On 12/06/2012 05:44, 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!).
Probably a generational thing. When I was at school (45+yers ago), and beyond as a music student etc, "perfect pitch" was the term universally used. I still find that most musicians will talk vernacularly of perfect pitch, while the acousticians will demand that it is called absolute pitch. It is indeed far from "perfect", as many musicians claiming perfect pitch nevertheless manage to both mis-hear things, and sing/play out of tune. Many top-class musicians possess absolute pitch (I think for example of Jane Manning, a specialist singer of complex atonal music); but a lot of "ordinary" musicians do too, where it does not give them in any recognisable way an advantage. It is also a concept that needs clarification not least with respect to questions of temperament - do people with absolute pitch insist on 12T Equal Temperament based on A=440? Or it is a broad categorical distinction, like recognising red as red and green as green?
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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 ,
I thought I was making it clear that I was using this as an analogy, not as a description of cognitive/neurological processes. The real situation is of course very complex, as the umpteen neurological studies of music and sound cognition (which include aspects of Auditory Processing and the disorders that can arise) demonstrate.
Richard Dobson _______________________________________________ Sursound mailing list Sursound@music.vt.edu https://mail.music.vt.edu/mailman/listinfo/sursound
