Posts made by SSmith1226

Re: need perfect pitch to play trombone ?

The topic, “Perfect Pitch To Play the Trombone”is nearly a year old. There was very good and relevant discussion at that time. I was going to add this to the discussion, but there is an automatic message that pops up which encourages the start of a new thread. I saw the following article today and thought it was interesting in general. I’ve also included two videos with the article.

How Can You Tell If You Have Perfect Pitch?

Some famous musicians—from Mariah Carey to Jimi Hendrix—have a gift known as perfect pitch. What is it? Could you have it, too?

Mariah Carey, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby, Mozart, Beethoven, Jimi Hendrix, and Yanni. What do these musicians have in common? They're all said to have perfect pitch.

How rare is perfect pitch? If you don’t have it already, can you learn it?

What is perfect (or absolute) pitch?

Perfect pitch (technically known as absolute pitch) is the ability to identify, without effort, the pitch of a note.

Let's say someone plays a D on the piano. A person with perfect pitch—and the musical training to be able to name the notes—would be able to identify the note as a D without any reference. Or they might hear a note played and be able to reproduce it on an instrument without having to search for it. If you told someone who had vocal training and perfect pitch to sing a D, they'd be able to do it easily.

When someone can identify a note only when it's based on a reference note, that's called relative pitch. People with perfect pitch, on the other hand, don't need a reference note to label an audible tone correctly.

How rare is perfect pitch?

Out of every 10,000 people, only between 1 to 5 of them will have perfect pitch. Out of every 10,000 musicians, however, between 100 and 1100 (that’s 1-11%) may have the gift. Perfect pitch is also observed to run in families, which suggests it's at least partially genetic.

Perfect pitch is more common in cultures where the language is tonal. In tonal languages, the same word said in different tones has different meanings. (That's compared to cultures where tone indicates emotion and not meaning.) One study of music students found that 60 percent of Mandarin-speaking students who had studied music since the age of four or five had perfect pitch relative to only 14 percent of English-speaking students.

Some scientists argue that this could mean perfect pitch can be taught. That's especially true for someone who learns to alter and identify pitch from a young age, like when they're learning to speak their first language.

Other studies have shown that perfect pitch is more common among people with autism. One study of children age 7 to 13 found that those with autism were better able to tell apart two subtlely different tones and to remember melodies weeks later than neurotypical children in the same age group. This link is particularly intriguing because understanding perfect pitch may help us understand the genetic links to autism as well as possible treatment therapies.

Investigations into actual anatomical differences have found that the brains of people with perfect pitch look different. They have more grey matter in the area of the brain we suspect is responsible for identifying pitch, the right auditory cortex. Their right auditory cortex and their prefrontal cortex, also associated with music processing, is also thicker, suggesting more brain activity there.

In the color analogy, a person with perfect pitch could look at a shade of blue on someone’s sweater and then go to a paint store and find the exact shade from memory.

Interestingly, if you have perfect pitch, it’s apparently hard to understand not having it. (I say “apparently” because I was not gifted with such a high-functioning ear.)

To understand why this is, an analogy to color is often used. Imagine someone who can see all the colors and tell them apart but can’t tell you if something is “yellow” or “blue” unless they were shown a reference color like “red” first. For those of us who see color, this makes no sense! The same goes for those with perfect pitch when they try to understand why the rest of us can’t label a note when we hear it on its own. In the color analogy, a person with perfect pitch could look at a shade of blue on someone’s sweater and then go to a paint store and find the exact shade from memory.

So why is the ability to differentiate something like color so common but absolute pitch so rare? One group has suggested that maybe some component of perfect pitch is more common—let’s call it not-quite-perfect-but-better-than-only-capable-of-relevant pitch.

Work led by Dr. Elizabeth Margulis at the University of Arkansas suggests that even people without any formal music training can show signs of some aspect of absolute pitch. For example, they might be able to pick out individual notes that are off-key more easily for familiar scales like C-major (think the white keys on the piano) versus less common scales like those in D-flat major (mostly black piano keys).

