Re: Perfect Pitch Problem

[Tom Maglione <maglione>]

I want to throw in my two cents on this issue and present a pet theory of mine
about perfect pitch: I believe people learn perfect pitch by becoming attuned
to certain resonances in their own heads, such that by perceiving the proper
mixture of resonance, they find it easy to narrow it down to one of say 88
pitches from the piano keyboard. I myself do not have perfect pitch, but my
relative pitch is pretty good when kept in practice.

When studying ear training in music school, I met a woman from Japan with
perfect pitch which fascinated me. She would talk about how she and her
boyfriend were compatible because of the harmonic resonance of their teeth!
Remarks like that caused me to become skeptical, so I would test her by playing
up to ten non-harmonic random simultaneous keys on the piano which she would
proceed to quickly pick out, so her talent could not be denied. It was her
mention of the teeth that made me think about the resonance idea.

This concept of resonance may explain why perfect pitch'ers have a hard time
with slightly mistuned musical samples: their resonances do not line up with
the expected learned tunings! This could be studied somewhat due to regional
differences; I understood that certain orchestras used A444 for tuning instead
of A440, maybe one would expect someone with perfect pitch in one region
would be thrown off by the tuning in another region, although a change from
A440 to A444 is only about 16 cents which is small but not negligible.

One reference is from Backus "The Acoustical Foundations of Music", 2nd ed.
1977 W.W.Norton & Co, Inc. N.Y. Backus even refers to the learning of perfect
pitch as maybe being due to early "imprinting", and gives some other
references.

Buon Solfeggio,
Tom Maglione

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