I don’t think I said I could tell the difference on Fur Elise, other than I knew it was going to be different because you said it was. And that’s the same problem with “Piano Man.” I can now say that it does sound different, but I’ve been primed to know that it was going to sound different. If I just randomly happened upon that live version, I don’t think I would have noticed.
My point was that “Piano Man” was less of a change than Fur Elise, and you still managed to identify it. You might have known it was coming, but you can’t deny it changes the feel of the whole song. And I have every confidence anybody else that has even the faintest touch of a decent ear could have heard a difference, as well.
It honestly does not change the feel of the song for me, nor do I think it’s a given that anybody with a decent ear would be able to identify a difference without a reference. But let’s just agree to disagree on these points, as I don’t think either of are going to convince the other. You obviously are much more sensitive to absolute pitches than I am.
False. I’m not trying to be unnecessarily argumentative, or dissuade you from a subjective opinion, but you’re just wrong on this.
A pitch at 100hz is not distinguishable from a pitch at 900hz?
Eonwe, you quoted drad dog as saying “everyone here knows pitches are distinguishable.” Twice.
And: would you be satisfied if drad dog prefaced his statement with “Except for a small minority of people who have perfect pitch or something very close to it…”?
First, I appreciate the fact that I think you and I fundamentally agree, and I’m not intending to pick a fight with you or drad dog. It’s just that I feel that there’s a fundamental truth that’s getting trod upon here, and, well, a debate about the nature of music is both interesting, cathartic, and a low stakes way to exercise brain power that doesn’t involve politics/current events. 
When he says:
. . . there’s a logical incongruity that he has yet to make clear. What is the difference between “distinguishable” and distinguishable “from each other”? That makes no sense at all. I read that as “I acknowledge that pitches are distinguishable, but I have walled that fact off from my theory in a semantic way so that I can dismiss it as being irrelevant to my assertion of the opposite.”
Nor do I find any problem with the color perception analogy:
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While I may not be able to identify the shades mustard, canary, daffodil, and lemon by sight, I can certainly tell yellow from blue, and I concede that a painter’s choice of shade of yellow will affect the overall painting (though to what degree will depend on the observer).
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While I may not be able to identify the pitches of A4 (440hz), Bb4 (466hz), or B4 (494hz), I can certainly tell high from low, and I concede that a musician’s choice of pitch range will affect the overall piece of music (though to what degree will depend on the observer, and human sensitivity to pitch is much more muted than to color).
If pitch doesn’t matter, and doesn’t color music, then I ask again: Is a piece of music centered around a 100hz tonic not distinguishable from the same piece centered around 900hz? Will people in general have identical responses to both versions? Are people who say they prefer one or the other delusional? Do they imagine a difference where there isn’t one?
There is absolutely a question about how sensitive people (in general) might be to small differences in pitch, and there’s a lot of interesting writing (both scientific and, um, observational(?)) about it. But the insistence that a particular element of sound is not meaningful in a musical context, despite the fact that we have the physical and mental apparatus to interpret that element is on the face of it silly, particularly while conceding that instrumentation/timbre is musically meaningful.
In fact, in one sense it doesn’t even matter if you the listener have anything approaching perfect pitch. Is advertising “woo” because the target can’t clearly identify that their purchasing choices were influenced by an ad?
As a footnote: Do keys have inherent and immutable “moods”? I don’t think so; I think key moods are in the ear of the beholder, and could be based on an element of pitch recognition combined with cultural association/baggage.
OK, I think I agree with everything above.
Eonwe, thanks for the clarification. I, too, am enjoying this thread as an alternative to so much other stuff out there.
When you put it that way, I think you basically agree with drad dog (and with me). We just have a different sense of the proportions involved. Rather than using the phrase “perfect pitch,” let’s just agree that there is a continuum of responses to music. Most people regularly* perceive almost everything BUT absolute-pitch-within-a-given-octave. RELATIVE pitches – the relationships these notes create, synchronously (intervals, chords…) and diacronically (melodies, harmonic progressions…) – not to mention all the other stuff (timbre…) – OVERWHELM the miniscule effect of absolute-pitch-within-a-given-octave, for most people.
