keys on key board play different notes?

[Greg_Charles]

@markn_1

Can you tell which key on a piano is being pressed just by listening to it? I certainly can’t but my musical skills are abysmal. Would you need to have perfect pitch to do this, or can most musically-educated people do it?

@Musicat

To answer question #1: yes. Perfect pitch is not needed; good, educated, well-developed relative pitch is. …

I’m confused by this. Isn’t the ability to tell the exact pitch of a note that you hear literally the definition of perfect pitch?

[Quote=Wikipedia]
Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone.
[/Quote]

Absolute pitch

Relative pitch would let you transcribe a tune you heard, but you wouldn’t necessarily reproduce it in the same key, unless you were given the starting note. I thought perfect pitch was an innate gift, but the Wikipedia article seems to say it can be developed to some extent.

[si_blakely]

@Richard_Pearse

As for the OP, words would become short musical phrases. I think you’d be able to learn the phrases better than you could learn to distinguish a single letter out of context. I’d be curious to know how many words would have the same “tune” as another word but in a different key.

To start with a famous (if somewhat forced) example - how easy would it be to distinguish HAL (the name of the malfunctioning computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey) from IBM. Same relative pitch steps, one semitone apart.

I’m a musician, and I doubt I could do it if they were separated by a few other words.

But I could identify a semi-tone modulation in a piece of music, because music generally has a structure and the notes in a piece have a relationship to each other defined by the key. If the piece was chromatic or atonal - no chance.

[Walken_After_Midnight]

The distinctive musical motif from the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind is meant to be a form of musical language. Wikipedia:

[John] Williams wrote over 300 examples of the iconic five-tone motif for Close Encounters—the five tones are used by scientists to communicate with the visiting spaceship as a mathematical language—before Spielberg chose the one incorporated into the film’s signature theme.

[markn_1]

I wonder if this would help – you assign 7 keys to the 7 notes of the diatonic scale. Then the next 7 keys are similarly assigned to the next higher octave but are slightly flat. Then the next 7 are the next octave but are even more flat, or maybe those are sharp. And so on. You would identify the octave by how flat/sharp the notes are. I assume musically trained people can tell the difference between, say, a flat fifth and any other interval.

[Ignotus]

@markn_1

I wonder if this would help – you assign 7 keys to the 7 notes of the diatonic scale. Then the next 7 keys are similarly assigned to the next higher octave but are slightly flat. Then the next 7 are the next octave but are even more flat, or maybe those are sharp. And so on. You would identify the octave by how flat/sharp the notes are. I assume musically trained people can tell the difference between, say, a flat fifth and any other interval.

I’m fairly sure this would make it easier to learn the system – particularly if the letters were assigned in approximate order of frequency. Making the space bar silent (effectively a rest) would probably help even more.