Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!convex!iex!ntvax!doug
From: doug@ntvax.uucp (Douglas Scott)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: What is perfect pitch?
Message-ID: <1989Nov29.202636.27483@ntvax.uucp>
Date: 29 Nov 89 20:26:36 GMT
References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <365@bbxsda.UUCP> <1989Nov27.212927.3253@agate.berkeley.edu> <7051@portia.Stanford.EDU>
Sender: Douglas Scott
Reply-To: doug@ntvax.UUCP (Douglas Scott)
Organization: CEMI, University of North Texas
Lines: 35

In article <7051@portia.Stanford.EDU> gaia@portia.Stanford.EDU (fai to leung) writes:
>
>Just cursious, will listening to intervals instead of pitches enhances
>a "grasp" of music context?  Or vice versa?  I don't have absolute pitch and 
>am interested to know the other side of the story.  Or is this a totally
>different issue?

First I would want to clear up the definition of "absolute pitch".  It is not
always a synonym for "perfect pitch" -- the latter often implies the ability
to recognize any pitch out of context; the former often implies an exceptional
ability to name new pitches once a reference pitch is given.  I will assume,
though, that you mean them to be synonymous here.

Not all people with absolute (perfect) pitch hear musical contexts in the same
way -- as a matter of fact, there is often a great deal of variation,
depending on the training (or lack thereof) of the individual.  I knew a woman
musician with pitch who could not recognize chords or chord functions, but she
could ALWAYS tell you what notes were in the chords!  It is somehow a matter
of focus.  I have perfect pitch as well, but I was trained early on to hear
harmonies as more than collections of individually identifiable pitches, so I
can focus on the pitch aspect or the interval aspect -- but I don't feel that
these two possibilities are all there is to "musical context".  I don't
believe that it is at all essential to have pitch in order to understand
musical context...though it is often nice to know WHICH remote key Mahler has
moved to in the midst of a 35 minute movement.

If forced to make a choice between hearing "pitches" or "intervals", assuming
such a division could be made, I would always choose to hear intervals.  There
is much, much more music that (it seems to me) expects the listener to hear
intervallic relations than there is that deals with pitches in isolation...and
that first catagory includes all the serial (12-tone) music I know as well.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Douglas Scott
doug@dept.csci.unt.edu


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