https://www.facebook.com/shaneleemus...7929184553110/
Some of you who are musicians may also be able to do this...
https://www.facebook.com/shaneleemus...7929184553110/
Some of you who are musicians may also be able to do this...
I can only imagine. I cannot distinguish an A from a B, but enough musicians (especially singers) miss the notes they're going for, that it's often painful to listen.Dan Armstrong I too have this "gift". You can't learn or be taught it. It's just there. Can be a blessing, but also a curse - especially when listening to music that's out of tune!
Of course you can distinguish A from B (otherwise you'd have little or no interest in music) you just can't name them. This kid has the rare gift of perfect pitch. For anyone having that innate ability what he did is easy. Still amazes me though.
Even with perfect pitch, its difficult to tell those chords.
Exactly. It's a "gift" and you have to be born with it. Out of my many fellow musician friends, I know about 3 or 4 who have that gift. One of those guys... well you could play him a fast flurry of an atonal series of notes and he can play it right back to you verbatim like he was a tape recorder. He can also randomly play practically every tune he's ever heard in his life and tell you who wrote it and what year it was written. In my experience, perfect pitch often goes hand in hand with perfect memory retention.Originally Posted by Buddhabreath
There is a thing called "relative pitch" that can be learned. All great improvisers have it. In a nutshell, it means that if you're played one pitch and told what it is, you can identify whatever pitch follows it. Same with chords. I've studied and taught that kind of ear training and my relative pitch is pretty good. But I couldn't have named the notes in those "cluster chords" that guy played for the kid if my life depended on it.
Only if you can't remember what you just heard - kind of ties into No Pride's point when he says " In my experience, perfect pitch often goes hand in hand with perfect memory retention." interesting. Perhaps perfect pitch and short-term memory abilities are related phenomena in the brain.
Anyway we all know progressive music fans are WAY above average in intelligence!
Back in the day, the dial tone on our old pulse phones in the UK was a B.
I had a 10 year old student last year who had perfect pitch.
I asked him what he "saw " when I tested him with notes /chords, and he told me that the sharps and flats were determined by the natural tones.
In other words if I played a C# , then he would hear C natural but a little higher.
Fantastic gift that I wish I had, although I still work on my relative pitch in the car with a free iphone app called Ear Trainer .
no tunes, no dynamics, no nosebone
Never heard of that app...will have to check it out. Thx NB.
...a somewhat related story....While I was attending GIT, one of my classmates spent the entire year at school constantly striking an "A"=440 tuning fork and placing it up to his temple. When asked about this strange act, he stated that he was trying to have his brain "memorize" what an "A" sounded like. Not sure if that worked out for him in the long-run.
All I have to do is think of Les Bres in Am by the Allman Brothers and my A is spot on!
When I was at Berklee ,one of my teachers told me to read a book aloud using one pitch.
So I read Stephen King's Pet Semetary in "C".
no tunes, no dynamics, no nosebone
My sense of pitch, especially when singing, is quite unreliable. But since I've started (and struggled) to play guitar, something is happening. The other day I was thinking about a popular piece of theme music from a movie and when I sat down on the guitar to try to find the right opening note I thought "gotta be a D". I started searching for guitar tabs and sure enough, it's a D. That was a little frightening.
I have known a few people with perfect pitch. My cousin, who is the most musical in a very musical family, has a fantastic ear. He makes me fucking sick.
I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means 'put down.'- Bob Newhart
Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly, but I'm thinking there was a recent segment on NPR about perfect pitch and they were relating it to languages where pitch is important. They found people speaking Chinese (for example) would use the exact same pitch when speaking certain syllables even when the conversation was recorded weeks apart. This points to a learned ability and I think they found this also mapped over to musical ability. Perfect pitch is more somewhat common in countries with pitch-centric (sorry, forgot the correct term) languages.
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For the longest time, in my case it's been Tie Your Mother Down.
