Newsgroups: comp.music
Path: utzoo!utgpu!cunews!dgbt!ted
From: ted@dgbt.doc.ca (Ted Grusec)
Subject: Re: Perfect Pitch
Message-ID: <1991Mar25.145217.1573@dgbt.doc.ca>
Organization: The Communications Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada
References: <1991Mar18.215252.21611@athena.mit.edu> <1991Mar19.133646.6659@bernina.ethz.ch> <872@mrcu>
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 91 14:52:17 GMT

Generally, everyone seems to assume that perfect pitch and musical
ability are highly related - in other words, that someone with perfect
pitch is also high in other aspects of musical talent (although, of
course, the absence of perfect pitch is not related to low talent).
Consider, however, that the question of perfect pitch would rarely
come up in a non-musical context, so that most people who are
discovered to have perfect pitch are involved in music.

I am a psychologist doing music and audio research and one of the
tools I have been using are the Seashore tests of musical talent. I
use heterogenous groups of people in my research and one of the things
that has come up is that there are people who have perfect pitch but
who are not at all musically talented or inclined. Such people would
not normally be revealed except in the kind of research I am doing.

The point is that perfect pitch is not coincident with high musical
ability at all. Its presence is, arguably, useful to musicians, but,
in my present view, and in the light of individuals that I have
studied, it is not at all to be equated with musical ability.

The Sloboda reference is a good one. The conclusion of that author, as
I recall, is that musical ability can best be considered a matter of a
number of different aptitudes coming together in a single mind. Thus,
pitch, time, timbre, loudness, rhythm, musical memory etc., when they
all come together as perceptual/cognitive strengths, constitute a
highly musical mind. But any one or several of these may exist in high
strength without the others, and in those cases, musical inclination
may be weaker.

I will end with an anecdote. As a graduate student I was doing some
research in which I was exposing subjects to sine wave tones of the
same pitch. Day after day, week after week, I, as experimenter, heard
these tones over and over and over. After a week or so of this, I
could walk into the lab and see how close I was to humming the tones
in question before turning the apparatus on. I became quite perfect at
this and was able to impress visitors to the lab with my "perfect
pitch". I do not have perfect pitch but had clearly acquired something
analogous without conscious effort. How restricted this was to the lab
situation I don't know. Nor did I then pursue this in other contexts
for its generality. But, clearly, learning effects can be quite
striking.