Margulis and her team also find that our ability to track absolute pitch may affect how emotional we feel when listening to music. Participants in the study reported that the music felt tenser when it contained notes that were in the wrong key.

Can you learn to have perfect pitch?

Perfect pitch is thought to be some combination of innate ability, early childhood music exposure, and possibly training. So, if you didn’t start those music lessons at age five, is it too late for you? Historically, the belief was that you either have it or you don’t when it comes to perfect pitch. But a few recent studies have suggested that maybe the skill can be learned.

A few recent studies have suggested that perfect pitch can be learned.

In a small study of 17 students with varying musical backgrounds at the University of Chicago, researchers found that participants were better able to identify notes without a reference after a period of training. The training consisted of three 60-note sets for which the students were asked to identify each note after hearing it and received immediate feedback on whether or not their identification was correct. The students were not as good at identifying notes when tested again a few months later (without any additional training), but they were still better off than where they originally started.

One group even managed to “retune” people who did have perfect pitch by effectively over-writing their tonal knowledge to new values. (Going back to our color analogy, think of someone being told to reset so that purple is now yellow.) The title of that study was, appropriately, "Absolute pitch may not be so absolute."

How do you know if you have perfect pitch?

Searching for “perfect pitch test” online turns up dozens of results because there is generally no agreed-upon reliable test for perfect pitch, at least not for those of us who aren’t musically trained. So there are plenty of online tests to have some fun poking at the limitations of your skills, but if you really want to know if you have perfect pitch, you may have to see a professional.

JOIN THE SCIENCE CONVERSATION
Do you have perfect pitch? Have you learned to identify notes with musical training? I'd love to hear about it! Join the conversation on Facebook or Twitter. If you have a question that you’d like to see on a future episode, send me an email at everydayeinstein@quickanddirtytips.com. Stay in the science loop! Listen and subscribe on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

About the Author

Sabrina Stierwalt, PhD
Dr Sabrina Stierwalt earned a Ph.D. in Astronomy & Astrophysics from Cornell University and is now a Professor of Physics at Occidental College.

This is a perfect site to post this photo. We all have thought of using a Crown Royal bag as a mute. Now you can repurpose all those Crown Royal bags that you collected and not as of yet found an application to use as a mute.

ESTATE PLANNING:
My buddy Dave was a single guy living at home with his father and working in the family business. 
He knew that he would inherit a fortune once his sickly father died.
Dave wanted two things:
• to learn how to invest his inheritance and,
• to find a wife to share his fortune.
One evening at an investment meeting, he spotted the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. 
Her natural beauty took his breath away .
I may look like just an ordinary man," he said to her, "but in just a few years, my father will die, and I'll inherit 20 million dollars."
Impressed, the woman obtained his business card.
 
Two weeks later, she became his stepmother.
Women are so much better at estate planning than men.

The New York Philharmonic
Ravel’s Bolero

I’m originally from Mt. Vernon, NY, the home of the Mt. Vernon Bach Stradivarius. I left New York in 1974 and never expected to find a song about Mt. Vernon. I was wrong. This song came out years after I left, but the video was filmed at many locations I knew during the 26 years that I lived there. Music and life were different then.

@GeorgeB
Thanks George

@Kehaulani said in Artist on BOARD:

p.s. speaking of Bob Ross, I saw a show the other night from his son. Guess what? Same basic style and content but better. And the sky actually looked like a sky.

Perhaps the Chinese Bob Ross...

