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7 comments:
wow. I got 2/12. bravo.
10/12 when I could use middle C.
It's so weird to consider the ramifications of pitch testing. It suggests (to me, from how I perceive the world around me) that your aural experience is similar to this visual example:
A man has red sunglasses on. He can tell that the bedsheets are blue (and they are), that his dog is white (and it is), and that my t-shirt is green (3 for 3), but he genuinely thinks they are these colors: he cannot discern that they are really all peculiar hues of red which he is seeing through glasses.
I have never been that man when it comes to sunglasses (I *always* see my world as yellowed or browned or reddened the moment I get distracted from whatever I'm focusing on, be it the road or a person or what have you) because I never forget my "internal color compass," so to speak. I don't forget, no matter how long I wear the shades, that there was such a visual experience as the one from before the sunglasses, where things were decidedly less yellowed or browned or reddened. I remember. I am aware that the world I am seeing is fake.
It's the same exact thing for me when people play famous songs in the wrong key. I can't stand it. And it doesn't matter how long the song plays: it drives me friggin' nuts. You play the song in the key it was made famous in, end of story! If the singer can't reach those notes, too bad! >( ^^; I swear, every time they play an oldie in a (usually) lower key so some nobody can sing it on American Idol, it drives me nuts. It's like I'm watching FOX with sunglasses, if that makes sense. Watching Fox with sunglasses while being aware, constantly that I've got sunglasses on and they're coloring everything.
But back to you. It seems to me that the person with excellent relative pitch but no significant degree of perfect pitch is like the man with the colored sunglasses: he can tell colors apart from one another, but he can't assess their (if you will) true, innate color. To him, white is white is white whether he's seeing it through red sunglasses, brown sunglasses, or clear non-prescription glasses. The only tipoff that he has is when the delta in color-POV changes, i.e. the moment I place red sunglasses on Jay, Jay can tell, "Oh boy! It suddenly got a whole lot redder!" Similarly, if I play a tone, a person with relative pitch may not be able to identify it all on its own -- "white?" he may say -- but as I remove the red sunglasses from his face, i.e. I let him listen to Middle C as a reference, he goes, "OHHHHHHHH! I get it! I had red sunglasses on! So the answer is pink! White + red = pink!" Or rather, "Oh, I get it! I was listening to an F! It's obvious now that I can hear the Middle C!"
But here's where I'm really, REALLY weird compared with the human populace. I currently exist in defiance of conventional definitions of pitch perception. How so?
#1. I clearly have some internal guidance of perfect pitch, as reflected by my performance.
#2. However! What the reader doesn't recognize is that I use handy little "cheats" or "pnemonics" (they are neither, you'll see why in a second) in order to orient myself. More on that in a sec.
The man with no pitch is like the man who cannot identify any of the stars in the sky no matter how much time you give him. He sees the stars -- he hears the notes -- and he appreciates their beauty, but he cannot tell you which is which.
The man with perfect pitch is like the man who can be blindfolded, turned about many times, unblindfolded and in that same instant made to answer, "What is the name of that star?" as his assistant points out a random star in the sky. "Antares," he answers. "Correct." "Polaris." "Correct." "Rigel." "Correct." He identifies every single star almost instantaneously -- faster than should be possible were we to assume he was using constellations and other heavenly landmarks as clues.
The person with relative pitch is like the man who can identify no stars in the sky for certain no matter how much time you give him, BUT! if you at least ground him in one direction (e.g. you tell him, "That star cluster you're looking at there is indeed Orion"), then he can name for you every single star in the sky. He just needs that first helpful push from you.
Me? I'm curious indeed. I have puzzled and frustrated many people at Caltech and Purdue. I have been told numerous times that I should not exist, i.e. that I am either mistaken or else a liar. I am certainly not a liar, and while I wish I were mistaken (PERFECT PITCH CLUB, PLEASE :D) I still have reservations given my poor performance in the realm compared with others. Here is how I would describe myself: I am like the man who cannot name a single star in the sky for you UNLESS he has had a chance to orient himself. Orient himself with respect to what, you ask? Why, Orion, of course! I could spot Orion for you almost any cloudless night in Indiana (as Orion is almost always visible in Indiana nighttime skies), but if you were to blindfold me, spin me around a bunch, unblindfold me, and bark into my ear, "What is that star?", thrusting out your index finger towards some random star in the sky, I'd be clueless. I would need you to let me wrest myself from your firm grip, scan the skies for Orion, find him, orient myself, and then return to the task at hand. "Antares," I could tell you. "Correct," you say. "You took longer than normal, but correct."
