Posted on 11/16/2014 7:51:18 AM PST by CharlesOConnell
I knew a man with perfect pitch who was so handicapped by it, he couldn't play anything if it he was hearing the music sung in a different key.
I learned to sight-read while transposing on the fly into a different key. It used a certain neurological pathway; it got to be difficult to play in the written key—the customary neurological pathway was different, "too simple".
What is perfect pitch? Neuroscientist Diana Deutsch at UC San Diego found that people whose native language is tonal—Chinese—have a higher propensity to have perfect pitch. Also people with mixed-hand preference, the form of left-handedness that makes them write "scrunched-over", have abnormally high communication between brain hemispheres through the corpus callosum, the dividing membrane that's deliberately injured in lobotomy. People in non-literate societies have a much higher incidence of perfect pitch, as do children before kindergarten. It's an ability that's lost when undergoing the neurological transition to the world of spatial, technical object use.
What's it like having perfect pitch? The ususal "trick" is that, in music class, one geeky, teacher's pet "can tell you what key is being played on the piano". That's not the lifelong reality.
The reality is like Jason in The Giver, being able to see colors while everyone else in his society is color blind.
It can still be a disability: Listening to someone who sings flat, is like eating a piece of sour, unripe fruit. That poor person who wasted a life in thousands of hours of practice, only to run up against a glass ceiling of achievement, should have been evaluated while first being triaged in elementary school music class: "Hmm, Suzie, maybe you'd better take percussion."
Still, when transported into ecstasy listening to Jascha Heifets or Midori playing violin, it's worth the pain. Not so with Anne-Sophie Mutter or Yo-Yo Ma—they have other gifts, of phrasing, or dynamics, or expressiveness—but they very distinctly "do not have perfect pitch".
I saw a woman bassist last year at the Medford Jazz Jubilee and sh was the best bassist I’ve ever heard. She did a solo that sounded like an entire orchestra, hauntingly beautiful.
I forgot her name, but she had a CD out if I can find it.
Ed
My mother had perfect pitch. She could not only name any note that she heard, she could reproduce it with her voice.
She used her talent to directv he church choir, first the junior choir, then the senior choir. An off key note hurt her ears, drove her crazy, but she never said much unless it was me singing or playing the violin.
She couldn’t stand Frank Sinatra’s voice. She said he was always off key and she couldn’t stand falsetto. I’ll never forget her making fun of the old rock and rol song, Sherry. She would sound like she was holding her nose and sing, Sherrry, Sherry baby, and walk over to the radio and turn it off. We just waited until she left the room and turned it back on.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
(Ed, the banjo player!)
I like Adele and Carey Underwood.
Ed
Perfect pitch is the ability to identify a note that is heard. My mother’s piano teacher was fascinated by mother’s ability. The teacher would send my mother into another room and ask her to name a note. My mother got it right every time. Her real name is agent was her voice, though. It ran in the family, her cousin sang with the Metropolitan opera. He was a baritone.
Richard Bona is the best bassist I’ve ever seen live, I saw him with Metheny about ten years ago, he could give Jaco a run for his money. Plus he plays about twenty other instruments and can sing.
Almost unbelieveable, yet it happened.
Personally, I play the stereo. A man’s got to know his limitations.
As a left handed writer the scrunched over doesn't come from any "type" of lefthandness. I learned to write that way because writing normally with your left hand means you smear the pencil lead and/or ink with the edge of your hand if you're writing left to right. So to avoid it we needed to twist our hands up and around.
When your paper is turned to the 2 o’clock position, your hand doesn’t smudge anything because, just like right handed, the hand doesn’t touch the ink. I’m left handed and have never had the smudge problem nor do I have to scrunched or twist my hand over. Hubby is left handed, too and he doesn’t scrunch over either. People may go for years before realizing we’re lefties.
I don’t know why but for some reason I never did the paper turning thing....I think I had a hard time learning how to make my letters and turning the paper would have been a complicating factor. Nice to know though.....though I rarely if ever write long hand anymore.
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