Re: Perfect Pitch

--- Padraic Brown <pbrown@...> wrote:

> Indeed not. I'm of the opinion that 99% of it (where "it" is
> note production) is quasi-instinctual remembering of how to
> set your lips (wind players), where to place the slide (t-bone)
> or where to put your fingers (strings). Given the idiosyncrasies
> of your instrument, the weather, other players, etc. Though, it
> helps rather a lot to be able to hear the note before trying to
> produce the tone!
I agree 99%.  (I'm too much of a natural skeptic and cynic to agree
100% with anything.)

I have perfect pitch because of no other reason but the grace of God.
I was exposed to a lot of music, from classical to hard rock to
country, from age three or four on.  It's those late toddler-early
childhood years that are paramount to learning something like music or
language.  Muslims often say that the best time to teach a child the
Quran and the Arabic it is written in is before age seven.

Because I "memorized" (at that age, it's by osmosis) what middle C
sounds like -- then the other 87 keys of the piano -- I can hear music
and determine what key it's in, and whether a note is sharp or flat.
An off-key trombone player wracks my nerves more than it would other
people.  (The recording of "The Star Spangled Banner" after Lance
Armstrong's victory in Le Tour de France sounded like a junior high
school band... yuck...)

So if you want your child to be a linguist, teach it phonics.  It's sad
that good ol' phonics isn't really taught in schools as much as it was
when I was a grade-schooler (I started kindegarten in 1976).  A strong
point was made that I knew how to pronounce *any* English word by the
end of first grade, and by that critical age of seven.

After that, you don't absorb stuff; it starts taking effort to learn
things.

So obviously a Tamil speaker can identify a phone as "voiceless
retroflex stop" much more easily than an English speaker.  A Russian or
Spanish speaker hears the letter T as dental, but that same Tamil
speaker hears it as retroflex.  And of course an Arabic speaker is less
likely than an English speaker to describe the voiceless pharyngeal
fricative as hawking phlegm.

DaW.

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