Re: Pitch learning

[robert gjerdingen <r-gjerdingen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear List members,

	I just returned from my son's high-school band concert. Hardly any  
frequency was used more than once, and the inharmonicity was awesome  
to behold. And yet there was a tonal system in play. If I were to  
grant Linda's premise, or Susan's (with whom I went to college--Hi  
Suzie!), then we might need to outlaw generalizations and  
categorizations of any kind. Vilayat Khan, whom I once engaged for a  
concert, was an amazing (if famously ill-tempered) musician. Yet I  
would venture that his mental representation of Sa and Pa (1 and 5 of  
the That or parent scale) hover  as close to a 3/2 frequency ratio as  
did Mozart's representation of Do and Sol. If that commonality across  
cultural and geographic space-time could be explained by their  
sharing similar auditory systems with similar frequency-processing  
neuro-physiologies, I don't see how the empirical facts of the matter  
make one musician the colonizer of the other, or makes the person who  
describes co-firings between neural pulse trains insensitive to  
performance nuance.

Just some late-night thoughts on a rainy spring day (the perfect  
moment for Raga Bahar),

Bob Gjerdingen
Northwestern