Re: The limits of human hearing

On Sep 30, 6:00 pm, Jack Campin - bogus address
<bo...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Are you sure about people with absolute pitch in tonal language
environments?
Absolutely 100% positive
I noticed that each person and possibly in some communities in China
that the 1st tone or the high even tone seems to be uniform with the
people in conversation. i.e. when using the question tone to end a
sentence on the word ma, the pitch is often the same.

The research on links between tonal language and perfect pitch was done
on languages from West Africa, not China. It seems to be relevant that
rural West Africa is on the whole a rather quiet environment for kids to
grow up in.

You get interrogative question tone like you describe in Turkish too,
though it isn't otherwise a tonal language.

==== j a c k at c a m p i n . m e . u k === <http://www.campin.me.uk> ====
Jack Campin, 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland == mob 07800 739 557
CD-ROMs and free stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, and Mac logic fonts

Hmm, that's interesting. In China, there is a rather large segment of
the population (at lest in numbers if not per capita) that educate
their children in the Western music as well as in their own cultural
music. I am wondering how the information on the native speaking
children in West Africa being more adaptive to either Absolute or
Relative pitch is determined. It just doesn't seem like a great sample
to make conclusions unless I am way off to assume that Absolute or
Relative pitch is NOT a major factor in their lives. If it is not
something that is part of their life then the testers must teach them
to some extent and if so, then the sample is tainted by the
effectiveness of their teaching or at least by their explanations of
what they are supposed to do in the study.

I assumed that it would be in someplace like China where there is a
fairly large and very old musical culture that does share a lot with
our own culture. In fact, the way Chinese learn to read music is very
much like our solfeggio system in concept although it is a bit more
elaborate than ours as it can be used not only for a single line
melody, but can be used to write out the most intricate piano pieces
that are in our Western musical culture, and maybe that this would
have something to do with a culturally learned way of approaching
music that would also be a suggestion of the way they write music as
well as the tonal influences of their language.

I think that we have some of of that tonal inflection in our language
as well, although not as isolated and cut and dry as in Chinese and
maybe Turkish. We just seem to like to put more words into the
inflections when we ask the question whereas the Chinese one is
actually a specific word that makes the statement a question. Almost
like, "You want water, yes?" And then there is that Canadian "eh"!
LJS
.

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