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From: harlan@bbn.com (Harlan Feinstein)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: perfect pitch
Keywords: perfect pitch, ear training
Message-ID: <48907@bbn.COM>
Date: 29 Nov 89 21:37:52 GMT
References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <365@bbxsda.UUCP> <3289@husc6.harvard.edu>
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Reply-To: harlan@labs-n.bbn.com (Harlan Feinstein)
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In article <3289@husc6.harvard.edu> elkies@brauer.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies) writes:
>So what's to stop them from writing down the notes they hear and then
>transposing them after the fact?

Nothing stops them from doing that, but the point of the exercise (or one of
them) is to develop your relative pitch, to be able to hear intervals, and
eventually chords.  To do the exercise your way gets around this, but you'd
never learn the concept that's being taught.  It's like touch typing in that
sometimes the person learning can go quicker using hunt-and-peck typing, but
eventually by using the "correct" methods of typing (which are slower for the
time being) you can achieve more benefits (higher speed).
>
>Perhaps the only solution is to segregate ear-training classes by perfect
>pitch---but that's usually impractical.
>
At Eastman School of Music they tested people for it in the preliminary test
that places you in the proper music theory class.  I don't know if there was
a special class for those with perfect pitch, but there was one person in our
class with perfect pitch.  I don't think it necessarily would be impractical
to separate people like you suggest, as more music students than you would
expect have it...

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

Harlan Feinstein
hfeinstein@wash-vax.bbn.com
h_feinstein@guvax.georgetown.edu


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