Well no shit I took longer than normal: BECAUSE I EMPLOYED RELATIVE PITCH PERCEPTION IN THE COMPANY OF MY PERFECT PITCH PERCEPTION OF THE NOTE 'G' !
For reasons I don't understand, I can identify a G immediately. D, almost always also immediately. E's my next best, but it's definitely 3rd place. I also have a zone of the spectrum that I have trouble with, big time, and that's G# through B. I always have to pause and think about it long and hard. I usually get them right, and if I don't they're usually the only ones I ever miss (e.g. I may say A# when it was really A), but still: there should be no such thing for a perfect pitch person, so says our society.
And yet our society also says that the closest thing to perfect pitch, relative pitch, is an ability which does not allow you to cheat the statistics of a 12-question exam. You have 12 different possible answers from which to guess and 12 times to do it. It is statistically improbable that I should get a 12/12 and a 10/12 (or a 22/24) if I were truly guessing with 1-in-12 odds each time. I tell the perfect pitcher how I did it -- "I have perfect G pitch, and I relative pitch myself away from it towards the destination" -- but he doesn't believe me.
In a worst case scenario, I'm right, he's wrong, and I have broken perfect pitch.
In a best case scenario, he's right, I'm wrong, and I'm still learning to associate notes with their names and G just happens to be one of the ones I picked up most easily.
To tell you some of my specific "tricks" (or whatever you want to call them), this is what I do.
1. I orient myself with respect to G. "SING US A SONG you're the piano man" I hum to myself. "SING US A SOOOOOOOONG" I draw it out. I establish my G. I've got it.
2. From there, I go "So ... La ... Ti ... Do!" I've made it to C.
3. From there, I hum the Jurassic Park song which plays when Hammond stares into his cane on the helicopter at the end of the film. Its first note is C. It helps me to confirm that I've made it to my destination safely.
4. I am now comfortably close to E, so I go ahead and "change tactics" by humming a new song, the "Hace Hace Mucho Tiempo" song from Pan's Labyrinth. It's a very distinctive song which I almost never ever hum wrong (and definitely not once I'm situated close to the E, as with C, which is solid thanks to the G!). So with this little melody, I get D and E nailed, too. G A B C D E. Last one left is F!
5. Returning to the C (and re-confirming its identity thanks to Pan and Billy Joel), I hum the bit "Here comes the bride, all dressed in white!" The word "bride" is my F that I seek. The word "white" is a full octave G above the G where we started. I hum it forcefully -- "WHIIIIIIIIIIITE" -- to confirm that it is indeed Mr. Joel's Piano Man G. We've nailed all 7 major notes.
6. As for identifying the half-notes, this is easier for some than for others, but my current tactic is simply to hum a cacophonous half-note upwards or downwards from a full note. Sort of like wailing, I guess. So like ... I'll wail up from C to what I think is C#, and then I'll wail down from D to what I think is D-flat, and I establish for myself what I believe to be the C#. Sort of like averaging things out. Same procedure for D# and F#.
7. G# is a bitch for me because it sounds to my brain an awful lot like G and like A. As in ...
C = Red
C# = Orange
D = Yellow
Everyone can see orange exists between red and yellow.
G = Blue
G# = Indigo
A = Violet
Not everyone can appreciate that indigo is a distinct color from blue and violet. (SELF INCLUDED! I see it when it's pointed out to me, sure, but I think it's nothing more than "blue-violet." I don't think it's a unique color entity the same way that orange and green are, that's for sure!)
