Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!husc6!osgood!elkies
From: elkies@osgood.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: perfect pitch
Keywords: perfect pitch, ear training
Message-ID: <3327@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 4 Dec 89 00:51:50 GMT
References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu: <365@bbxsda.UUCP> <3289@husc6.harvard.edu> <48907@bbn.COM>
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: elkies@osgood.harvard.edu (Noam Elkies)
Organization: Harvard Math Department
Lines: 39

In article <48907@bbn.COM: harlan@labs-n.bbn.com (Harlan Feinstein) writes:
:In article <3289@husc6.harvard.edu> [I wrote:]
:>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.

I realize that what I was suggesting amounts to "cheating" in this sense, but
I submit that confusing the perfect-pitch students in this way won't teach
them much about intervals anyway (though some may learn something about
transposing).  One of the other points of such exercises is to develop not
only a local sense of interval recognition, but a global sense of where notes
are relative to the initial pitch; this is accomplished better by perfect pitch
than any amount of relative training, so it's counterproductive to frustrate
the former (where it exists) in order to stimulate the latter.  Yes, musicians
with perfect pitch need to know about intervals and chords, but they best learn
this via a different process than other students---why force their square peg
into a round hole?

:>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...

At a school with a large music program I'd expect this to be possible.
Smaller programs might have a harder time fitting into the same class the
handful of perfect-pitch students if (as one would generally expect) their
ears are at very different stages of development.

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


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