Vocalist.org archive


From:  "Susan Schneider" <smschneider@e...>
Date:  Wed Jun 28, 2000  2:13 pm
Subject:  Re: [vocalist-temporary] score reading and perfect pitch


HI, Fiona and List,

Your thoughts on the various degrees of absolute pitch are intriguing to me.
My mother, a pianist, has it, and she does all of the things you described,
not just one or another, and could do them all as a young child. I sing new
music almost exclusively, and naturally, I don't have it at all!!!!! I have
what is generally called good relative pitch. My 8-year-old son, who until
last year I thought couldn't carry a tune in a bucket, has been taking
violin lessons for 1 year now, and can now sing the pitches of his open
strings without hearing them first. He has no other "symptoms" of perfect
pitch yet, but that alone blows me away. Maybe a lesser degree of perfect
pitch can be referred to as good tonal memory, though that's the essence of
perfect pitch anyway.

Susan Schneider

-----Original Message-----
From: Fiona Chow <fionat@i...>



>Good post, John.
>
>Just to elaborate - there are different degrees of perfect pitch. Not sure
>how to explain it. There have also been studies conducted which seem to
>indicate that perfect pitch is partially genetic. anyhow, there are people
>with perfect pitch who simply hear the pitch of a note and recall it and
>can tell you what key something is in. There are others who will scream
if
>when singing in a choir, the choir goes off into a quarter-tone
>soemthing -or-other and is not really in a key. (I'm not one of these
thank
>goodness). There are others who can hear a huge chromatic-like cluster of
>notes and name them all on the spot without much thought. And there are
>some who can tell when a note is Ab and 3/4... very precise kind of pitch.
>So it does vary.
>
>Fiona
>
>
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