Lockdown With Essential Services Only

Magic

@Kehaulani
The video you posted was very informative, well done, and well worth the nearly one hour invested in watching it.
There is a back story to Louis Armstrong’s life as well. I grew up in Mt. Vernon, N.Y. as did a woman who claimed to be Louis Armstrong’s daughter. She was born in Harlem, the daughter of a dancer that was part of Louis Armstrongs touring show. When the girl was seven, the year that I was in 9 th grade, Louis Armstrong purchased a house for the mother and daughter in Mt. Vernon. According to her, he continued to support them even a few years past his death in 1971. I only was aware of this possibility around 2012 when this story broke.
The following is one of many references to this story:

https://www.nola.com/entertainment_life/music/article_3cdd28a9-b5b5-5318-8383-ab65fe0c2c6d.html

The following is a talk and question and answer session from Dr. David Price of Cornell University Medical Center in New York City. Dr. Price is a Critical Care physician in the current epicenter of Covid-19 in the United States. This video will last almost one hour, but will give you common sense advice how to navigate “The New Reality” based on Information that we know today. I am posting it not to give out unsolicited medical advice, but to put the current situation in perspective, give understanding to the current situation, and perhaps save those who follow this common sense approach a lot of grief.

Broadway: The New Reality

Italian style lock down:

@GeorgeB
Thanks for your kind thoughts. We are all home bound and in the same boat.

FULL YOUTH ORCHESTRA PLAYS MAHLER FROM HOME
By Norman Lebrecht
On March 27, 2020
The New York Youth Symphony had to cancel its spring date at Carnegie Hall but nothing was going to stop them playing.

Click on link below for a movement of Mahler’s first symphony, 74 young musicians playing from home, conducted by Michael Repper.

https://slippedisc.com/2020/03/unbelieee-vable-full-youth-orchestra-plays-mahler-from-home/

FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE:

Trumpet teacher forms a virtual brass ensemble with 40 quarantined students

By PAM KRAGEN
MARCH 25, 2020
7:43 AM
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San Diego’s Tim Saeger assembled student-shot videos into a single concert of a Bach chorale for trumpets

Rancho Penasquitos — What happens to a trumpeter and music teacher who loses all of his concert gigs, school contracts and private students virtually overnight due to the COVID-19 pandemic?
In the case of San Diego resident Tim Saeger, 35, he found a way to both make music and connect with his students by creating a virtual orchestra online.

Last week, 40 of Saeger’s middle- and high school-age trumpet students made cellphone videos of themselves playing parts he assigned them from a chorale for trumpets by Johann Sebastian Bach. Then he assembled all the individual videos into a multi-track master video with all of the students playing together in perfect harmony.

A video and audio editing hobbyist, Saeger had experience with multi-tracking, having created several merged videos of himself with other musicians and one video of himself playing eight different parts of “America the Beautiful.”

The newly formed online trumpet ensemble has given Saeger something to occupy his time and has given the students, all now sequestered in home isolation, something to do with their instrument. Up next, they’ll collaborate on a recording of “Amazing Grace.”

Saeger — who lives in Rancho Peñasquitos with his wife, Dessie, and their two dogs — said the experience has lifted his spirits and encouraged him to reimagine how he may be able to teach lessons in the future.

“It provided a challenge for me. I was looking for solutions and I got the idea to adapt and overcome by doing something online,” he said. “The kids are stuck and home and bored and the parents were very excited.”

Ethan Olim, 17, of Rancho Penasquitos has been taking trumpet lessons from Saeger for the past eight years. He loves the trumpet for its versatility.

“It has this incredible range. You can be this destructive overwhelming power in an orchestra or have a smoky, mysterious quality in a jazz ensemble or be this light dancing delicate instrument alone,” said Olim, a senior at Westview High School in Rancho Peñasquitos.

While Olim said he at first enjoyed having more time to read and work out after schools shut down last week, he misses the human contact of being around his friends and classmates. So when Saeger contacted him about doing a multi-track recording last week, he was thrilled.

“He’s been putting out those videos for a few years and all of his students saw his level of recording, editing and technical skill. So when he reached out to us to put together something ourselves it was really exciting,” Olim said.

