View post (Is this perfect Pitch thing Real?)

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noticingthemistake
Crime Fighter
Joined: 08/04/02
Posts: 1,518
noticingthemistake
Crime Fighter
Joined: 08/04/02
Posts: 1,518
02/12/2004 4:20 pm
Well perfect pitch is a skill, your not born with it. That's a ridiculous notion. What people are born with is a better sense of hearing, like people who can see better than others. Sound identication tool is the ear, man. Nothing special is in the head. Someone with perfect pitch like me, knows what F# sounds like because it has a sort of texture to it. No magic tuners in the head, nothing like that. F# just has a different sound that makes it distinguishable from all the other notes, exactly like the color black is different from white. The quality never changes from octave to octave. Yes as you to the extremes it does get harder to tell, but F# still has that nasal bright 'weir' quality to it. Eb still has a softer rounder wahish sound. People with perfect pitch can tell the differences between these notes because they hear them so vividly, even for a split second. Like if you closed your eyes, and opened them for only a split second to see a color, you could name it before you closed your eyes again.SO once the sound wavs are vivid to your ear, as color wavs are vivid to the eye, it's easy to name a note that sounds only for a spilt second. The sound of a note doesn't change from the time it's first stuck, til it finally fades out. So with that said the first step is to train the ear to listen alittle closer and pay attention to these differences. That can be done, the ear can be improved. We know this because relative pitch, sight reading, all that can be learned. So it makes no sense that someone can't learn to hear the difference between the note Eb and F# or any note. Play them on your guitar! I quarantee you can even hear the difference between Eb and F#, so you do sense a difference. Once you can hear the differences it's not hard to go to the next step and name them. Then to know if a note is alittle flat or sharp, or just sing any note at will. People don't learn it because they don't pay attention to these differences, instead they try to use relative, "how high is Eb". That's impossible. Even the great music theorist of all shapes, Paul Hindemith, said it is possible to learn the skill of absolute pitch. And perfect pitch doesn't mean your perfect, I have it and I still make mistakes every now and then. I believe even Petrucci (I believe it was him) learned it to some degree by playing the note A over and over until he knew what A sounded like, so now he uses that to tune his guitar.
"My whole life is a dark room...ONE BIG DARK ROOM" - a.f.i.