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From: allyn@milton.u.washington.edu (Allyn Weaks)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Re: Perfect Pitch
Message-ID: <18972@milton.u.washington.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 91 08:46:24 GMT
References: <3123@esquire.dpw.com> <7180012@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM> <3137@esquire.dpw.com>
Organization: University of Washington, Seattle
Lines: 40

weigel@DPW.COM (William Weigel) writes:
>     The previous post asked whether a pure sine wave Bb sounds different
>from a pure sine wave A.  David Burge, the perfect pitch teacher, claims
>that the tone "colors" are apparent even with pure sine waves, and that
>perfect pitch is completely independent of timbre.  My own ear has not
>progressed to the stage of being able to express an opinion as to whether
>this is true or not.

It might be useful to remember that it's not possible to hear a pure sine wave
- you can _produce_ a pure sine wave, but by the time it gets to the nerves
that carry it to the brain, non-linearities in the ear have already added
overtones and combination tones.  Faint, but a trained ear can hear them
explicitly if the tone is loud enough.  Since the overtone structure of the
non-linearities will vary with pitch sensitivity of the ear, it could well be
that people either specially trained or born with better than average acuity
will hear a different tone color at different pitches.  I'd also expect that
the accuracy of pitch recognition would depend on volume of the signal -
certainly relative pitch perception of a sine wave does [Benade].

Of course, that still doesn't imply that perfect absolute or even relative
pitch is actually a useful or even desirable trait...

A question: long ago back in high school when I was singing regularly, I could
always very precisely sing a D, since so many of our pieces happened to start
there.  But it wasn't so much the pitch I was remembering, as the kinesthetic
memory of the throat muscles knowing what to do.  When doing your pitch
exercises, do you tend to sing or hum along, even subvocally?  And could that
be an aid?  Is your pitch recognition as good for notes well outside of your
singing range as for notes within it? 

I will once again recommend the best musical acoustics book I've come across
so far:  Arthur Benade, _Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics_, Dover, ISBN
0-486-26484-X, $16.  It uses virtually no math (nothing more complicated that
a square root), but in spite of that, does far more than scratch the surface.
Included are extensive references to the literature.  For those not quite up
to a 550 page book no matter how good, Benade has a smaller introduction,
_Horns, Strings, and Harmony_ that I think is still in print.  

Allyn Weaks
allyn@milton.u.washington.edu