Absolute Pitch Education

[TS]

[aruffo]

[boes]

[aruffo]

[etaxier]

I'm just responding to the 5%C...90%E question that Chris just posed. To me, the 5% C / 90% E sounded analogous to the "not quite C not quite G" example. In other words, it sounded like a C-E interval.

I think most people would at least hear the C as a root and the E as a "high loud background to the C."

5% isn't as low as you might think. Check out this article's bassoon graph which clearly shows that for some instruments, "the fundamental frequency produces far less than 10% of the total power" of a given note.

In further regards to the 5% C example, I think our minds are designed to seek out and construct notes that are closer to speech frequencies. E's pretty high up there in comparison, which is why I believe most people will automatically treat it as background to the C.

[aruffo]

Ooh! Great link. Thanks f'r that.

[TS]

From the May 29, 2007 post:

[petew83]

Chris I love the new sound color wheel stuff. it's amazing how visual and sound color are turning out to have so many similarities.

[aruffo]

[TS]

I don't really understand how the brain works well enough to say anything about that subject. I used the word "brain", but I really meant the unconscious mind, or whatever it is that processes sound.

What I meant was to propose a model for manipulating a tone while keeping the chroma of the tone constant, without really going into what happens in the brain. I think that chroma is a collection of harmonic frequencies, and any single frequency on its own doesn't matter, and can be removed, even the fundamental, and for example a tone with G-chroma doesn't need to actually have any harmonics that are the G-frequency, just as long as there are enough other frequencies present that fit the collection, which is a bit like the idea of primary pitches.

Initially you proposed that combining C, G and E pitches results in a tone that is still a C. Then you proposed that making the E louder than the other pitches would make the tone sound more like an E than a C, but to me it still sounded like a C, even though the C was almost nonexistent. What I'm saying is that you could remove the C altogether, and the tone would still sound like a C, because the G and E make it a C, so they are sort of like the primary pitches that together make another pitch. The loudness of the component pitches doesn't have much to do with it, more important are the positions of the component pitches in the spectrum. If the component pitches coincide with the overtones of the C, then they create a sensation of C-chroma, even when the C isn't there.

[petew83]

'G and E make it a C'

I've read about this before. Crappy radios can't get the low notes but we still hear them because of this phenomenon. I guess there really is a way to mix 2 other pitches to get a third pitch. It really helps when u play the fundamental first, then play the major 6th above alone. Then u sense the C underneath even if you're not playing it, and the C feels like 'king'

[aruffo]