Subject: Re: Perception as memory ... From: Diana Deutsch <ddeutsch@xxxxxxxx> Date: Mon, 24 Aug 2009 13:23:47 -0700 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>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