[sdiy] Perception (was: Moog Waveform Variation)

[David Cornutt]

On Wednesday, December 31, 2003, at 03:18  PM, Scott Gravenhorst wrote:

>
> Great points.  I hadn't thought about that, but it explains many 
> things.  I've
> long known about outright tone deafness, but what you say brings to 
> mind that
> there is an infinity of *range* to things like that.  I'll consider my 
> "relative
> pitch" and excellent pitch memory talents as incredible gifts from now 
> on.
> Having them makes me wrongly assume that so do all or most other 
> people.
>

I've been reading a book on this lately, titled "Music, The Brain, and 
Ecstasy"
by Robert Jourdain.  It goes into intimate detail about the anatomy of 
the ear
and the neurology and psychology of hearing and music perception.  It's
not a quick read; you have to concentrate while you are reading it, but 
it
has been very interesting so far.  I'm about halfway through it.  As an 
example,
one of the topics discussed has been "perfect pitch" and pitch 
perception.
As Scott describes, it mentions pitch memory and how most people 
perceive
pitches in intervals; apparently true "absolute pitch", meaning the 
ability to
perceive pitch without any physical or mental reference, is quite rare.

On reading it, I thought about the fact that I carry around in my head 
a set
of "pitch standards".  Growing up when I did, and with the music I heard
then, these tend to consist mostly of intros to '70s rock songs.  For 
example,
I tune guitars and basses using a mental replay of the intro to Heart's
"Barracuda", of which the first note is E.  A lot of AC/DC stuff is in 
A, but
the intro to "For Those About to Rock" starts with a B note and plays a
descending scale in E-minor down to E.  Genesis' "The Musical Box"
starts with and mostly sticks with F#.  (It's remarkable how many great
progressive rock tunes are in F#, especially considering that that key
has been almost totally ignored in classical music.  And you tend to
hear things like Bb a lot in jazz, but hardly ever in rock.  My theory 
is
it's a combination of limitations of the instruments -- Bb anything is 
hard
to play on a guitar -- and the compromises of equal-tempered tuning.)
Pitches like C and G are harder for me to identify because I don't have
good mental standards for them.

[BTW: The "ecstasy" referred to in the book title is the mental kind, 
and
not the drug-induced kind.)