Wednesday, May 18, 2005

Flak for Perfect Pitch

For some reason, I am getting a lot of flak for my perfect pitch post. It is not something that I was trying to brag about, and it certainly doesn't make me a crazy (well, OK, my obsessive behavior could be considered crazy). The way I explain it to people is to compare it to sight. People have perfect sight, in that they can identify the visible wavelength they see by naming the color. When you see red, you know it's red. Or green or blue. When I hear C, I know it's C, not some nameless tone.

Doug asked me today when I figured out that I had perfect pitch. I told him back when I was at summer music camp (Usdan) when I was about 10. The teacher would do relative pitch games, where she would play middle C and then another note and ask the student to name the note from the interval they heard. I thought this must be some kind of joke, why would you need to hear C first before you name the note? At that point, I assumed that everyone heard the same way I did, but then realized that I was the different one.

That was just one of the many things that I learned that I was able to do better than other people. It's hard to be a GENIUS (OK, you can flame me for that comment!!!). Just kidding ;P

1 comment :

Anonymous said...

Well, now that you put it that way it reminded me of an NPR news story recently of people that can hear in color.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4602748

Even though you don't know how a message map works, you are a genius.