> On 26 May 2016, at 08:02, N. Andrew Walsh <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Off topic, I know, but how do those gifted with perfect pitch cope with all > this? > > Michael > > You ready for some polemic? > > "Perfect pitch" is a sham. It's a fraud perpetuated by people who think that > some of us are simply born musical geniuses, with an innate ability to sense > the inner nature of music directly, and from whom creative and musical > expressiveness naturally and effortlessly flows. I've sat in on seminars for > composition, ear-training, musicology, music history, you name it; if one of > the composers said he had perfect pitch, everybody's eyes lit up, and his > scores are immediately taken more seriously. > > What it really means is this: you have internalized the 12-note equal > tempered scale -- usually through extensive piano lessons from an early age > -- to such a point that your auditory memory is deeply enough ingrained that > you can associate heard pitches with their usual note names. That's it. I've > also sat in on ear-training seminars where the played music was to be written > down transposed: the kids with perfect pitch floundered, because they > couldn't actually hear the intervals, and (for them) the note names were all > wrong. Likewise, play them examples in other tuning systems -- just > intonation, but also meantone, pythagorean, or similar -- and likewise, they > couldn't actually identify any of the notes. To them, it was all just "out of > tune." > > I *despise* the idea of perfect pitch, because to me it's a sort of musical > parlor trick that a distressingly high number of musicians have conflated > with some sort of in-born propensity for musical talent, and creative > music-making suffers greatly for it. > > But my opinions on the matter are, as the kids are saying these days, "salty." > > Cheers, > > A
I seem to have struck an interesting chord, here! Another phenomenon about which I have doubts involves people who claim that when they hear music in “sharp” keys (e.g. G, D, A, E) their experience is of brightness, while the flat keys make for a more sombre sound. I’ve even heard in a radio interview that this applies to F# and Gb (the one bright, the other dull). Michael (lighting blue touch-paper and retiring to a safe distance). _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
