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Absolute Pitch, as Opposed to Relative Pitch


DonRocks

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I always thought the advent of the internet would expose Absolute Pitch for the fraud it is, and that it would be revealed as many orders-of-magnitude more common than previously thought.

Apparently that isn't the case (although when I was a child, they said "one-in-a-million," and now, they're saying "one-in-ten-thousand") - well, it amounted to some really good party tricks for my parents! (Seriously, it did, when I was like, four - they'd play a blob of notes on the piano, and I'd cruise in from the next room and play the same blob of notes.)

If there are any scientists or professors out there looking to study this stuff, let me know - I'll be happy to volunteer, for all that's not worth. The paper can be titled, "What Happens When a Talented Infant Does Nothing To Cultivate Said Talent." :rolleyes: In all seriousness, nobody has done so much as a party trick on me for the past 20-30 years, so there's your research (don't worry, I won't go test myself in my undoubtedly out-of-tune piano while you're mulling things over).

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I was just pondering this for the first time in decades. When my parents played a staccato group of notes, I'd ask them to hold it down, apparently so I could "go through the chord," and pick out the notes, and I think I might have thought about it left-to-right, or bottom-to-top - was that habit, was it because I was right-handed (*), or was it because I grew up reading left-to-right instead of right-to-left?

(*) Wouldn't *that* be a fascinating relationship.

*Dibs!* (Although you'd think the right-handed people would have come out by now (I'm pretty sure it's because I was taught to read left-to-right - PS, in case you think this is some type of sin, how do you think of the world ... northern hemisphere on top? Well, you could turn it (along with the entire universe it's in) upside-down, and it would be *exactly* as correct (gravity knows no north-versus-south))).

Isn't that disturbing: To think of South America on top of North America? There are people out there who think maps were drawn to put "civilization" (i.e., Europe) on top. 

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