But there is a minority of folks for whom absolute-pitch-within-a-given-octave CAN be readily perceived in a variety of conditions. For them, this one thing IS a part of the musical listening experience (including emotions, etc.). At the far end of the scale are a few folks for whom this one thing is a really IMPORTANT part of the experience.
*Meaning, outside of a few experimental conditions, like the test pulykamell and I did.
If I may offer an analogy, consider the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in linguistics. This is the idea that languages can be so different from each other (in structure, grammar, tenses, and especially in “what needs to be included or not” – e.g., how in English we HAVE to mark most nouns with a definite or indefinite article), that the** language someone learns as a child rewires their brain** such that hey THINK in some ways and not in others – that it CHANNELS how they perceive the world.
This is a seductive idea that comes up over and over, but it’s mostly hogwash. Frequently cited examples (“Hopi has no past tense marking, so, like, Hopi Indians are always so present, you know what I’m saying, man? Whoa!”) turn out to be BS. Language-specific peculiarities are nearly all just accidental trappings. Most anything can be expressed in any language, and a language has only the tiniest effect on how an individual’s brain works.
I say “mostly” because, as with the experiment pulykamell and I did, there are some laboratory conditions where a miniscule effect can sometimes be observed. If you test how fast a hundred Mandarin speakers can push a button given a certain prompt vs. a hundred English speakers, the average response times for certain things mill differ by a couple of milliseconds. Whoopty-doo. Contrasting Weltanschauungs, this ain’t.
(My analogy breaks down in that there aren’t any equivalents of the folks for whom absolute-pitch-within-a-given octave really IS an important part of the musical experience.)
“Distinguishable” for me, is “Can I tell the difference when you play those notes for me, in sequence and apart from musical uses?”
Distinguishable for the purpose of music is different, because each sound is involved in a dance that carries the mind away. The force of this is in the relationships mathematically expressed in the notes, as the major factor. Hearing, and hearing music are two different things.
The painting metaphor fails because the melody is only analogous to the idea and concept of the painting, as an abstract idea, and not the physical presence. As an abstraction you are free to transpose it. It’s the element that is copyrighted. You may copyright a picture in one hue but sue over the use, with another hue. It’s still yours. You can show it in other contexts, other keys, other color temeratures etc etc. The colors in the painting are relatively unimportant. We can recognize art that is subjected to all kinds of graphic manipulation.
You can’t copyright the other aspects, other than melody, because they aren’t the thing itself. It has transposability, or ways of mathematically expressing it in other modes. Are timbre etc like that? Melody doesn’t color the music. It is the music.
What about a piece of music that is played at 1600, and then at 100? Then it would depend on what you could hear in the mix, the high guitar or somebodies froggy bottomy vocal. It wouldn’t make any difference to the musical idea.
If you are listening to a song played in a “between” tuning you will find yourself needing and anticipating the “between” scale as the resolution of your musical expectations, also called being lost in the music. If you’re like most people you won’t even be able to imagine A4 at that moment, and won’t until you are listening to a different song. So why is A4 important?
People keep saying “I know high and low when I hear it” but I can’t see how this changes the concepts.
ETA: The 1, 4 and 5 notes of the scale have been found to be native, or at least intuitive to the human mind. I never hear that it is pitch specific. We don’t find much meaning in a pitch frequency heard out of context. The musical context is much stronger, and will hold as long as the math relationships in the system hold.
I used to sing with a group that did improvised, call-and-response singing. The leader sung about a third higher than my vocal range, so I would transpose down by an interval that would let me sing along. Oftentimes, it didn’t really sound right to my ears. I don’t think I was off key, it was more like being exactly correct was not melodious. After about an hour, everyone would kind of warm up and find their own harmonies, and things would sound better overall.
This was all completely subjective, of course, and not quite the topic of whether different Western musical keys have different “characters”. IMO it may have more to do with the instruments used and their physical characteristics. However, not ruling anything out. Some musicians do swear there’s a difference, especially when using relative tunings rather than “well-tempered” or absolute interval tuning.
Welcome to the Dope, and what a great username-post combination!
