November 09, 2004

• It may be true, but us Chinese are still mostly crap singers.
• Interesting. As a music student in Vancouver, I can say that most of the perfect pitch students I know are Asian. I often thought that some of that might be due to the cultural import many Chinese families seem to put on musical skill--thanks for the new insight! Perfect Pitch can be a pain for students in ear tests as most profs will transpose music in order to level the playing field...and thus "PP" students have to ignore their instinct.
• I seem to recall a NYT article about perfect pitch from a while back. One of the observations in that article was the increased likelihood of Asians possessing perfect pitch. A genetic component was positied, but this seems like a much more likely explanation. Perfect pitch comes in degrees, in my experience. I have it to some extent... I can tell you what key a piece of music is in, can identify notes by ear, but if someone were to lay their hands indisriminately on a piano and play random tone clusters there's no way I'd identify all of the tones. I've only known two people who could perform that feat, and they were both Asian. One was Mandarin Chinese, and the other was Filipino (but grew up in America, and IIRC Tagalog isn't a tonal language anyway). So that anecdotal evidence doesn't quell the "genetics vs. linguistics" debate for me.
• Somehow I suspect if one can be taught to speak a tone language, one can learn to have perfect pitch. Its not like its impossible to learn Hmong anyway, and that has 8 tones.
• I've often thought about buying this fine product, but this guy sort of convinced me to save my money.
• The guy in Wolof's second link describes the kind of perfect pitch-ish skill I have (although I think the fact that he relies on muscle memory via his voice rather than his musical memory means that he probably is not all that accurate). For me, it's more like a really good facility for audiation (as described by prominent music education researcher Dr. Edwin Gordon) than anything... I can "replay" music very accurately in my head, which provides the pitch reference. It's probably closer to perfect pitch than what "bass player guy" has in that it's a cognitive activity, but it's nowhere near as discriminating as the skill possessed by the friends I mentioned upthread. I've met people that have developed close to perfect pitch on their own instruments, but can't duplicate it when listening to other instruments. For those folks a specific timbre is needed for recognition, and muscle memory may be involved as well. When trying to identify a pitch by ear, a trumpet player I knew in college would unconsciously play "air trumpet" and mime holding down the valve combination for said note. I do think audiation can be learned. Most people probably have some inherent facility for it, given that most folks get songs "stuck in their head." It seems to me that good audiation is just the ability to control that. A great book about the cognitive and physical processes involved in listening to and playing music is Music, The Brain and Ecstasy by Robert Jourdain. It's written in such a way as to be accessible by both musicians and non-musicians, and Jourdain's explanations of the neurology involved are wonderful.
• Bryan's an arse-kickingly great bass player, BTW. He was in Mike Keneally's band.
• Regarding the occurrence of perfect pitch, what I can't get is how you all know over 10,000 people.
• *checks out website* Also has been working with Steve Vai and put out his first solo record. Way to go, Brine!
• what I can't get is how you all know over 10,000 people. The_bone drives a choir, so he's definitely heard a buttload of people sing, and it's pretty apparent when people have it and when they don't. Only played with one guy myself who was perfectly pitch-enabled, and musically speaking this was of tremendous advantage to him. Phenomenal player, lives in London teaching guitar in between tours with Billy Cobham, Randy Brecker, guys like that. Hi, Carl!
• Most people have a sense of "relative" pitch, i.e. the ability to hear relationships between tones and reproduce them. Again, this ability exists in degrees of refinement, but is more easily learned than absolute pitch and just about everyone can do it. The exception of course are people who are really and truly tone deaf, which is less common than you may think. I define "tone deaf" as someone who, when singing a familiar ditty like "Happy Birthday," can't even approximate the contour of the melody. If someone can make their voice go up and down at the right times... even if it's horribly awry... there's some measure of hope. In the book I mentioned above it's said that tone deafness is kind of like "musical dyslexia" and is distributed in the population similarly. It's been my experience that most people who say they are "tone deaf" have some combination of poor relative pitch, poor audiation skills and an unappealing voice, and are not absolutely hopeless. The amount of time it takes to develop those skills may be immense, though. what I can't get is how you all know over 10,000 people. :) Since perfect pitch shows up most often in the music world, it stands to reason that musicians will encounter it more often than most. But, like Bryan Beller form Wolof's link, I "wouldn