Re: OT: high-precision tuner app

[N. Andrew Walsh]

On Thu, May 26, 2016 at 9:34 AM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> "Perfect pitch" is a sham.  [...]

It seems that you don't know the facts very well.  Absolute pitch is
*not* related to being a `better' musician.  In fact, it's not even
related to music.  Have a look at the Wikipedia article; it gives a
nice overview.

I think you might have misunderstood what I was saying. I *absolutely* do not think having absolute pitch makes you a better musician, and I specifically criticized those who do (in my case, the committees reviewing composers' scores who think having absolute pitch makes them some kind of musical savant). I specifically said that the undue attention paid to it is detrimental to creative music-making. 

 

In general, I consider having an absolute pitch a burden.  My life
would be *much* easier if I hadn't to do transposition all the time.

I said this as well: it's a direct hindrance to being able to being able to hear musical relationships the moment the heard material deviates from what you've been habituated with.

 

> 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.

Pfft.  Maybe this is an US thing.  Here in Austria and Germany noone
takes care of that.

I've been working and teaching at a music school in Germany for eight years. I beg to disagree. It was usually the first question they asked in the ear-training seminars, and the reaction I describe for composition seminars occurred just as often. But I do agree that they take it even more seriously in the US. 

 

> 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.

No, it's not.  Please look up the facts.

From that wikipedia article you suggested I read: 

Influence by music experience

Absolute pitch sense appears to be influenced by cultural exposure to music, especially in the familiarization of the equal-tempered C-major scale. Most of the absolute listeners that were tested in this respect identified the C-major tones more reliably and, except for B, more quickly than the five "black key" tones, which corresponds to the higher prevalence of these tones in ordinary musical experience. One study of Dutch non-musicians also demonstrated a bias toward using C-major tones in ordinary speech, especially on syllables related to emphasis.

and later:

Nature vs. nurture

Absolute pitch might be achievable by any human being during a critical period of auditory development, after which period cognitive strategies favor global and relational processing. Proponents of the critical-period theory agree that the presence of absolute pitch ability is dependent on learning, but there is disagreement about whether training causes absolute skills to occur or lack of training causes absolute perception to be overwhelmed and obliterated by relative perception of musical intervals.

I've been working with and writing music in non-standard tunings for … 15 years. I've worked with a lot of musicians in that time, both in Germany and in the US. I can tell you from experience, and from having talked about it with acousticians and musical-cognition specialists (a number of them from the Fraunhofer Institut), that I'm pretty confident that when I say that absolute pitch is largely the result of internalizing an equal-tempered scale (and that usually within a narrow range of the standard concert pitch, be it 440 or 443 or whatever) learned through early musical training, and that a lot of musicians, composers, theorists, etc. nevertheless treat it as if it's some key to musical talent., and that this does more harm to music-making than good, I have a reasonably solid basis for asserting it to be the case. 

Cheers,

A