Absolute Pitch Education

[larrya]

I’d like to talk about your analogy between color and sound. I’m red green color blind, and at the same time have relative pitch or perfect pitch, or whatever label we want to attach to the ability.

After studying some art (I work as a graphic designer) I’ve become amused at the way people LABEL color. We have names for colors such as mauve, lavender etc which really only have meaning to the people who learned them as children. In general men seem to be not as in tune with those names as women, perhaps because they didn’t pay as much attention to them when they were younger. The point I’m making is that those names have always been sort of meaningless to me. I learned color in a more scientific way. Each one of those named colors is made up of combinations of different wavelengths that we see as color. Orange is a combination of what we see as reflected red and yellow mixed together. But that’s not completely it either, there can be a component of gray in it, or blue green that is it’s opposite on the color wheel that reduces the intensity of the orange. So there are hundreds of different possible oranges, depending on how sensitive we are to seeing them. They can be measured, and we can train ourselves to look more closely, study the relationships of one color to another and what colors the combinations produce. Even someone who is color blind like me can improve their understanding of color and their ability to see it to a point. I can compensate for what I know are my deficiencies. I can see pure greens, but the more gray or another color is added to the green, the more it just looks gray or the other color to me. But by understanding how other opposites on the Munsell color wheel work together I can mimic those relationships when using green, even if I can’t always see them. It’s almost like I grok it in the dark. I realize that in my case there is a genetic component that gets in the way of my seeing color accurately, but I don’t believe that anyone’s perception of color is absolute, or that any 2 people see color exactly the same or more importantly according to some scientific standard. If our color vision is entirely dependent on the rods and cones on the retina of the eye then I don’t see how any 2 people can have exactly the same make up of rods and cones and therefore see color exactly the same.

I’ve learned pitch playing the horn. When I hear a pitch I immediately feel it as if I were playing it on the horn. I feel it in my bones. It’s more than just hearing it. I remember the feel of the vibrations on my lips. I hear the sound in my ears and associate different amounts tension/relaxation and sensations in different muscles necessary for producing that pitch on the horn. People make fun of me sometimes when I sing because I’m fingering the notes as if I were playing them on the horn, without realizing it. I grok pitch. Of course I couldn’t possibly have perfect pitch because what I hear as middle C is a 4th lower than an ACTUAL middle C, since the horn is pitched in the key of F. (I’m being sarcastic). Whether or not I know what the name of the actual concert pitch is, I have my own label for it based in the key of F, which was entirely learned from my experience learning to play the horn. I haven’t really played now in about 15 years, but I sing 5 or 6 days a week. When I began singing I had to pretend I was playing C horn, so I was transposing everything I saw down a 4th. That way I wouldn’t get confused by the fact that what I was hearing was not what I was seeing on the page of music. After exclusively singing for 15 years my reference has now shifted to concert pitch, or at least the transposition in my mind happens so fast I don’t notice it anymore. Isn’t it possible that different people with perfect pitch accomplish that trick in different ways? While the result of being able to identify or feel pitches may be the same, there must be different tricks based on each persons experiences that people learn that they use to accomplish it. Like my method of using color, it could be argued that some techniques are just intellectual crutches. If perfect pitch is genetic then using these crutches is sort of cheating, yet when the end result is the same what’s the difference? We’re all born with equipment that allows us to discriminate pitch, it’s probably some survival thing. But the skills that musicians develop with that equipment must come from the environment. Based on everyone’s education and experience we all must have slightly or even drastically different sensations and memories of sensations etc. related to pitches that we hear that allow us to accomplish certain things with them. How else can peoples’ abilities be so varied? Some people have the ability to identify one single note with complete accuracy. Another might NOT be able to do that, but can look at an entire orchestral score and basically hear it in their head or play it on the piano. If perfect pitch is ONLY about identifying single pitches with some internal measuring instrument, then it’s of no use to any one but a piano tuner. I just don’t think perfect pitch is any ONE single ability or skill, or that it is a completely genetic trait. It must be a complex set of sensations and developed skills that is a little different in everyone.

I’m in the process of trying to teach my girlfriend, who has very little experience with western music, to sing. She has a phobia about making music with her voice in front of other people. It’s very perplexing to me, because I hear her singing Farsi songs (she grew up in Iran) to herself and with her family and she has no problem making lovely sounds. But the minute I try to help her match a pitch or focus her attention on the sounds she’s making, she’s lost. It’s as if she doesn’t understand the concept of pitch, even though she has a very clever ear and can mimic a tune she’s heard just one time almost perfectly, when she’s not thinking about it. She’s desperately trying to find some kind of concrete template that she can use that will allow her to look at a piece of music and sing it. I keep telling her that she doesn’t need to learn to read music yet. She didn’t learn to talk in two languages from reading, it happened the other way around. And she didn’t learn to conceptualize language after she learned to talk, she started learning to say words when she had something she wanted to say? Am I right.

Thanks for letting me ramble.

[LouMan5]

I've seen a program (don't recall where) where you can sing into a mic and it will show the pitch on a musical scale. That should be a good feedback system for her to understand. Then she can try to control the pitch on a single note, raise to the next one, etc. Then show her a simple melody, and get her to match it with the program.