Thursday, March 28, 2019

What actually is perfect pitch ...

... – and how do I get it?

Picture: Getty

By Maddy Shaw Roberts, ClassicFM

‘Q: How do you tell if someone has perfect pitch? A: They’ll tell you.’

If you have perfect pitch – or ‘absolute’ pitch – you can sing or play any note on the spot, with no former guiding note.

Only about one in 10,000 people have it, so if you do have the knack – go you.

via GIPHY

OK, so how do I get perfect pitch?

Some people believe you can only have ‘true’ perfect pitch by being born with it. According to Brady (1970), Ward and Burns (1999) and Levitin and Rogers (2005), “training that begins after the age of nine very rarely leads to [perfect pitch], and there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring it.”

But there is also evidence that you can develop perfect pitch without having a mystical, innate ability. A study carried out a few years ago at the University of Chicago tested a group of students with varied amounts of musical experience, before and after a period of pitch recognition training.

The students showed significant improvement after the training, and those tested a few months later had retained the ability to recreate the notes, without any reference.

So, with the correct training, it is perfectly possible for adults to learn to have perfect pitch. If you fancy giving it a try, a good place to start would be A LOT OF PRACTICE.

> Do you have perfect pitch? Take our test!

And what about relative pitch?

Relative pitch is a bit different, in that it allows you to identify a note by comparing it to a reference tone. It is a lot more common among musicians, and can be as simple as asking a musician to play an ‘E’, while giving them an ‘F’ as a reference.

It can also mean you are able to recreate certain notes in the scale, simply by being frequently exposed to them. For instance, if you’ve played in an orchestra and have the sound of that concert ‘A’ ringing in your ears, you might be able to recreate that note and use it to find your way around the whole 12-tone scale.

Which musicians and singers have perfect pitch?

Some of the greatest classical composers, including Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Handel all had perfect pitch; and it’s not so rare in the pop world either.

Mariah Carey has it, as did Michael Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and Bing Crosby. Charlie Puth, for all his current popularity, was supposedly bullied at school for having perfect pitch. He told The Independent: “I found out that I had something 0.5 per cent of the population has, a type of perfect pitch, where I can hear notes and play them back right away.

“It was mostly verbal, like name-calling and such, the verbal stuff was massive amounts of discouragement like, ‘how could you remotely think you could make it in this industry?’, but I didn’t listen, because I knew I was pretty dope.”

But despite the general feeling of awe that surrounds perfect pitch, it isn’t all that helpful to see it as a measure of musical ability (no offence, of course, to Charlie Puth).

It does make a pretty impressive party trick, though:

What advice do you have for a young composer?

We've worked out John Williams' secret ...

... to starting a great melody, and it's unbelievably simple

John Williams I – V interval — Is this John Williams' secret ingredient? . Picture: Getty Images

Do you want to know the secret to writing a world-class melody? If John Williams’ music is anything to go by, it comes down to one really simple thing…

Would you believe us if we said that John Williams used the same compositional trick in his melodies for Jurassic Park, Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones?

We're here to tell you he does and it all stems from one central idea: the tonic – dominant interval. That's the leap from the first note of the scale to the fifth. Call it a I-Vor perfect fifth interval if you prefer.

Tonic and Dominant — Tonic (I) and Dominant (V). Picture: 8notes

Using the I-V relationship is nothing new when it comes to writing music, it’s one of the fundamental melodic relationships in Western harmony. However, John Williams uses this interval as the backbone of many of his iconic melodies.

He doesn't just use the I-V interval as a part of the melody, he uses it as a tool to catapult us right into the juicy bit of the tune. Picture the harmonic interval as a slingshot, if you will.

via GIPHY

So, with this sophisticated analogy in place, let's take a look at the music to see how the magic happens.

Star Wars

The Star Wars theme is probably the most famous music to ever be used in a film, so John Williams was clearly doing something right here. Even the introduction of brass fanfare triplets is iconic, but the music really gets going when the melody hits.

The up-beat triplet motif is followed by two sturdy I-V minims (half notes, if you're American). Williams uses this as springboard into the rest of the phrase, and into the rest of the score, in fact.

Jurassic Park

For all those Jurassic Park fans reading, you’ll know that this music comes at the point when we catch our first glimpse of the island. Not only is there a sudden key change at this point, but the epic theme is put straight in front of us, no frills, no introduction. So it's no surprise that John Williams uses a I-V jump to get the melody going.

There is something else is going on in the melody here, too. Williams uses two consecutive perfect fifth jumps: first from B flat to F and then from C-G. Instead of reading this as a I-V and II-VI, using a quick tonicisation, John Williams treats the ascending sequence as two I-V jumps.

Superman

John Williams is a fan of a fanfare (see what we did there?), and his score to Superman is no exception. With triplets and blazing brass in abundance, we get the feel of the superhero from the very core of his score.

Does the music seem familiar? Look beyond the dotted rhythm and where the melody goes after the I-V jump, and the beginning of this phrase is almost identical to the Star Wars theme. Williams, however, takes the music in a completely different direction after his signature I-V interval.

E. T.

E.T. — Picture: John Williams / Classic FM

The E. T. Flying Theme opens with a perfect fifth jump, but this is far more lyrical than any of the previous examples. So how does John Williams adapt the same melody to sound completely different here?

It's all in the instrumentation – the melody sits atop tremolo violins, fluttering flutes and sky high scalic runs that instantly set the scene of the famous flying scene.

And unlike many of his other scores, John Williams begins by giving the melody to the strings. Gone is the fanfare and heavy brass; this melody is lighter than air.

So there you have it – some of the world's most famous film score melodies are built around that heroic jump from tonic to dominant. What comes after, well, that's another story.

via GIPHY