hear and then
transposing them after the fact?

Perhaps the only solution is to segregate ear-training classes by perfect
pitch---but that's usually impractical.

--Noam D. Elkies (elkies@zariski.harvard.edu)
  Department of Mathematics, Harvard Univ.


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