#21 ·
Sarah Moore86 said:I get the general idea, but one thing still escapes me. When someone with absolute pitch hears a chord, do they actually hear every individual note within it? I once had a dream where people saw music in colors—is that a thing? Like, does an entire song feel washed in one primary color? I recall Hendrix mentioning he built his compositions based on "color" when he was asked about his songwriting process. I wonder how he perceives sound outside of music. Maybe everything just feels amplified?
First things first: chords aren't made of notes. They’re made of tones. Notes are just the shorthand we use to get those tones down on paper.
By some logic, an absolute pitch listener should be able to identify every single tone within a played chord—minor, major, seventh, quintal, or whatever else you can throw at them. The possibilities are pretty much endless, I guess.
Personally, I think identifying those chords or tones shouldn't be much of a struggle, even for someone without perfect pitch, provided they have a solid grasp of harmonic theory. It’s the kind of thing you'd study in depth during a music theory course at a place like Juilliard.
Of course, I’m not talking about instantly recognizing the exact tones within an chord the moment you hear them without any help from an instrument. What I mean is what musicians with decent relative pitch call "ear training" or simply "transcribing" chords by ear.You shouldn't look at a tone or a chord in isolation. It’s more about the context within the entire composition. I guess you have to figure out what the composer was actually trying to achieve by introducing a dominant, a subdominant, a seventh, or even a parallel minor at a specific point in the piece.I suppose having a solid grasp of music theory and harmony can be a massive help, especially when you're tackling more complex arrangements.
Musical theory proficiency actually plays a role even for those with absolute pitch, especially when it comes to composing or complex recognition tasks. I guess it's just one more tool in the kit.
Here are a few pages that offer some clarification on the theoretical side of things.
Check out http://chordmaps.com/. It might be useful.
The fundamentals of interpreting theory can be found here: http://www.dolmetsch.com/theoryintro.htm
Regarding how people with absolute pitch perceive chords and tones—I suspect it comes down heavily to imagination. Music relies so much on that, after all. I wouldn't go so far as to claim everyone with perfect pitch sees notes in color, but I don't see why someone couldn't experience an F# (whether it’s a 7th, a 6th, major, or minor) as "purple," or a B as "green." Ultimately, the human imagination is limitless. It often lacks any logic that anyone else could understand, except perhaps for the person playing that specific mental movie.
Regarding Hendrix—he was a genius, and maybe we can’t fully wrap our heads around him. I suppose his perception of music, specifically that idea of seeing songs through colors, might have been influenced by the hallucinogens he used. But then again, I don't see why someone couldn't perceive a song as a certain color just through pure imagination. Music is deeply subjective, unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately. Imagination plays such a massive role, even in something as precise as harmony. What I experience as "blue," someone else might sense as "brown." There is no objective way to determine what color a song is, much like there is no objective way to decide if a track is actually good or if a painting is beautiful. There are only things that the majority happen to enjoy, but popularity doesn't equal quality. You look at mainstream pop hits that everyone loves, yet many others would argue they are just poorly written music.
I don't really get this question about hearing outside of music:
We perceive sounds as either tones or noise.
Sounds outside of music are just noise, which I assume absolute pitchers probably experience the same way they do any other noise.
(Noise is just noise; there’s nothing special about it, so why would it be heightened?)