Sammy Levy, a 17-year-old junior at Westview High, has been studying with Saeger for five years. Levin said the 90-second Bach chorale piece that Saeger chose for the multi-track video is something that all of the trumpet students use as a warm-up during practice, so there would be no learning curve required for their first experiment with multi-tracking.

To keep everyone playing at the same tempo, Levy said Saeger instructed all of the students to wear headsets or earbuds playing a metronome counting at 72 beats per minute.

“It was really satisfying seeing how everyone’s hard work paid off and it turned into such a masterpiece, Levy said.

Olin said he imagined that with 40 students playing in their own homes, the intonation and coordination would fall flat. He was wrong.

“I expected lots of problems with tuning and out-of-sync releases and attacks, but I was so impressed at how clean all of that stuff was,” Olin said.

Also taking part in the project was Sienna Barker, 14, a freshman at Westview High who began taking lessons from Saeger three years ago. She is first chair trumpet in Westview’s ninth grade band and played in the marching band last fall.

Barker grew up playing piano, but had to pick a new instrument when she joined her middle school orchestra. She picked the trumpet, thinking it had to be the easiest instrument to learn with only three buttons. It wasn’t, but she fell in love with the trumpet anyway.

“It’s a really pretty instrument and it can be so versatile,” she said. “It can have a bright and exciting sound and it can also be deep and rich.”

Barker praised Saeger’s teaching style because he’s interested in his students both as musicians and individuals.

“While he cares about your improvement as a musician, the first questions he’ll ask at a lesson are: ‘How are you doing? How’s your life? Anything new?’ Then he’ll ask, ‘how’s your trumpet playing going?”

Born and raised in San Diego, Saeger started playing trumpet in the fifth grade and attended San Diego State University on a performance scholarship. The longtime professional musician is a contract player for the San Diego Symphony and its Summer Pops season, as well as the Pacific Symphony, the San Diego Winds Concert Band and multiple brass ensembles, Classics 4 Kids, La Jolla Playhouse, The Old Globe and San Diego Zoo, among others.

Since 2008, he has been teaching trumpet at middle and high schools in the San Diego and Poway school districts. He now coaches the trumpet sections for Westview, Mt. Carmel and Del Norte high schools. He also has a private teaching business with between 50 to 60 students.

Saeger said he was devastated when all of his income evaporated overnight, but fortunately his wife has a job so they’re OK financially. That has given him the time to figure out how to use technology to perhaps begin doing lessons online. Performing concert music together over an app doesn’t work well due to the unpredictable lag time associated with the signal transmission. But the positive response he received from the first online trumpet ensemble performance has given him confidence to experiment.

I’m exploring virtual lessons,” he said. “The economy isn’t the same as it was before. A lot of students’ parents are now out of work. But we’ll do more of these online concerts. Everyone has been very complimentary, so I want to do more.”

To see some of Saeger’s videos, visit timsaeger.com or his Youtube channel at youtube.com/user/saegerstudios/videos.

Sent from my iPhone

Today I received an email from the New Horizons International Music Association. It featured an idea from our own Ivan Hunter. It said the following, “Ivan Hunter describes himself as a whole-hearted supporter of the New Horizons concept. He spends his time designing and building trumpets, writing about recreational music making, conducting Trumpet Saturdays, and mentoring/playing in several community ensembles.
His idea is to make music at dedicated times e.g. 10:00am and 7:00pm (either or both, depending on your circumstances). You can play a simple melody whilst holding in your thoughts someone dear to you. This can be a way of reducing stress, improving our mood, and helping us to be more positive towards others.

He would like to invite New Horizons members to participate. The music each day
is posted on:

Facebook page: Trumpet4Fun

https://www.facebook.com/Trumpet4Fun “

I would certainly defer to Ivan to elaborate further on his wonderful idea.

The email also had a link to the Rotterdam Philharmonic, while socially isolating from home, playing the Ode to Joy as a single unit.