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From: sandell@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Perfect Pitch
Message-ID: <1219@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 91 08:30:07 GMT
Sender: news@ils.nwu.edu
Reply-To: sandell@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Greg Sandell)
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Lines: 47

weigel@DPW.COM (William Weigel) writes:

> 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.

Yes, I heard from someone who bought the Burge kit who said that the
method had alot to do with associating specific pitches with certain
colors.

If you play an A-flat in four octaves on an acoustic piano
there is alot of complex information in there that defines its
timbre.  Now I could tell myself that what I'm hearing is the
color "green" or whatever.  But if I hear a sine wave at the
same frequency I won't be getting that information I used to
make the association to green.  

I won't get on a psychoacoustics high horse on this thing, but I
will say that to my intuitive mind, the idea of particular pitches on
the piano (let *alone* sine waves) having some sort of universal
color is pure hogwash and snake oil.  I suspect that when Burge's
customer's actually learned perfect pitch, it's because they
taught themselves to attach the timbre of each of the 12 piano-produced
pitches to SOME other sensory modality possessing an ordering
system they were better familiar with.  Instead of colors,
it could have been smells (lime, orange, lilac, whatever) or
textures (sandy, smooth, etc.).  Although it was probably important
to try to correlate changes in the dimensions of pitch (i.e. height)
to some similarly changing value in color (hue or luminosity) in
order to foster the best possible comparison between the two
modalities, you could accomplish the same thing with odor or
texture.  And moreover, it would be fairly unimportant what pitch
you chose as the starting point for your succession of colors, or
odors, just as long as you stuck to the succession.

These are just opinions, of course; I neither have perfect pitch
myself, nor have I purchased Burge's course.  Can you tell me,
does Burge's 'color scale' ascend in normal ordering of hues
(red, orange, green, etc.) along with ascent in pitch?

Greg Sandell

--
Greg Sandell
sandell@ils.nwu.edu