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It's my understanding that perfect pitch can be tuned, and also trained to deal with microtonal harmonies, etc. I don't think it is a straight jacket. Jacob Col
by SwellJoe 8y ago
It's my understanding that perfect pitch can be tuned, and also trained to deal with microtonal harmonies, etc. I don't think it is a straight jacket. Jacob Collier, I think(?), has perfect pitch, but going outside of western harmony is his schtick.
I think it's more like learning new words as an adult rather than a cage. But, maybe I'm wrong? I've heard anecdotally of people with perfect pitch complaining about some music being "out of tune", but I somehow doubt musicians are saying that, since as you note, music comes in all sorts of tunings (and the more interesting the music is, the more likely it is to go in weird directions, in terms of tuning, scales, etc.).
- mhh__ 8y agoJacob Colliers perfect pitch is apparently (if his tricks on stream are to be believed) accurate to a few cents
- SwellJoe 8y agoI'm inclined to believe it. I don't care for his music, but he's really impressive from a technical perspective. He can zero in on incredibly tiny pitch variations, when listening and singing. Hearing him sing microtonal stuff is downright intimidating. Anyway, since he does have absolute pitch, I think he is very strong evidence that it doesn't limit you to A=440 and 12 tone equal temperament, because he is frequently wildly divergent from that, exploring microtonal music, harmonic series tunings, etc. It seems to be freeing rather than limiting (I understand some of that stuff on a theoretical level, but not on a level where I could improvise or compose in those languages without a lot of work and a whole new approach to ear training...musical concepts he studies and seems to grok in days or weeks would take me months or years).