Pitch Perfect

[Eben]

No, not the movie.

But.... how do we listen to music. When I was in standard 6 (about a 100 years ago), living in the Karoo, we visited a friend of my dad on his sheep farm. In their lounge they had a baby grand Steinway (they were not struggling), long story short, his wife demonstrated that their daughter (who was in my class) could name any note her mother played on the piano without looking. I was fascinated. She had ?Absolute Pitch (AP)? or was Pitch Perfect (PP). This changed the way I listen to music completely.

Any of you PP? Statistically your chances are about 1:10 000. There is no record of any adult learning to do this. You either can or can?t do it.
This is the test: (from our friend, Wikipedia)

?Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities, achieved without a reference tone:
? Identify by name individual pitches (e.g. A, B, C♯) played on various instruments.
? Name the key of a given piece of tonal music.
? Reproduce a piece of tonal music in the correct key days after hearing it.
? Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass.
? Accurately sing a named pitch.
? Name the pitches of common everyday sounds such as car horns and alarms.?

It is not about remembering a piece of music, it is recalling or naming the pitch. People that have this do not enjoy music more or are even better musicians at all, it is just a party trick.

? Relative Pitch (RP) is the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note by comparing it to a reference note.?

So, RP is basically, given a key or a note, you can identify any other note. Often these people can play a song with no direction or sheet music on a piano. One would think that all musicians should have AP but this is not the case. (I am sure we can all name some)

A singer that takes real care about intonation and detail sounds real special.

Karen Carpenter
Katie Melua
Liz Fraser (Cocteau Twins). Listen to her singing this song absolutely flawless, even if you dont like the song or what she has done to it.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFWKJ2FUiAQ  (thanks JonnyP)

In classical music everything needs to be perfect, no room for sloppiness.

I will give some examples later.

 

[Family_Dog]

 

[legro]

 

[Steerpike]

 

[Kemosabe]

 

[Scubadude]

 

[croak]

 

[ron g]

 

[Timber_MG]

 

[chipwelder]

 

[Kemosabe]

 

[Eben]

 

[chipwelder]

 

[adie]

 

[Kemosabe]

 

[Eben]

 

[Nico V]

 

[adie]

 

[Eben]

 

[adie]