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From:  Gary Godfrey <ggodfrey@i...>
Date:  Wed Dec 18, 2002  9:14 pm
Subject:  Re: tone-deaf?


On Tue, 17 Dec 2002, John Link wrote:
> [stuff deleted]
>
> P.S. How could someone who is tone-deaf possibly recognize a vowel?
> Two vowels can be sung or spoken on the same pitch and what makes
> them different, if I've understood what I've read, is that they have
> different formants. Formants refer to frequency, and pitch is made of
> frequency!

I would argue that this might be an example of "higher level" brain
activity. The brain tends to hide information away from conscience
thought unless there's some reason for the detail to be availble. So
maybe, he does all of his vowel processing very close to the ear input
and none of the tone information is allowed up to higher level
structures.

I suspect that all of us are physically capable of "perfect pitch",
but since relative pitch is so much more important for language, we
lose the capability. There's a small "module" in the brain that
converts a rising pitch to "going up" and a falling pitch to "going
down" and only those signals make it to the next stage in the brain.
I'll bet if you announced dinner to a baby with a Bb and changing time
with a C, etc., you'd get a child with perfect pitch.

Here's another example. When I was young, my father, Michael, used to
tell a story about how he went to Thailand and that none of the girls
could pronounce his name. "They would say maah eee cull not Michael."
I heard him tell the same story a little while back (after I started
singing) and pointed out that they were just pronouncing the diphthong
slower than he was used to, but that it was really the same "vowels".
I had to go back and forth through several speeds before he began to
"hear" what was going on.

Cheers,

Gary Godfrey
Bass, Austin Chord Rangers (Barbershop)
Austin, TX, USA






  Replies Name/Email Yahoo! ID Date  
21575 Re: tone-deaf?Sharon Szymanski sszymanski27514 Thu  12/19/2002  

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