And B-flat (A#) is even worse! Worst of all! Because I already have trouble with A and B (personally), and trying to tell apart the half-note in between them is just @_@ . But I try. It helps to think of songs that are in the key of F, as those songs make frequent use of B-flats for obvious reasons. So I may hum a sung like "The Lion Sleeps Tonight", intentionally humming it in the key of F, because it's a familiar song and I know exactly where I'll hit the B-flat.
To make a long story short, these "training wheels" (if you will) have seen me through with moderate success in college (where I was lazy and never really studied the notes even though I said I was going to) and in the last 48 hours they've EXPLODED into a highly-useful toolset which have seen me through two perfect pitch tests and well in excess of 100/100 correctly-guessed notes on my keyboard at home (with different instruments: piano, flute, violin, xylophone [THAT WAS A HARD ONE, as is percussion in general because of how brief the tone duration is]). The hardest one I've done is steel drums, since they have reverberating bodies that generate more than one unique tone (imho) and you have to learn to pick out the main tone from the minor tones.
So, try out similar things if you want. Your results may vary. I have had other friends who have tried this and been disappointed to discover that they still failed the perfect pitch test. Shrug. I dunno. I don't even know what I am, whether I'm a broken perfect pitcher, an X-Man relative pitcher, or some heretofore unobserved half-breed in between. ;p
You're a mutant! You need to call up Xavier and hone that skill. I always play songs in the wrong key. One of the facts that made me dismayed about a career as a composer is that I've never been able to understand the, apparently, set in stone emotional associations with key. I mean, I get minor = sad and major = happy, but the difference between C and G, one being more triumphant than the other, is personally negligible. I'll switch things up for the sake of variety, and certainly I get some kind of emotional change, but the Jurassic Park theme is the Jurassic Park theme to me, whether I play it in C (as I taught myself when I was very young) or whether I listen to it in...whatever key it is actually in.
No idea what key it's really in, but if you mean the one when they're in the chopper headed to the island and Hammond says "There it is! :)", the one that has all the brassy fanfare (I LOVE THAT SONG! :D), here's what I think the notes are. Keep in mind, I could be wrong. Take it with a grain of salt: C G! D A! A B C , C B G A!
So I'd guess it's C too, seeing as there are almost no black keys being pressed in there, and that can only happen in C -- ASSUMING the melody contains no minors and such, that is!
That's why I've NEVER understood how people could or why they would even BOTHER to define "playing in keys." It makes no fucking sense to my brain. There are only 12 unique notes in European music per octave, folks, so let's just name them ABCDEFGHIJKL, get it over with, and no longer need stupid keys. It's all made up in people's heads when they say "this song is in the key of F#." No, no it isn't. -_-; There is no such thing as "keys" in which to play. There are only notes which one does play.
To make my example obvious to the reader:
(1) play this for me, please, in the key of C? --> E F# G# A B C# D# E
(2) play this for me, please, in the key of E? --> E F G A B C D E
Guess what, folks? THEY'RE EXACTLY THE SAME. You invented a bogus concept ("keys in which we play music") such that you could justify your even more bogus bullshit strategy of "simplifying" (!?!?!?!?!?) sheet music by abbreviating sharps and flats to whole note letterings when the piece has a disproportionately large number of them.
In other words, some lazy fucker in 16th or 17th century Europe was getting tired (POOR BABY!) from writing # and flats all the time to the side of notes on the staff, and it got all cluttered (AWWWW! :(), so he beseeched his Royal Highness if it would be okay to use a trick that would save him a lot of needless inking?
Fuck him. An F# is an F# is an F# whether it's played in the key of C (noted as F#) or in the key of E (noted as F) or even if it's noted as a G-flat. IT'S THE SAME GODDAMN TONE.
Ryan's musical preference: ONE TONE [PER OCTAVE], ONE LETTER! That's all you need. ABCDEFGHIJKL for European music, and an additional seven notes (iirc) for Arab music. (I have a chart somewhere on my computer. Iirc there are seven quarter notes.)
Actually, here you go (just for fun :) ), check this out: see if you can tell that the tones played here are C, D, and E-flat# (or D##), i.e. the third tone is one-quarter step below a true E: rast.mid
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