Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uwm.edu!psuvax1!rutgers!columbia!cs!abrams From: abrams@cs.columbia.edu (Steven Abrams) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: What is perfect pitch? (Was re: New tunings) Message-ID: Date: 28 Nov 89 04:55:06 GMT References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <365@bbxsda.UUCP> Sender: abrams@cs.columbia.edu Organization: Columbia University Department of Computer Science Lines: 33 In-reply-to: scott@bbxsda.UUCP's message of 27 Nov 89 18:07:13 GMT 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. Being a student with perfect pitch, I remember certain music theory dictations that really bugged me. I was so used to picking out pitches without hearing intervals, that to determine, say a half-diminished seventh chord, I'd pick out the notes and visualize the chord to see what it was -- as a result, I was very bad at identifying chords by their feelings. I almost wished that early on I had a teacher who did exactly what you describe, just to develop my sense of intervals. Of course, the same teacher in High School who disliked my method for identifying chords used me to impress judges at choral competitions. I'd lightly humm the starting note, and the entire choir would start off a capella, on pitch, without an audible starting note on the piano or a pitch pipe :-) ~~~Steve -- /************************************************* * *Steven Abrams abrams@cs.columbia.edu * **************************************************/ #include #include Brought to you by Super Global Mega Corp .com