As is the case with many of my often neglected side-projects and ill-conceived schemes, my latest project is inspired by my readings, conversations with friends and family, and the mish-mash of podcasts and video clips I regularly consume. This project resulted from a convergence of ideas around a similar theme which has been amplified by my ongoing musical activities.
I listened to a fascinating episode of Radiolab recently (Season 2 Episode 2 “Musical Language”) in which they explored the relationship between music and language and the brain. They interviewed a musical psychologist and linguist named Diana Deutsch who has done some interesting research. She has found a strong connection between the likelihood that a musician has perfect pitch and whether or not they speak a tonal language. In a bit of a cultural ass-whooping, 74% the tone language-speaking students she tested had absolute pitch compared to only 15% of the non-tone language-speaking students. There is also an awesome bit about a recorded phrase from one of Deutsch’s CD’s that sounds like music and not like spoken word. The melody of Deutsch simply saying “sometimes they behave so strangely” will be stuck in your head for weeks! If you listen to this Radiolab episode for anything, just that section makes it worth it.
I also recently read Daniel J. Levitin’s “This Is Your Brain on Music.” Levitin spends a good deal of time in his book on the importance of pitch, and how the ability to detect differences in pitch is based on physiology.
The basilar membrane of the human inner ear contains hair cells that are frequency selective, firing only in response to a certain band of frequencies. These are stretched out across the membrane from low frequencies to high; low-frequency sounds excite hair cells on one end of the basilar membrane, medium-frequency sounds excite the hair cells in the middle, and high-frequency sounds excite the at the other end. We can think of the membrane as containing map of different pitches very much like a piano keyboard superimposed on it.
In other words, pitches are physically mapped in the brain, it is not a “virtual” thing that could be different in each person’s head, which also effectively means that sounds may “sound” the same for everyone. Different parts of the brain respond to different pitches, and it is demonstrated across all members of the species. You could look at someone’s brain activity and be able to tell the pitch of the sound they are hearing just based on where their brain is active.
Now I definitely don’t have perfect pitch. But as a musician, I am curious to see if I could get it just by training my ear over time. Levitin describes a test that he and his colleague Perry Cook created to see if the average non-musician could learn to recognize and/or reproduce a note. They gave their subjects each a tuning fork and asked them to carry them around for a week, banging them on their knees and listening to the sound as often as they could. They also gave the tuning forks a name instead of telling the subjects which note they were (half the subjects’ forks were named “Ethel”, and the other half “Fred”), I assume in an effort to also personalize them. After the week was over, they took the forks away for a week and then had the subjects come in to be tested. Levitin explains, “Half of the subjects were asked to sing back ‘their pitch’ and half were asked to pick it out from three notes that I played on a keyboard. The subjects were overwhelmingly able to reproduce or recognize ‘their’ note.”
These kinds of things always get me excited, and as a result, I am now the proud owner of a set of John Walker tuning forks (thanks, Mom and Dad). I intend to train my ears this year, and see how well I can learn to recognize and reproduce different notes. I’ve already had the forks for a couple weeks, and within a week I began having some success recreating a note from memory. However, my plan does not stop at simply trying to acquire perfect pitch. It also includes a couple of other fun things that I hope you will enjoy, and, as you will see, fully deserves to be called a “project” and not just a “plan”.
Lately, I’ve been inspired by many other musicians’ song-per-whatever projects, especially Andy Berkhout’s song-per-week project. Now I am not so ambitious as to commit to write a song a week, but I will commit to writing a song in the key of the note of each tuning fork in my set (13 total C to C) in 2011. This is of course a little more than one song per month. I will do recordings of each song as well, hopefully including the talents and contributions of other St. Louis musicians.
So, allow me to introduce you to our first fork: Mr. Clarence C. Fork.
Clarence, the original C-note
Clarence is a C-note who carries a frequency of 261.6 Hz, enjoys smashing his tines on various surfaces, and fancies a daily ride in my shirt pocket. Next time you see me, please ask to meet Clarence as well.
So here is a summary of the project:
- I will train my ear on each tuning fork for at least a couple of weeks, but maybe up to a month. Tests will occur quite often and I’ll keep everyone updated on my progress.
- Each fork will receive a regular human-type name so we can all get to know them.
- I will write a song in the key (major or minor) of each note.
- Each song will be recorded and shared.
- I will try to employ the talents of other St. Louis musicians for the recording of these musical “sketches”.
I hope to have the first sketch out by the end of the month, the songwriting has already begun (Clarence is such an easy key to write in!) I’ll send out TweeTumbleStatuses with my updates.
