Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!iuvax!rutgers!columbia!cs!cs.columbia.edu!abrams From: abrams@cs.columbia.edu (Steven Abrams) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: What is perfect pitch? (Was re: New tunings) Message-ID: Date: 5 Dec 89 06:27:41 GMT References: <18807@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu> <365@bbxsda.UUCP> <75@motto.UUCP> Sender: abrams@cs.columbia.edu Organization: Columbia University Lines: 29 In-reply-to: dave@motto.UUCP's message of 4 Dec 89 14:01:36 GMT In article <75@motto.UUCP> dave@motto.UUCP (David Brown) writes: I was once part of a massed choir at a summer music camp. For the final concert we sang an a capella number. At the last rehearsal the conductor told us he would not be giving us a starting pitch. Instead we were to "pull it out of the air". Sure enough, when the time came, he gave us a moment to collect our thoughts and then brought us in. Amazingly, it worked! This sounds to me like one of those cases of tone-memory that people have been talking about. I remember a show that I directed where one girl had to start off a song by herself. She and I spent so much time going over how I was going to cue her and what the starting note was going to be that she no longer needed the faint tap on the piano that I was giving her. She did *not* have perfect pitch, but for the duration of rehearsals and performances, she remembered that pitch. I think that's the difference between naturally having perfect pitch and being musical to have tonal memory -- one is an inate ability, the other is something that can be learned for some period of time. ~~~Steve -- /************************************************* * *Steven Abrams abrams@cs.columbia.edu * **************************************************/ #include #include