If you transpose and sing the melody literally then you are out of key and it will probably sound crappy. For example, “Three Blind Mice” in C starts with the notes E, D, C. If you transpose down a major third you sing C, Bb, Ab, which against the chords C/G/C is going to be weird. This is why (in my opinion) singing harmony is so hard - you have to abandon the literal melody and sing a new one. To harmonize TBM in C, you have to start C, B, G
Also harmony tends to move between major and minor thirds below or above, or major or minor sixths below or above, or seconds, fourths, or fifths, with occasional unisons or octaves. You’re right; it’s very much like creating a new melody that rides the original melody.
Yes that is probably why it was so hard and why it sounded “off”. This was call-and-response singing, too – had one bar to catch the melody and repeat it back, and either transpose it or strain myself to reproduce the exact melody. All while duplicating the rhythmic pattern and cadence. I couldn’t quite manage to improvise a matching harmony on the spot. Maybe some day…
Please listen to this man; he knows what he is talking about.
First some disclaimers: 1) I have not read the entire thread, the post quoted above is as far as I could go without making a comment (wish I had found this earlier). 2) I am not a musician, professional or otherwise. 3) Hi Opal (brought that back from antiquity- huh?) 4) Will this board ever have a musical discussion that does not devolve into an off topic figurative slugfest that slaughters everyone’s sacred cows while ignoring the question being asked? 5) Lastly, thanks to all of you for those off-topic rants which have significantly contributed to my musical knowledge and appreciation over the years.
A number of music aficionados (mostly in the world of classical music- but not all) have assured me that Bach was the pinnacle of serious music for understanding, complexity, organization, and any other attribute one can measure. That music gets more and more complex as you go back in time, culminating at Bach, at which time it gets less complex the farther back you go (and they all praised other Classical and/or Baroque composers as well- especially your favorite!). In those days instruments were tuned differently as has been mentioned by nearly everyone in the thread, but Johann Sebastian believed each key had an emotional component. Several of my kid’s music teachers have insisted this is true (many but not all of them play a non fretted string instrument as their primary instrument so how they tune that instrument and play thirds or fifths may vary from modern tuning for all I know- but they all teach piano also and each of them has a piano in perfect half-step tune). So the greatest musical mind of all time (by their account) has sanctioned a belief that as pulykamell and others have pointed out is no longer the case.
And finally, here is how I know this to be absolutely true, at least in my case. Every morning Monday through Friday I stand at a sink and wash breakfast dishes as I listen to my kid play music (or some mornings just try to play music) while he waits for the bus. If he happens to be playing a keyboard, practicing arpeggios in major keys playing the circle of fifths, I am not hearing C Major and thinking “how childlike and innocent”. When he moves to G Major I am not thinking “rather military in nature, how different from the childlike innocence of C”. Next is D Major which never inspires any emotional difference; “This feels romantic to me [or melancholy, or joyous, or any other emotion]. As he works up to F# then jumps to the flat keys, there is really no sense of any emotion except perhaps indifference or boredom and that has to do with the musician- not with the key being played. If I feel like he is just going through the motions I have him play three octaves instead of two so he has to think a little bit. I can assure you the most emotion is when I have to tell him he is getting sloppy, he needs to slow down and practice playing it RIGHT (because he is already pretty good at playing it wrong). It is the same if he plays scales or triads or cadences (reverse motion always sounds wrong to me in every key). If keys truly had a profound and universal emotional element, the easiest place to notice it would be when they are being played back to back to back playing the exact same thing. I sure can’t hear it; I can tell a major chord from a minor chord, but no chord sounds any different from any (structurally identical) chord in a different key
When he plays his saxophone, he plays arpeggios chromatically through the whole range of the instrument. Again every major key two and about a half times, and the only way they “feel” is half a tone higher than the previous one. But I can tell stuff like: his embouchure is too tight, he is sounding shrill, or the notes aren’t as distinct at the high end, or he is growling in the middle range. As pulykamell also said, I couldn’t tell you if he started on his absolutely lowest note (a B flat in this case) or if he skipped the first one or even two half-steps. I can certainly tell if he tries to skip steps in the middle, but not so much if he skips the bottom few or doesn’t stretch himself all the way at the high end. I cannot say: “hey, you didn’t go all the way to the high A”, I can only ask “Is that as high as you can go?”
