Re: Is perfect pitch trainable?


"Greg G" <gdguarino@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:ul2re1d9tdr02hfr8ghkmoago8l08182a7@xxxxxxxxxx
[snip]
>
> If you had some reason to learn those TV themes, you'd get out your
> instrument and take a couple of guesses until you found the correct
> key, right?

Yes.

But what would be the NEXT step? Could you then pick out
> the rest of the chords without using your instrument, or would you
> need to play along?

Depends on how complex it is, and how "memorable" it is. The theme from Monk
(the first season that's acoustic guitar with a Django inspired feel) was
not so easy for me to get - I had to play along. Something like Hawaii 5-0 I
figured out in the middle of a guitar solo one time - I was so used to
hearing it an knew it so well that I just kind of guessed where they were
and how far apart they were and got most of them (I'm a rock player, but I
do a lot of silly quoting - like the Andy Griffith theme, or Scooby Doo in
the middle of these hard rock tunes just to mess with people - usually what
happens is I'll be playing a solo and I'll notice that some riff sounds like
a portion of X theme, and then I'll play a few other target notes/riffs
while improvising, then I'll piece it all together).

What I'm wondering is if the only difference is in
> identifying the key, or if the whole process is different for you.

You know what, though, I don't care about the key. I just pick a key (when
I'm away from the recording) unless I've got some aural clues (harmonics,
open strings, etc.) that help me narrow it down, and then figure it out
interval by interval. Although I don't sit there and go, oh, it sounds like
it went up a M3. It's more like I parse direction, distance, whether it's
diatonic or chromatic - and then any types of inflections - like is it a
blue note, a chordal 7th or chordal 3rd, does it lay in a Major 3rd or minor
3rd relationship to the root, etc. So I'm using every bit of information I
can to place notes - either against a previous note, the tonic, or a
harmony, or the tonic harmony. Also, there's a lot of learned patterns
obviously, so if I hear 5-b6-5 over a chord, I know immediately what it is.
Guitar licks are also immediately recognizable. This is why it's harder for
me to do soemthing like Schoenberg than Cream - I'm far more familiar with
playing the Cream stuff - my understanding is that for people with AP, that
kind of difference makes no difference! (excepting how much you can memorize
before having to commit it to paper)

[snip]

> I don't like to get stuck on naming things, but there is certainly a
> difference between my ability and most musicians I have met. I do
> "nail it" a sizeable majority of the time, and virtually every time
> when I've been near my instrument in the last day or so. I have heard
> that there are people whose abilities are more precise, or perhaps
> more stable.
>

And that would seem to mean that that article is not as thorough as it could
be (I assumed as much). It seems to me you do have a varied type of what
they describe - that binary nomenclature is very likely too limited.

[snip]
>
> I "hear" named notes in my head. That enables me to sing them. I
> suppose that I'm comparing that mental "image" of the sound with the
> actual sound when I recognize a key.

It's funny that you say "hear" and mental image - it's like you really can't
describe what's going on. I think that's what frustrates the non AP people
so much. We're like, so how do you do it, and everyon answers, we just
"hear" it. We're all like, darn it. But I know exactly what you mean. When
I'm tuning an A string from a non reference point on a guitar, when it gets
right it just "locks-in" for me. I can't explain it any other way.

[snip]
> Well, it's not exactly a scholarly journal, after all. As I was
> reading that article I found many things that don't match my own
> experience.

Agreed. I'll have to do more research on it over time.

[snip]
>>Well I hear tones in all sorts of "other" sounds too.
>
> Sure, but I frequently hear them as NAMED pitches. I suspect that when
> they are a little off (that would be always) I may unconsciously
> "reset" my pitch sense a little.

Ahh, so you know what notes they are. Let me ask you this. If you hear some
hum and you recognize it a A, then the next day you hear it, and it's
different, and it's a Bb, you've got it. But what if it's in-between - do
you know it's between an A and Bb, or can you not "hear" that it's between
those two named pitches (and by extension, it is as incalculable to you as a
note that was between C and Db?) - what happens as a guitar player slowly
bends a note? Does it go "in and out" of known territory?

[snip]>
> Do you associate what you hear in your head with specific notes?