"A new study concludes that young musicians who speak Mandarin Chinese can learn to identify isolated musical notes much better than English speakers can. Fewer than one American in 10,000 has absolute pitch, which means they can identify or produce a note without reference to any other note. Also called perfect pitch, this skill requires distinguishing sounds that differ by just 6 percent in frequency. "
http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...nal-languages/
When I used to play, and try to figure out covers by ear, I often felt like I had whatever the opposite of perfect pitch would be. I just never had a talent for it.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
I betcha that's because in Mandarin Chinese the same exact word can have completely different meanings depending on the intonation. Note that intonation can refer to accuracy of pitch in music or to tone or inflection in language. There you have it - practice makes perfect.
Who wrote Swanee River?
Can he carve animals he's never seen before? That ability freaks me out, although actually I don't believe it's real.
I went to college with a music major (bassoon) who had both a photographic memory and perfect pitch. The guy never, ever had to study all that much - nor did he ever need sheet music other than one single time.
The guy was amazing - you could ask him a question like: Psych 201 book, page 152, second column, 4th paragraph down, second sentence, 3rd word . . . he would look at you for a second - - - then say "intellect" - - - which was correct. He was constantly on the dean's list and played the bassoon like an angel. Flip side is that he was totally fucking insane: he got a new Technics turntable and a Stetson cowboy hat for Christmas one year, and we celebrated our return to school after winter break. He wore absolutely no clothes at the party except his hat - then he suddenly opened the turntable dust cover and pissed on the record, as it was playing - followed by throwing his new hat into the (roaring) fireplace and barking like a dog. He was constantly arrested for fist fights in the downtown bars - bit girls in the ass as they were dancing, arrested for shoplifting almost monthly - - - you name it. Now he's "born again" and teaches music up in NH somewhere after a long stint with symphony orchestras around the country.
I guess you could call him an unbalanced savant.
I used to work with a guy who was a little like that, Whorg.
He was a huge Philadelphia Flyers fan, and we used to shoot dates at him and he could tell us the score of the game and little tidbits about it. "Flyers won, 5-2, and Reggie Leach had a hat trick." And this goes back their entire history, to 1967. Totally crazy. But he wasn't the most social guy. We always assumed that he was borderline Autistic/Asperger's.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Yup - it was really something. But - he was really a good guy: give you the shirt off his back . . . always went to EVERY one of our gigs & shows without fail, amazing cook too (especially for a college guy).
I remember one time in college, bars were closing downtown and it was about 20 degrees below zero outside . . . he was really drunk and had passed out in a booth for an hour . . . the bartenders woke him up to leave the establishment, so he gave me a call. He didn't know where he was . . . so I asked him to run outside the bar and look at the street signs, or bar name . . . he let the phone drop (pay phone) and came back in about 3 minutes - - - said he was at the corner of "Walk" and "Don't Walk". I fucking kid you not - -
But honestly - to listen to this guy play the bassoon was like sitting in front of an angel or something - - - he really had a strong connection with that instrument (and music in general) - he'd just be staring ahead, reading the music in his mind.
I can tell when a tune is in E because it's the lowest note I can sing. And with relative pitch, I can identify any other key by it's intervallic relation to E. But that's not perfect pitch because I have to think about it and it can take a couple of seconds. With perfect pitch, you just know immediately.
All I have to do is think of Les Bres in Am by the Allman Brothers and my A is spot on!
Well I could Google that. But the guy I was talking about would be able to tell you and tell you what year it was written in. He had a steady solo piano gig at The Four Seasons hotel in Chicago for several years and he would invite people to try and stump him with songs. One time, somebody requested a song that was never recorded; it was only ever heard on an episode from "The Odd Couple" TV series. And the guy knew it.I was at a party once and he played a Jimi Hendrix medley on piano. He knew all of Jimi's solos note for note and would trill two notes for a vibrato.
Great story! "Unbalanced savant" sounds accurate.
Wow. That is insane.Well I could Google that. But the guy I was talking about would be able to tell you and tell you what year it was written in. He had a steady solo piano gig at The Four Seasons hotel in Chicago for several years and he would invite people to try and stump him with songs. One time, somebody requested a song that was never recorded; it was only ever heard on an episode from "The Odd Couple" TV series. And the guy knew it.
Music isn't about chops, or even about talent - it's about sound and the way that sound communicates to people. Mike Keneally
Ok dude, I seriously just spit out some major coffee reading THAT nugget....
Great story!
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