I’d like to believe that musicians are so much sexier than
normal people. Add up the God-given talent of having a perfect pitch... legendarily awesome. Like
baby-you’re-a-firework awesome.
Nope, this is not the recently aired movie Pitch Perfect. It’s
perfect pitch we’re talking about. This is when a person knows how high or how
low a G would be without any instrument or tuner at hand. This is when you sing
the recently released Look Up dance craze song from Eat Bulaga and your
ultra-music-sensitive-maybe-almost-pathologic
brother/sister/friend/parent/stranger comments on you: “That is waaay to low
key. You’re five whole steps low blah-blah-blah” just after hearing the song
for the first time in Eat Bulaga. Then all your dreams of being an
international singer and getting a record deal have been shattered. Just one
hearing and he/she already knew the key. That is not human. Not human!
According to Acoustic Learning, Inc., there’s this thing called
Theory of Absolute Pitch. Absolute pitch or perfect pitch is the ‘ability to
perceive and comprehend musical sound as though it were language’ (Aruffo, n.d.) . Take language
itself. You hear ‘Mahal kita’ and you recognize it’s Tagalog. You hear ‘I love
you’ and you recognize it’s English. You hear ‘Je t’aime’ and you recognize it’s
French. Well, musicians have their own little world of language. You play C on
the piano and the listener recognizes it’s C (without ever telling him that it
is indeed C). You play B flat and they’re gonna tell you definitely it’s B
flat. It’s also the same the other way. Tell them that a song ‘Just the Way You
Are’ by Bruno Mars is in F major key and they’ll sing it in F major key without
the aid of any instrument. Can I just say o.O?
I bet every musician or even a music enthusiast would want
to have this unbelievable talent. Talent it may be, I believe for a fact that
perfect pitch is learnable. I’ve been believing in this for so many years ever
since I fell in love with perfect pitch. And my belief just strengthened more
when I’ve read about how the auditory cortex is shaped by experience, one of
the topics in this subject I’m writing for, Psych 135. According to the book,
experience-dependent plasticity is also applicable when it comes to auditory
hearing. Christo Pantev and his colleagues demonstrated that musical training ‘enlarges
the area of auditory cortex that responds to piano tones’ (Goldstein, 2010) . It was also said that 25 percent of
the cortex were more activated in musicians than in nonmusicians. On the same
note, the point that is amazing with this topic of musical training is that a
small amount of training already enables a neuron to respond better to a particular
frequency, or to a particular note, hence. Besides the rapid acquisition is
that the effect lasted for hours after training (this is probably what happens
when you listen to a song and then you still sing it on the same key just after
hearing it but then tomorrow it’s either you’re a whole step lower or higher).
As we can see here, training for perfect pitch is definitely possible.
So how does this work? Maybe start with repeating the note C
for a number of times and then repeating the same session for two to three
times a day. After mastering the note C, try D, then try distinguishing between
C and D. Then E. Then discrimination again of C, D, and E. Maybe in the future
you can try scales. Affuro (n.d.) says so himself that children who do not have
the genetic gift of perfect pitch can be taught. And adults also can be taught
through the principles of perceptual learning. He has this program in more
detail so if you want you can check his website below.
Personally, I once taught myself the perfect pitch since it
would really be nice to already recognize what key a particular piano piece is
in. It was pretty hard, but still possible. One of the strategies I used at
first was my gut feeling or tone visualization. A key of C major would feel
like a sky. E flat major would feel like a church. That sort of stuff. Yea,
weird me. I wasn’t able, though, to continue with my training because of more
important things to do – like acads (haha).
Perhaps one practical application of this is when you have a
rehearsal and it just so happens that there’s no instrument around. You wanted
to practice the choir with the song “Lead Me Lord” in the key of G. Without the
instrument, you can hum to them how high Lead Me Lord would be in the key of G.
Then if you observed that the singers can’t reach the pitch or the piece’s
original key is too high for them, you can lower it to D without the use of any
instrument also. I happen to witness this as I met a bassist/choral conductor
train a choir in a television network station. It was a-w-e-s-o-m-e.
To end, I think the best part of learning stuff that don’t
make sense at first is that they become meaningful once you’ve learned it. Then
you acquire something that normal people don’t actually understand. You
suddenly say things that make people ‘nganga.’
Weird, it is. For some, awesome. But for me (and it’s a personal choice,
mind you, haha), I’d like to call it sexy. Oh yes, indeed. Baby-you’re-a-firework-sexy.
===KATE ILENE V. ANG===
References
Aruffo, C. (n.d.). Theory of Absolute Pitch.
Retrieved from Acoustic Learning, Inc.:
http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/theories.htm
Goldstein, E. B. (2010). Sensation and
Perception. Canada: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.
Image Sources:
http://i.huffpost.com/gen/828800/thumbs/r-PERFECT-PITCH-large570.jpg?4
http://www.onosokki.co.jp/English/hp_e/patio/images/sofanotes.gif
http://musicpsychology.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Music.jpg
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