Perfect Pitch
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Most people can keep a pitch in short-term memory, for five or fifteen seconds, long enough to reproduce it accurately after a conductor's prep beat. "Perfect pitch" is just long-term memory for pitch. People who "have it" have a permanent memory bank by which pitches are recognized and reproduced without constant refreshers, and people with this mysterious-seeming gift are valuable in choruses as human pitch pipes.
I noticed that I had it, and that others didn't, some time after starting elementary school band. Even playing on a transposing instrument didn't make it obvious. The notes of an alto saxophone on its staff with a treble clef are on the same lines and spaces as the notes on the bass clef in concert pitch (though down an octave). So it seemed as though was I reading bass clef when playing sax. Eventually I realized that the note I was calling F by this mistaken method the band director was calling D, and so on, and furthermore the sharps and flats weren't what they should normally be. After getting a few puzzled looks from Mr. Morse regarding note-spellings, I learned about transposing instruments, adjusted to the new information, and later on in high school was able to play tenor sax without being disoriented by its transposition down a step.
Mom on a few occasions approached the piano to test my ears. These times were always when I was in my bedroom, maybe reading or doing homework, and the piano was on the opposite side of the wall, in the living room. She'd plink a note, ask me what it was, plink another, etc., several times, then say "huh" and move on. She didn't explain or elaborate. Both that and the physical separation does seem oddly ritualistic now that I think about it.
It had been easy for me to play familiar melodies by ear all along, and as my technique grew I could harmonize by ear as well if the harmony wasn't too elaborate.
People have asked whether music played in the "wrong" key sounds horrible. It doesn't. Not all perfect pitch is equally perfect. I'm definitely not one who winces at an orchestra playing a few cents sharp to brighten the sound (though sometimes I can hear that). I have a harder time correctly identifying sung pitches than instrumental pitches. My sense of pitch is probably affected by having inconsistently tuned and out-of-tune pianos to play on*, and it still tends to get lazy and run below A=440 Hz. I've joked that I slip into Baroque tuning if I'm not careful. And it has happened a few times that popular songs that I thought were in C turned about to be in B (e.g., "Ob-La-Di", "The Tide is High", "Sir Duke"). I chalk this up not so much to faulty pitch memory as to a calibration issue.
And do you know those transposer knobs on electronic and digital organs that will raise or lower the key for the benefit of the singer, while saving the organist the burden of accomplishing it with her own neurons? Those knobs are total Kryptonite. The aural feedback is intensely disorienting and quickly leads my hands to aim for the notes heard rather than the notes printed. I won't claim that it would be impossible for someone with perfect pitch to become accustomed to this, but I, for one, am just as happy never to need to.
It probably was shortly after learning about transposing instruments that I got the idea of writing a bit of music for band. Figuring out a big, multi-faceted puzzle and getting it all out on paper -- that, as has often been the case, was what started me on a new venture. See it, hear it, do it.
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*From recordings made when I was in junior high school, I am pretty sure that our home piano was about a half-step flat for a time. Somehow I was acclimated to practicing on it, then coming to lessons with Dr. Kooiker whose pianos were, of course, correctly tuned.
(Incidentally, on revisiting the Mitch Miller LPs that I heard so much of over several years, and still remember well, I found that most of them are tuned a fraction of a step higher than standard pitch, maybe by 20 cents or so. It's very easy for me to hear his music as being up a half step -- A's as B-flats, etc. -- and orient accordingly)
Previous: Band Next: Starting and Stopping Composing
Most people can keep a pitch in short-term memory, for five or fifteen seconds, long enough to reproduce it accurately after a conductor's prep beat. "Perfect pitch" is just long-term memory for pitch. People who "have it" have a permanent memory bank by which pitches are recognized and reproduced without constant refreshers, and people with this mysterious-seeming gift are valuable in choruses as human pitch pipes.
I noticed that I had it, and that others didn't, some time after starting elementary school band. Even playing on a transposing instrument didn't make it obvious. The notes of an alto saxophone on its staff with a treble clef are on the same lines and spaces as the notes on the bass clef in concert pitch (though down an octave). So it seemed as though was I reading bass clef when playing sax. Eventually I realized that the note I was calling F by this mistaken method the band director was calling D, and so on, and furthermore the sharps and flats weren't what they should normally be. After getting a few puzzled looks from Mr. Morse regarding note-spellings, I learned about transposing instruments, adjusted to the new information, and later on in high school was able to play tenor sax without being disoriented by its transposition down a step.
Mom on a few occasions approached the piano to test my ears. These times were always when I was in my bedroom, maybe reading or doing homework, and the piano was on the opposite side of the wall, in the living room. She'd plink a note, ask me what it was, plink another, etc., several times, then say "huh" and move on. She didn't explain or elaborate. Both that and the physical separation does seem oddly ritualistic now that I think about it.
It had been easy for me to play familiar melodies by ear all along, and as my technique grew I could harmonize by ear as well if the harmony wasn't too elaborate.
People have asked whether music played in the "wrong" key sounds horrible. It doesn't. Not all perfect pitch is equally perfect. I'm definitely not one who winces at an orchestra playing a few cents sharp to brighten the sound (though sometimes I can hear that). I have a harder time correctly identifying sung pitches than instrumental pitches. My sense of pitch is probably affected by having inconsistently tuned and out-of-tune pianos to play on*, and it still tends to get lazy and run below A=440 Hz. I've joked that I slip into Baroque tuning if I'm not careful. And it has happened a few times that popular songs that I thought were in C turned about to be in B (e.g., "Ob-La-Di", "The Tide is High", "Sir Duke"). I chalk this up not so much to faulty pitch memory as to a calibration issue.
And do you know those transposer knobs on electronic and digital organs that will raise or lower the key for the benefit of the singer, while saving the organist the burden of accomplishing it with her own neurons? Those knobs are total Kryptonite. The aural feedback is intensely disorienting and quickly leads my hands to aim for the notes heard rather than the notes printed. I won't claim that it would be impossible for someone with perfect pitch to become accustomed to this, but I, for one, am just as happy never to need to.
It probably was shortly after learning about transposing instruments that I got the idea of writing a bit of music for band. Figuring out a big, multi-faceted puzzle and getting it all out on paper -- that, as has often been the case, was what started me on a new venture. See it, hear it, do it.
--------------------------------------
*From recordings made when I was in junior high school, I am pretty sure that our home piano was about a half-step flat for a time. Somehow I was acclimated to practicing on it, then coming to lessons with Dr. Kooiker whose pianos were, of course, correctly tuned.
(Incidentally, on revisiting the Mitch Miller LPs that I heard so much of over several years, and still remember well, I found that most of them are tuned a fraction of a step higher than standard pitch, maybe by 20 cents or so. It's very easy for me to hear his music as being up a half step -- A's as B-flats, etc. -- and orient accordingly)
Previous: Band Next: Starting and Stopping Composing
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