I've mentioned in a previous Music Room diary that I grew up in a family of not very musical people. Sure, most of my cousins took piano lessons, but for them it was an obligation. For me, piano was a passion.
The real proof of my extended family's inability to get music would come out if any of the others tried singing. They were all, in a word, awful. What's worse, few of them had any idea of how poor their singing was. Listening to their off notes was physically painful for me.
Perfect Pitch, Relative Pitch, and Tone-deafness: that's today's theme - click onward for the variations.
My family, especially my parents, were convinced that I had perfect pitch, and that was why the family's crappy singing hurt my ears so much. But I didn't have perfect pitch at all. Perfect pitch is the ability to hear a note and immediately identify it without any other reference tones. I had relative pitch. I could reliably sing or internalize a Middle C, and I used that to find other notes.
There is some interesting research on perfect pitch, which is also called "absolute pitch." I looked into a study hosted at UCSF where one researcher was hoping to find some genetic markers for perfect pitch. The theory was, there is a much higher than normal incidence of perfect pitch among Ashkenazi (Eastern European) Jews. Having perfect pitch requires musical training before age 7 as well as the ability itself, and Jewish families seemed to have a higher preference for musical training for their children. So the researcher hoped to test a number of Bay Area Jewish families, find those with perfect pitch, and then hope to find the corresponding genes.
Perhaps the researchers should have chosen the Bay Area's Asian population instead. Absolute pitch is more commonly found among tonal language speakers such as Mandarin or Vietnamese.
The test can distinguish between absolute and relative pitch by having the listener hear two unrelated notes more than an octave apart. My husband took this test and found out that he doesn't have perfect pitch at all since he didn't pass it. Yet he could always name any piece's key signature or name any note you played.
Maybe he had passive perfect pitch.
Variations on a Theme
Passive perfect pitch, according to musicologist Richard Parncutt, is the ability to identify a single musical note or name the key of a piece of music. Some with the "passive" form can identify more than one note at time in a chord. The "active" form means the musician can sing any given note on cue.
Perfect pitch is not always a handy musicianship tool. Those with relative pitch find it easier to transpose pieces on the fly; to the musician with perfect pitch, a piece in another key sounds jarringly wrong. Some researchers even note the higher incidence of absolute pitch to autism, particularly in those with Williams Syndrome.
The UCSF Researchers also are looking out for those who experience pitch through other senses. They describe people who perceive notes as different colors, and notes that some forms of synesthesia are tied in with absolute pitch.
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Previous Music Room Diaries
#2 - 3/25/06 Music Lessons
#1 - 3/18/06 Jokes & Stories