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From: barrett@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Dan Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.music,rec.music.synth,comp.multimedia
Subject: Re: PITCH and COLOUR
Message-ID: <7983@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
Date: 14 Apr 91 19:22:37 GMT
References: <1991Apr12.035714.10375@dgbt.doc.ca>
Followup-To: comp.music
Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Lines: 31

>>In article <1991Apr10.031342.27656@dgbt.doc.ca> ted@dgbt.doc.ca (Ted Grusec)
>>writes:
>>>[Two identical colors, in different contexts, look different.]
>>>By contrast, a person with perfect pitch will identify the pitch of
>>>a given note no matter what very different chords that pitched note is
>>>presented in.

I responded:
>>	No, the ear can EASILY be fooled.  When several pitches are played
>>at exactly the same time, the ear perceives them as a single sound.

He responded to me:
>I don't have perfect pitch. But "several pitches played at exactly the same
>time" is, of course, a chord.  I can analyze the constituent notes of a
>chord quite easily....

	Your premise is wrong:  "several pitches played at exactly the
same time" is a CLUSTER, not a chord.  I did not say that the pitches were
equal-tempered scale degrees, or harmonically related in any way.  When
you listen to someone hit a snare drum, you hear the sound of a snare
drum.  You don't hear fifty different harmonics as independent instruments.
When you press a note on a pipe organ, you often hear a single pitch, even
though twelve different pipes might be playing harmonically related pitches.

                                                        Dan

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