25th December 2024
Happy Christmas! I’ve been awake since 4:00 (thanks SAD!) and I’ve been on a computer for a good deal of that time. I’m currently using my old Thinkpad a lot more; I’ve just put Ubuntu onto it and it’s now just as fast as my MacBook for nearly everything text and internet related. I’d not like to make music on it again - I remember the pain of having to find ways of getting Windows and an Intel mobile processor from 2015 to handle a 100+ track session file all too well!
One difference though, and a pretty key one for someone sat in a dark room, is that my ThinkPad has no keyboard backlight. And I think that I’ve finally found an analogy for differentiating between Absolute and Relative pitch which I’m actually happy with!
The “seeing in colour thing” never made any sense to me (possibly as I’ve got aphantasia too so imagining the concept of seeing in black and white would be, by definition, impossible). As a result, I have been looking for a better way of explaining it which makes sense to me, and I think my keyboard backlight dilemma probably gets me the closest to that I can be.
You see, I’m a touch-typist. For those unacquainted, I can type without looking at the keyboard. However, touch typing is completely relative. My fingers have spent long enough at a keyboard to know the relative distances and directions between all the letters involved. My brain can pick apart the word it wishes to type next into letters, and encode those letters into a series of vectors, each sent to the most efficient finger for the job. As a result, I never have to look at the keyboard whilst typing, so it makes no difference that I am typing in the dark, you are able to read what I’m writing no bother.
But, and this is where I find the analogy to be strongest, I MUST know that my fingers are over my ‘home’ keys (d and j in my case) in order to type the correct letters. I know my vectors from there and can always move to the right letter from those keys. If, instead of d and j, I used s and h, it’d come out as a lot of wrong letters (I can’t bring myself to publish the monstrosity itself!). This is what relative pitch must feel like: the ability to work out the relative distances between the notes you’re hearing without any idea if they are objectively the correct notes. Of course in music, getting the notes relatively correct but objectively wrong doesn’t matter so much; it’s still the same piece, just in a different key, and most people will simply not notice.
But, to me, turning on absolute pitch is like turning on the keyboard backlight. Suddenly, everything is blindingly obvious, and you know exactly where to start your word. You can use a combination of relative and absolute typing techniques to get you through a piece, but at the end of the day, if you ever mistype a letter, you can look down and see exactly where it is meant to be on the keyboard at all times; a fixed reference frame. That’s exactly what my AP feels like to me, always there if I need to look down for a glance at it, instant, and rather accurate. (Although the analogy rather breaks down when I start telling you about why the whole world sounds around 13-27 cents sharp to me, but that’s another story for another day.
Anyway, Christmas morning ramble over. Have a lovely day everyone.
NB: You’ve had an explanation of how I’m typing this post, thus I take absolutely no responsibility whatsoever for matters of typographical inaccuracy.
Tagged as: music thoughts perfect-pitch