Absolute+Pitch

The direct perception of tone chroma; alternatively, the ability to "remember what certain tone chromas sound like" (perception-talk vs. memory-talk).

[//Batya//] I have absolute pitch and am certain that I developed it from my Suzuki training. Suzuki has been around for awhile and I can probably assume that everyone in our class knows what it is all about- but assumptions are no good, especially in a science class, so in respect to that I will say a little bit about Suzuki first. (Disclaimer: I am no authority on this and am merely writing from my own knowlege and experience)

The Suzuki method is based on the concept that learning music is like learning to speak a language: anyone is able to do it, at any age. Young children learn to speak their native language(s) by ear; this is acheived in an environment that constantly reinforces the language and its meaning in the child's world. The same ideas are applied to music in the Suzuki method. You, the parent, are your child's teacher and are responsible for continuing their music studies outside of their private lessons. Learning music by ear is a major concept in this method- I was taught to play pieces without seeing the music at all and this is where the perfect pitch comes in...I can remember listening to recordings of pieces I wanted to play and knowing where the notes that I heard were located on my instrument. What I can't remember is when that step became so fast that I no longer thought of the sounds in terms of my instrument but instead as actual notes. But maybe the only reason I gained the ability to name pitches I hear is because I learned to play an instrument and fine tune those pitches that I have to "hit" on the violin. Maybe if I had instead been trained as a vocalist, the names of the pitches would not have been so important. Does that make any sense?

I think the term "by ear" is an interesting one because it sort of combines the practice of perception AND memory. Any comments?

[//Aaron//] "What I can't remember is when that step became so fast that I no longer thought of the sounds in terms of my instrument but instead as actual notes." Or did this (thinking of sounds in terms of your instrument) never actually stop happening? Did it simply become something that you are no longer aware of? There have been a lot of studies (citations forthcoming) that demonstrate subconscious fine motor activity in instrumentalists while they listen to music. I'm not sure if there are any directly relating this to absolute pitch, but it's good evidence for why we should resist the tempation to parse out our experience into different independent processes.

Also, I think that your experience as a string player might be closer to a vocalists experience than you think, in the sense that pitch is continuous (I have to "find" the note) in the same way that it is for a singer. This is very different from, say, a wind player's or a pianist's perspective, where pitch is quantized to the chromatic scale (every time I press //this// key, the instrument produces //that// note). Apparently even this is suspect, though. I got into an interesting argument with Karen Reynolds once, about the extent to which it is necessary for flute players to have an idea of the pitch they're going to play in order to play it. While I agreed with her that it is "musically" preferable (for reasons of intonation, phrasing, etc.) to be able to hear a sound before you play it, I was absolutely floored when she tried to convince me that if you didn't, you wouldn't physically be able to produce the sound (e.g. that if I didn't hear G before putting down my fingers and blowing, I literally would not be able to play a G)!