Weird. I just realized I've been whistling out-of-key my whole life. I'm having a mind-blowing morning.

A little background. Having absolute pitch allows me to identify the name of a sounded pitch. Like, if I hear a 'C', my brain says "C!". By the same token I can think "Sing a 'C'" and my vocal muscles will work in concert to produce a sound fairly akin to a 'C'. And then but here's the bizarre twist:

The whole thing breaks down with whistling in this paradoxical way where I both can and can't hear at the same time.

If I try to whistle while playing guitar I enter a musical twilight zone. I pucker up to whistle 'C' and make the whistling sound and out comes a note. And my brain-muscle feedback-loop alerts me that I am in fact singing a 'C'. And then I play a 'C' chord on guitar and WHOAAH it just sounds BAD.

I stop. Whistle a 'C'. Cool, sounds like a 'C'. Pluck a 'C' on guitar. Cool, another 'C'. BUT THEY'RE NOT THE SAME PITCH!! It's veeery strange. A bit like reading Foucault for the first time.

It turns out I have to tell my mouth-via-brain to whistle an 'F' in order to produce a sound that's a 'C' in the generally-accepted real world.

Googling the phenomenon led me to these two comments on a post about absolute pitch.





This post reminds me of a very curious thing that happened in a music theory class I took. The teacher, early in the year, was trying to get us to reproduce tones we heard on the piano; most of the class (including me) had found their way there because the teacher was also the chorus teacher, so most of the class had no problem. There was one boy who was very insistent that he couldn't sing at all, though he was an accomplished musician (I think he played one of the string instruments) and in fact wound up being the best in the class (I can learn a song very fast and have decent pitch but no knack for music theory at all).

But the teacher, of course, was not content to let him say "I can't" and get away with it, so he had the boy try, and the boy sang a perfect fifth above the tone. It was bizarre, and led me to suspect that what you say in your last paragraph is true--that it wasn't a problem with his ears (since he was a musician, on a string instrument no less, and I mean this was a perfectly tuned fifth he sang) but some sort of problem with getting his voice to obey his brain. I have to say I feel somewhat vindicated to see that scientists are starting to suspect the same thing.

Posted by: Isabel | July 27, 2007 at 07:57 PM


Dan's story is correct. Because our piano was tuned lower than A 440 (it was less than a half step low) I grew up with a highly developed (my piano teacher made pitch and chord recognition a part of every lesson) perfectly imperfect sense of perfect pitch. My teacher chose to display my "gift" at the annual recital held at her house. I was to identify pitches and chords which she played on her [A 440] piano. I missed nearly one! At age 8, after being introduced as a prodigy, this was a confusing and humiliating experience. Over the years I "tweaked" the ability to the point where I can recognize piano and organ pitches accurately. But play a note on any other instrument and I'll miss it more than half the time.

I use AP only for that rare individual who can identify any sound... the squeak of a door, a dog's bark etc. For most others I use PR, pitch recognition. And I agree that highly developed RP is most usefull.

Re: Isabel's account of the "fifther". I think that some brains pick up the second strongest partial (after the octave) in the overtone series. I've had a few in such students my classes. My odd contribution is that of a professional baritone who, when asked to whistle a given pitch, produced the pitch a perfect fifth higher. And was absolutely convinced that he had it right. Could this be the origin of Organum? A "fifther" monk singing Chant? And they liked it?

Posted by: Ron Nelson | October 04, 2007 at 02:36 PM