All that music is all in my head.
Fascinating conversation at the cafeteria lunch table yesterday.
My coworker Jo has perfect pitch, meaning that when he wants an A, he hums an A=440, and there it is. He first noticed this when he was in college, and he’d tune a guitar to itself, just whatever sounded “good” and it would turn out to be in tune with (a) every other guitar he tuned, and (b) the rest of the world.
Interestingly, he doesn’t go easily in the other direction - “Hey Jo, what’s this? Laaaa!” He has to keep testing against known notes in his head until one of them matches.
On the other hand, I most definitely do not have perfect pitch. I’ve always had good relative pitch, and after years of playing music learned entirely through the aural tradition, I’ve gotten to be a very good guesser. I’ve made people tune to my A enough times that I could probably imagine my A - but that’s hard to check, because once I hear any sound+name combination I’m not just finding an A, I’m locating it relative to what’s already in my ear, so I can only check if I know what an A is when there’s been no music-playing going on in the last few minutes. Actually, now that I think of it, the answer is probably No. Not with more than 50% accuracy. I think of myself as being a good guesser because if I remember a tune in my head and then compare to the rest of the world, it’s usually in the right key. If you play me a series of notes, I can play them back, starting on the right one - and *then* I could tell you that the notes were DBAGD, but if I tried to name the note when you played it, I’d short-circuit the instinct and I’d be doomed.
The thing that absolutely stumped my classical-piano-playing friend was that I don’t rely on “memorization” to know a tune. Her playing, she says, is a combination of reading the notes on a page, remembering what that sheet music looked like, or an exact muscle memory of what the piano keys were. My playing is really about having the sound of the tune in my ear, and just trusting my fingers to do what they have to do, to make that sound happen, reinforced by a combination of muscle memory (this is what my fingers do, this is how one does a triplet run up to a G), a few note-name mnemonics (this is a reel in Em and starts on the B with some B/E~/B/E stuff). But if I don’t know what I want something to sound like, it’s very very hard to play it. I can kind of “sight-read” music from tunes books, and frequently do for Scottish dancing, but unlike many of the other musicians, I really have to go through the stack of sheet music ahead of time and figure out which tunes I recognize - ideally the written notes are telling my how to play along with the vague tune in my ear, as opposed to the written notes telling me what notes to play and what order to play them in.
It’s always been this way, though. In high school band, the routine was, we get new sheet music, play through it badly, work on it for a while, get better, and after a few weeks it would sound pretty good, and he’d say “so today we’re going to work on memorizing this - we’ve got to be off the page by Thursday!” 75% of the room would groan and whine. It never really made any difference to me - if I knew how to play something well, I could play it just as well without the sheet music in front of me. Learning to play something already meant “making it sound right” rather than “playing the notes on the page”. I found the whole concept of counting measures of rest to be idiotic. If you don’t know how the passage you’re about to play fits into the rest of the orchestra and can’t hear the phrase leading into it, you’ve got no business playing it. But then, that’s high school, when there’s about 3 months of practice for every concert and not a whole lot of playing something new.
It occurred to me that it went even farther back. Remember Simon, the memory game? One of the first hand-held computer games, and I found it absolutely riveting. My piano-playing friend said she played it by color sequence (red red blue yellow red green blue green). One of the other guys at the table said he thought it had been position, like memorizing dance moves. For me it was always absolutely the sounds (4 tones, modeled after bugle calls) - including shifting the timing and emphasis of the random pattern of notes into phrases that made aural sense. Thus I ask: how did you play Simon?
My coworker Jo has perfect pitch, meaning that when he wants an A, he hums an A=440, and there it is. He first noticed this when he was in college, and he’d tune a guitar to itself, just whatever sounded “good” and it would turn out to be in tune with (a) every other guitar he tuned, and (b) the rest of the world.
Interestingly, he doesn’t go easily in the other direction - “Hey Jo, what’s this? Laaaa!” He has to keep testing against known notes in his head until one of them matches.
On the other hand, I most definitely do not have perfect pitch. I’ve always had good relative pitch, and after years of playing music learned entirely through the aural tradition, I’ve gotten to be a very good guesser. I’ve made people tune to my A enough times that I could probably imagine my A - but that’s hard to check, because once I hear any sound+name combination I’m not just finding an A, I’m locating it relative to what’s already in my ear, so I can only check if I know what an A is when there’s been no music-playing going on in the last few minutes. Actually, now that I think of it, the answer is probably No. Not with more than 50% accuracy. I think of myself as being a good guesser because if I remember a tune in my head and then compare to the rest of the world, it’s usually in the right key. If you play me a series of notes, I can play them back, starting on the right one - and *then* I could tell you that the notes were DBAGD, but if I tried to name the note when you played it, I’d short-circuit the instinct and I’d be doomed.
The thing that absolutely stumped my classical-piano-playing friend was that I don’t rely on “memorization” to know a tune. Her playing, she says, is a combination of reading the notes on a page, remembering what that sheet music looked like, or an exact muscle memory of what the piano keys were. My playing is really about having the sound of the tune in my ear, and just trusting my fingers to do what they have to do, to make that sound happen, reinforced by a combination of muscle memory (this is what my fingers do, this is how one does a triplet run up to a G), a few note-name mnemonics (this is a reel in Em and starts on the B with some B/E~/B/E stuff). But if I don’t know what I want something to sound like, it’s very very hard to play it. I can kind of “sight-read” music from tunes books, and frequently do for Scottish dancing, but unlike many of the other musicians, I really have to go through the stack of sheet music ahead of time and figure out which tunes I recognize - ideally the written notes are telling my how to play along with the vague tune in my ear, as opposed to the written notes telling me what notes to play and what order to play them in.
It’s always been this way, though. In high school band, the routine was, we get new sheet music, play through it badly, work on it for a while, get better, and after a few weeks it would sound pretty good, and he’d say “so today we’re going to work on memorizing this - we’ve got to be off the page by Thursday!” 75% of the room would groan and whine. It never really made any difference to me - if I knew how to play something well, I could play it just as well without the sheet music in front of me. Learning to play something already meant “making it sound right” rather than “playing the notes on the page”. I found the whole concept of counting measures of rest to be idiotic. If you don’t know how the passage you’re about to play fits into the rest of the orchestra and can’t hear the phrase leading into it, you’ve got no business playing it. But then, that’s high school, when there’s about 3 months of practice for every concert and not a whole lot of playing something new.
It occurred to me that it went even farther back. Remember Simon, the memory game? One of the first hand-held computer games, and I found it absolutely riveting. My piano-playing friend said she played it by color sequence (red red blue yellow red green blue green). One of the other guys at the table said he thought it had been position, like memorizing dance moves. For me it was always absolutely the sounds (4 tones, modeled after bugle calls) - including shifting the timing and emphasis of the random pattern of notes into phrases that made aural sense. Thus I ask: how did you play Simon?