A and B here in the first bit is not note A and B
but A and B in the sense of A/B testing!
Sorry for any lack of clarity. Of course
anyone who is not hopelessly tone deaf
can hear the differencer between note A and not B!
I should have said hear is X higher or lower than Y
or something!
Sorry
Robert
On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Robert Greene wrote:
The initial meessage is also in my view something of a misconception of the
meaning of "perfect pitch"
--which ought to be called absolute pitch, since there is nothing
perfect about it(no one has perfect resolution of pitch nor
of anything else!).
Absolute pitch is about MEMORY. Lots of people with "relative pitch"
only hear pitch very accurately in terms of is A higher or lower than B or
are A and B tuned in a perfect fifth(now there perfect means something--
in theory, 3 to 2 pitch ratio).
The difference is that people with absolute pitch can remember pitches
much better than other people. Anyone can remember the difference
between the bottom not on the piano and the top note.
Most people find it easy to tell from memory if a note is bass
or treble in less extreme senses. But they cannot remember
if a given not is an A or a B flat one half step above very easily.
But if one is not totally tone deaf, the perception of the difference
between an A and the B flat right above is instant and totally
reliable--if one is comparing one to the other.
But once a person with relative pitch has locked on to the standard
there is nothing whatever to suggest that they hear music in
"monochrome" in any sense. This is specious , with all respect.
There is nothing to suggest that this is true nor that there
is any real analogue with color perception at all.
People should not make stuff up.
We are just speaking of MEMORY here, not of perception as such.
It is much more analogous to being able to go to the upholstery store
and color match for a patch for your sofa without bringing a sample
along than anything else in the color line. Some people
can do that, most not--not within anything like the threshold
of seeing color differences. One an remember that one;s sofa
is say green. But which green--that is not easy.
But no one thinks this means that people who have poor memory for exact
colors are color blind.
This is just silly in my opinion.
In the same way, anyone can remember that treble is treble, a middle range
middle, a bass bass. No one would take the C string of a cello as a note one
could play on the violin. But exactly which note is which is hard or
impossible for most people to remember.
Oddly enough, some people with absolute pitch play somewhat out of tune on
the violin or other string instruments in the usual sense of the words out of
tune--because they tend to play piano (equal temperament) pitches which they
remember rather than play the pitch that the harmonic context calls for.And
of course the equal temperament pitches are harmonically wrong and sound
wrong on string instruments especially in double stop playing(Listen
carefully to YoYo Ma's Bach Suites)
In general, absolute pitch is attached to good pitch acuity--
but excellent pitch acuity is possible without absolute pitch.
Being able to detect something is not the same as being able to remember it!
Robert
PS You might try the experiment with going to the fabric store.
It is quite illuminating! Some artists --and others --can nail it
on the money from memory. But most people drift a LOT in just the time it
takes to get to the store. Best take a sample along!
On Mon, 11 Jun 2012, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
On Mon, Jun 11, 2012 at 09:44:18AM +0100, Richard Dobson wrote:
I find it useful in mnay cases to relate colour vision to auditory
"perfect pitch". People with the latter recognise the "absolute"
pitch of a note, but may suffer from octave ambiguities, such that
they are not sure whether one tone is above or below another - hence
sometimes intervals are mis-identified. Most people have only
"relative" pitch, which supports correct interval recognition, but
not the direct recognition of pitches. Put another way: most
listeners hear music as if in monochrome - good interval recognition
(just as well when music is so often transposed in performance) but
little or no certainty regarding exact pitch. Transposition is
another auditory phenomenon with no natural direct analogue in
vision. In music, transposition may go entirely unnoticed - national
anthems can and are played in any key - but no such process seems to
exist for vision.
I strongly believe that any supposed similarity between perception
of colours and pitch, and any mapping of the one unto the other, is
extremely suspect. The physical processes are completely different.
Our colour perception is roughly equivalent to three bandpass filters
covering a range of one 'octave'. And these filters are such that the
upper and lower ends of the visual spectrum seem to come together,
leading to the 'circle of colours' illusion. In contrast, the audio
domain covers ten octaves, resolution is some orders of magnitude
higher, and the extremities of the range don't map onto each other.
Ciao,
--
FA
A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia.
It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris
and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)
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