Depends. Sometimes, something "feels" like X key (if I think about it for a
minute) or X note. I can tell keys on guitar using aural clues such as open
stings, overall sound of a chord (like I can tell if it's a G barre chord,
or an open position chord) - but I think I'm using a lot of "non-note"
information for that - timbre tells me what fret it's likely to be on,
experience tells me that it's likely to be a common voicing, rather than a
less common one, and so on (so they're guesses based on odds for me). To
make an analogy with another instrument, if it was violin, I can tell you
when the open E is played, and guess at the open G, but that's about it. So
I'm so acquanted with the sound of the guitar, I can do many things that
look like AP on it, but it's instrument specific (largely) and even then I
can't just identify a given note with no reference (I'd get it about 50% of
the time I'd bet)

>I do.

Hate you again :-)

> On top of that I can sort of "feel" my fingers playing the notes as
> well, even though I'm not actually moving them very much. I do feel
> little twitches in the muscles though, as if I'm moving the proper
> fingers a tiny amount.

Ok, now you're getting into freaky territory. Of course that's probably just
been learned in conjunction with the AP skill and becoem intertwined with it
(???)


[snip]
>
> I think so too. But this goes back to what I said wrote previously: We
> don't really know what's going on in another musician's head, how they
> do it and how they THINK they do it, which may not be exactly the
> same.

Exactly.

>
> I do seem to be better at it than most people though, even including
> some much better musicians. This used to really surprise me. As a lad
> I assumed that the ability to play by ear was more or less
> proportional to the musician's overall skill.

I've met concert level classical musician's whose aural skills sucked. In
fact, they know nothing about nothing as far as music was concerned, except
that they were virtuosi - I think they concentrated so hard for so many
years on practicing that they end up weeding out any uneccessary skills or
information. But it also depends on the style - Jazz players obviously have
a different need for their ear than classical players, but it is interesting
that the two are not necessarily related.

>
> Using me as a sample of one, we have a musician whose absolute pitch
> is at least very good and whose ability to play by ear is unusually
> good [ you'll just have to take my word for it :) ]. Are those two
> facts related, or just coincidence? I don't know.

My guess is that they're probably not related, but you've learned to take
two separate skills and make use of them together (which to me makes a far
more formidable skill than either alone). My guess anyway :-)

>
> Sure. But in the pop and rock world I rarely come across a song I
> can't play just from memory. The last thing I remember actually
> sitting down with the record for was the intro to "Josie" (Steely
> Dan). The rest of the song I could just hear, but the intro is a
> little odd.

That sounds like me, but I feel that in my case it's got to do with
familiarity.

On the rare occasions when my band has a rehearsal I
> sometimes just listen to the 4 or 5 tunes on the way over in the car.

I do that all the time, and then figure it out real quick when I strap on
the guitar. But they're not Steely Dan tunes - they're much simpler "three
chord" rock (so when a vi comes up, it's even more easy to figure out!).
Obviously if it's a 12 bar, that eliminates a little guesswork for me. I
figured out the solo to a Shania Twain song after one listening - but it was
full of what I consider to be very "typical" guitar licks, so it again was a
questions of "what's it most likley to be" rather than what it actually is
(the chord progression was simply I IV V BTW).

>
>
>>Can you play a reasonable rendition of a Bach Fugue at the
>>keyboard? Again, I conclude from the information I have that the paragraph
>>above (and my similar experiences) make yours more in the RP realm.
>
> I think that many Bach Fugues would be beyond my finger skills and
> outside my zone of familiarity. But would I hear the individual lines
> and be able to reproduce short stretches as I could remember them
> (with one hand)? Probably so. When I hear music, I hear the notes, the
> chords and the individual lines. Very complex dissonant harmonies can
> be more difficult.

Interesting. See, I think a far more valuable skill that all musicians
should cultivate is "musical memory" - how much they can remember and
reproduce at one listening. It doesn't do you a lot of good if you can name
every note, but can't remember the order in which they were played (and
duration, etc.)! I can see where complex harmonies could cause a problem
because you probably start getting other tones created in there, which makes
portions of the sound "invisible" (???)

[snip]

> I don't know one way or the other, but I can remember NOT being able
> to recognize keys when I was maybe twelve or so. Of course, that was
> when I was first trying to play by ear. In the next few years I
> somehow learned. If the ability is inborn then maybe it was just a
> matter of familiarizing myself with our system of notes.

And maybe that's why there's discrepancies with other tuning systems. Maybe
one would have to "unlearn" 12tet, and learn some Hindu scale, but those
with AP could do it, and those without still can't. So it might not be
whether AP can be learned or not, but more a question of whether it can be
"unlocked" in those people that are born with
it??????????????????????????????????????????

Oh well, lucky you. I guess I'll get back to working on my ear now :-)

Steve


.

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