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From: jsc@kingtut.MIT.EDU (Jin S Choi)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Re: Perfect Pitch
Message-ID: <1991Mar26.111429.27568@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 26 Mar 91 11:14:29 GMT
Article-I.D.: athena.1991Mar26.111429.27568
References: <3123@esquire.dpw.com> <7180012@hpfcso.FC.HP.COM> <3137@esquire.dpw.com> <18972@milton.u.washington.edu>
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In article <18972@milton.u.washington.edu>, allyn@milton.u.washington.edu (Allyn Weaks) writes:
|> 
|> 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 think kinesthetic memory definitely helps a lot with pitch memory. As I've said,
for me perfect pitch started with my having to think about where on the 
fingerboard I would play a note that I heard. The same would be true for singers,
except that I imagine they have a much rougher time of it since they don't have
such an absolute frame of reference. I find that I have a much harder time
recognizing notes much below G below middle C, the lowest note on the violin. I
have no such problem with the upper ranges, so experience with notes in a certain
range would seem to help pitch recognition. For low notes, I usually mentally
transpose up as many octaves as I need to to get into my range. I also can't
mentally 'hear' the bass clef on sight as I can the treble, a real handicap for
my theory class.

--
Jin Choi
jsc@athena.mit.edu
617-232-3257