Re: Is perfect pitch trainable?


"Hans Aberg" <haberg@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:haberg-3007052358340001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <oJRGe.5970$Tk6.5584@trnddc02>, "Steve Latham"
> <llatham@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>> ... some languages are called tonal
>> languages (most are Asian, and I don't know exactly, but say Vietnamese
>> and
>> Cantonese (not meaning to offend, sorry I should know) and those who
>> speak
>> these languages show a much higher percentage of the general population
>> with
>> perfect pitch. So in America, it's, say, 20 percent, and in Tiawan (or
>> wherever it was) it's more like 40 percent (those are all guesstimates,
>> but
>> I bet if you look up perfect pitch and tonal languages on Google you get
>> some good stuff). So that begs the question that if you learn one of
>> these
>> languages, will you better your odds a training yourself in perfect pitch
>> (if it is in fact trainable).
>
> This is mentioned at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch

Thanks, Hans. Iwas too lazy to look it up before!

I can't believe I got Vietnamese and Cantonese right! I thought I remembered
those two, but wasn't sure. Hmm. Not Absolute memory, but good relative
memory!

Obviously, it's a lot lower percentage than I remembered.

[snip]
>
> It also sports a list of some absolute pitch celebrities, as well some
> without it.

Thank God Yanni is in there! I always wondered why he was so brilliant :-)

Seriously though, a little disheartening that Bach, Beethoven and Mozart are
all there, but at least there's no Handel, Schubert, Haydn, etc. While it
says there's no correlation, it probably doesn't hurt someone with the kind
of background that JS LV and WA had.

> When discussed in this newsgroup before before, a person with absolute
> pitch compared it with watching a TV screen with the colors off, though
> being able to recognize things after awhile.

I remembered the discussion, but I missed that particular post. Thanks for
that and the link.

preesh,

Steve


.

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