When he learned to play MY WAY, I felt he wasn’t doing all he could with the music. I explained to him that the guy in the song is dying and melancholy, and in his sadness and despair he remembers the glories of his youth and becomes bold and defiant and proud, and finally accepts his fate. After a few tries, the kid managed to make the same exact music sad, then bold, then (well different- not sure I could have read acceptance if I hadn’t been in the room when he determined what to go for). The point is, without benefit of key change, he managed to convey opposing emotions in that piece, but while playing every key he displays no specific emotion.
That makes me think perhaps the answer is self fulfilling prophesy. Maybe classically trained musicians (in some contexts) are taught the humors different keys are supposed to convey and over years and decades of practice imbue the different keys with different (technique?) which results in them sounding a certain way. Which perhaps results in them having a specific feel to them; this isn’t the craziest idea I ever had and might explain how some highly trained ears can hear a difference even if every step of every key is as exactly alike as technology allows. That seems possible in a string or wind instrument for sure, could it also be possible in the percussion mechanics of piano? Electric piano?
As far as higher or lower, one does not need to transpose to play higher or lower- just move up or down an octave. The kid was practicing with a “Worship Band” for a while and they played everything in C Major. When I asked the guy in charge if that was because every keys player starts with C, he said it was because everyone in the pews could sing in C, they only played in other keys if someone was singing a solo and the congregation would not be invited to sing that piece. As others have said, when accompanying a singer their range determines their key preference. I would think it would be very strange for a singer to hand the piano player sheet music then ask him or her to transpose it on the fly. If you want them to play it in a certain key, pay Musicnotes the five dollars and fifty cents and print a copy in the properly transposed key, or get some manuscript paper and transpose it yourself. All of the kid’s music teachers can sight read some very complex music (piano/keyboard teachers I am talking about here) and all but two of them admitted to me they needed a few minutes to actually transpose except for the most simple of music. I was also in a social group with a full university professor who complained about students showing up with some obscure piece of music that was taped together and barely legible and asking him to transpose it several steps for their audition in two minutes. He said after his first two years (when he did oblige them), he would play the asked for key in various inversions, play some grandiose flourish, give the singer a nod- then play the piece in whatever key it was written. He claimed only one student even noticed during all his years and years. I know other musicians (again keys) who have perfect pitch and can identify what key is being played and jump into the middle of a song with complete strangers having no music at all. (Most of those folks have a background in Pentecostal churches, but not all of them.) The folks who seem best at transposing to me are horn players (especially reed guys). I am told it is because they first, read intervals not notes; and second, often are looking over the shoulder of the keyboardist and playing six steps up or a full step down because they don’t play a C instrument.
Well this has become another long, boring and pedantic post. I will try to post an answer to the OP right after I post this. I have some thoughts on that topic as well, and if I can keep from thinking how that effects everything else, it might be more concise.
Nice. I used the same phrase “self-fulfilling prophecy” exactky the same way in an earlier post.
Later, the thread evolved into something else: how people with perfect pitch can associate particular tones with other things (colors, say), and this really can deeply change their experience of a song that has been transposed slightly but with all other things being the same. Like a seeing person trying to explain colors to a blind person, the posters with perfect pitch had difficulty imagining life without it — how the rest of us live.
On the one hand it’s worth noting that at the time Mattheson was writing (early 18th century) there were a variety of tuning systems in place and different keys really did have significant differences in sound (modality, if you like). On the other hand, Mattheson was a pompous git with pretensions of intellectual greatness, so his ascribing specific characteristics to specific keys should be taken with a large grain of salt. As for Schubart: an excellent harpsichordist but, again, rather fanciful of imagination.
So no, not all keys were created equal until equal temperament (for the most part), but nowadays it matters much less and, regardless, any association with moods will be entirely up to the composer and/or audience to decide.
Very interesting for a “long, boring and pedantic post.” Thank you for taking the time to write it. The only part I take exception to is the sentence “I know other musicians (again keys) who have perfect pitch and can identify what key is being played and jump into the middle of a song with complete strangers having no music at all.” I think you mean “no notes” or “nothing written”; music is what comes from you, not the black marks on the page.