Re: OT: high-precision tuner app

[Michael Hendry]

> On 26 May 2016, at 08:02, N. Andrew Walsh <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> Off topic, I know, but how do those gifted with perfect pitch cope with all 
> this?
> 
> Michael
> 
> You ready for some polemic?
> 
> "Perfect pitch" is a sham. It's a fraud perpetuated by people who think that 
> some of us are simply born musical geniuses, with an innate ability to sense 
> the inner nature of music directly, and from whom creative and musical 
> expressiveness naturally and effortlessly flows. I've sat in on seminars for 
> composition, ear-training, musicology, music history, you name it; if one of 
> the composers said he had perfect pitch, everybody's eyes lit up, and his 
> scores are immediately taken more seriously.
> 
> What it really means is this: you have internalized the 12-note equal 
> tempered scale -- usually through extensive piano lessons from an early age 
> -- to such a point that your auditory memory is deeply enough ingrained that 
> you can associate heard pitches with their usual note names. That's it. I've 
> also sat in on ear-training seminars where the played music was to be written 
> down transposed: the kids with perfect pitch floundered, because they 
> couldn't actually hear the intervals, and (for them) the note names were all 
> wrong. Likewise, play them examples in other tuning systems -- just 
> intonation, but also meantone, pythagorean, or similar -- and likewise, they 
> couldn't actually identify any of the notes. To them, it was all just "out of 
> tune." 
> 
> I *despise* the idea of perfect pitch, because to me it's a sort of musical 
> parlor trick that a distressingly high number of musicians have conflated 
> with some sort of in-born propensity for musical talent, and creative 
> music-making suffers greatly for it.
> 
> But my opinions on the matter are, as the kids are saying these days, "salty."
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> A

I seem to have struck an interesting chord, here!

Another phenomenon about which I have doubts involves people who claim that 
when they hear music in “sharp” keys (e.g. G, D, A, E) their experience is of 
brightness, while the flat keys make for a more sombre sound. I’ve even heard 
in a radio interview that this applies to F# and Gb (the one bright, the other 
dull).

Michael (lighting blue touch-paper and retiring to a safe distance).