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On "learned" A/P, lattice / grid
Thank you. The article is very interesting and informative.
From Parncutt & Levitin, Absolute Pitch: (abstracted)
They, AP possessors, may work out integrated qualities (intervals
and chords) by reconstructing them from the notes (note names),
rather than perceiving an 'integrated' sonority (Miyazaki, 1992,
1993). There is the proposition that "melody" is not heard, but
rather a string of pitches passing by.
An equivalent to this for non-AP people would be to read a chinese
text, with a knowledge of how chinese characters are constructed
(radicals and combinations), but having no sense of what the
characters mean, or how they relate.
This seems to correspond to the statement:
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 2009 17:20:33 +0200
From: Leon van Noorden <leonvannoorden@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Linearity as pitch perception: was Perception as memory
It was true in the time that I had to make music dictations, very
long ago, that I had to reconstruct the interval or chord from the
notes. It does not mean that you could not say what kind of chord it
was from the sound, such a major or minor.
As a non-AP listener, I hear (only) sets of relationships, and I have
developed large numbers of 'musical hierarchies' to categorize these
relationships. My hearing is (more or less) pattern-based, what I
refer to as 'process-oriented listening'. I note repetition,
variation, transformation, lattice / pattern matching etc.
In the article cited, P T Brady says that he 'taught himself' AP -- an
idea that many have difficulty with. Count me in this group. As with
Eliot Handelman, my alternate interpretation is that the AP existed,
but some aspects of it had been extinguished for some reason, and he
had re-discovered it with a one year re-training.
The visual model I use for this distinction is that used in certain
kinds of cross-country car racing where the instructions read:
Drive to the second traffic light, turn left
After five stop signs, turn right
One block after the school on your left, turn right
Drive to Maple St, turn left'
At Walnut Street, turn right
After Oak Street School, turn right on Oak Street
The first of these (similar to how I hear music), I build a kind of
chain, or lattice. It floats freely (usually about a P4 below the
absolute pitch level). The lattice is hierarchical, and contains
multiple referents. In tonal music, the scale degree ^3 will largely
identify a <t> tonic function, and ^7 will identify a <d> dominant. ^4
or ^#4 I hear largely as <dp>, dominant preparation. Knowing (or
guessing) the key of the piece, I will visualize a score, and through
reverse-engineering, would write out the pitches I think I hear. This
appears to be the opposite method used by possessors of AP.
FWIW, my understanding of Chomsky's transformational linguistics is
built upon the idea of relationships and hierarchies; language as a
form of variation and hierarchies. In (many? most?) Indo-european
languages, there are clusters of word types (verbs, gerunds,
adverbs,nouns etc), often based around some kind of root that
undergoes transformations: to think, thinking, thoughtfully,
thought ...), and while the 'absolute' form [well-formed] is learned
(with the exceptions), the mind is able to read that:
Ta-daye eye had gotten inta ma kar n wint duntoun
The translation of this, or machine reading of this, would likely be
Jazz, if it is to be more than a stream of notes going by, can be
heard as song-form variation, and enjoyed for the inventiveness of the
musician. This may also be the case in other 'language delimited'
improvisations -- I think of north Indian and Persian particularly,
both of which have extensive ancient theories of music.
Many years ago I worked on creating a database with the analysis of
Bach Chorales, and very quickly understood how Heinrich Schenker came
to his conclusions that western music is about structure,
relationships and hierarchy rather than objects -- relationships in a
lattice (being a spatial relationship), rather a grid (map) upon which
objects are fixed [absolutely].