Perfect Pitch - How It's
Achieved And What's Involved
What Is Pitch?To make a long
physics lesson short, pitch is the rate at which a sound vibrates.
Mathematically, Hz (hertz, or cycles per second) units denote pitch and
the faster the vibration -- the higher the tone. The A note for example
vibrates faster than a C or D note whereas a G note vibrates much slower
than a B note.
Perfect pitch is the sound of exact tones or
notes. Its counterpart, relative pitch, is the sound of chords. Since a
large part of learning to play the piano entails training the ear, it's
important that you spend some time
training yourself to listen
for perfect pitches. Practice certainly makes the process easier,
however others contend that
training yourself
to listen for relative pitches at the same time increases your
abilities to hear both. Some pianists even claim that training to
identify relative pitches enhances the ability to pinpoint perfect
pitches.
What's particularly interesting about perfect pitch
is that it isn't easy to identify and it has thus become the subject of
scientific study. It prompts us to ask why some people can easily
identify any note while others can't.Four Components: The Ear, The
Body, and Practice As musicians, we can tell you that part of the
answer lays in practice. Years and years and years of practice not only
train your ear, they train your body as well. The ear isn't the only
thing that responds to sound -- the entire body responds to sound too.
So when you play a note, you're ears will hear how it sounds and your
body will feel how it vibrates even if you're not conscious of the
note's sound waves. In a sense, our bodies are tuners in their own
right.So you really have two distinct tools to help you identify
perfect pitch and this is why many musicians will say, "that feels about
right" when they attempt to match a tone. Believe us when we say that
years of practice have a tremendous impact on these "feelings." The
ability to "feel" one's way through a song isn't unusual at all and it's
one of the techniques used by blind pianists such as Stevie Wonder and
Ray Charles. Natural TalentPractice of course doesn't mean to
suggest that people can't achieve perfect pitch through natural ability.
Pianists who seem to pick up their lessons rather quickly probably have
the natural ability to achieve perfect pitch because their bodies are
more sensitive to the vibration of sound.
For those of us who
aren't
Mozarts or Chopins
however, or just not as sensitive to sound waves as others are, we need
to practice - and we need practice a lot!
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