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Re: Perception as memory ...



Dear Kevin,

You can't be serious in saying that people with absolute pitch don't 'hear' chords. It's true that we can pick out the names of notes within a chord in addition to hearing it, but of course we perceive pitch relationships at the same time.

I quote from Arthur Rubenstein's autobiography: 'My young years', in which he describes an interview he had with the great Professor Joachim when he was about four years old:

'First he asked me to call out the notes of many tricky chords he struck on the piano, and then I had to prove my perfect ear in other ways. And finally, I remember, he made me play back the beautiful second theme of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony after he had hummed it. I had to find the right harmonies, and later transpose the tune into another tonality'.

Cheers,

Diana



Professor Diana Deutsch
Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Dr. #0109
La Jolla, CA 92093-0109, USA

858-453-1558 (tel)
858-453-4763 (fax)

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu
http://www.philomel.com


On Aug 24, 2009, at 7:05 AM, Kevin Austin wrote:

Thanks for the reply.

My experience is that perception is unique and individual -- statistical in nature.

The training example is interesting. What I didn't mention is that in three cases I 'tested', synesthetes, all three with absolute pitch and absolute color, they did not have the sensation of integration of the 10-note chord. They simple named the 10 notes in ascending order on hearing the sound for under a second. My experience with some others with absolute pitch has been that they don't "hear" chords. One person told me that she did tonal harmonic analysis not by hearing the chord and its function, but by hearing the notes and doing a rapid [reverse engineering] analysis. All three chose to be in the visual arts and keep music as a hobby.

One of the three prepared a 10 meter-long score of the first movement of the Bartok Music for Strings, Percussion and Celeste, in graph form, by ear. Each pitch class was represented by a different color (her color <-> pitch-class mapping). She reported difficulty in only one place, in the lead-up to the central (octave) unison, where certain inner voices appeared in the wrong octave. I think this had to do with the quality of the recording she was working from, and the (low) quality headphones she used. She did this all with relative ease and I realized (again) how dwarfish my own hearing is in such an environment.

At some point in this on-going discussion, there may be a topic on continuous and quantized time. Another time maybe.


Best

Kevin