DarrylZero wrote:
My situation is a bit odd, and I've never heard of anyone else with the same issue. First off, I don't have absolute pitch or tonality. Despite having a music degree and 6 semesters of ear training under my belt I have a lot of difficulty with relative pitch (well, had...I don't really use it much anymore). I can tune a guitar to itself, but I'd need a reference note to make sure it was "in tune." I can usually learn something by ear, but I generally have to use a phrase sampler I have that lets me slow down music without changing the pitch. Sometimes I can hear an arrangement and tell if something is a little off, but I wouldn't be able to say how it was off.
Here's where it gets interesting. Out of frustration I went to several of my teachers for help with this problem during office hours. One of them had a very interesting theory. He had me sing a major scale up and down. He said I had it right, more or less, but I slightly flatted a couple of notes. He said that the notes I actually sang were the same as the overtone series of the root note. He theorized that my ears were too sensitive to pitch and that I was hearing the overtones and that was making it hard for me to get a solid lock on the fundamental.
This was interesting because I remember a group practice session I had with some other students from one of my ear training classes. In the group we had a more experienced student from a higher level class acting as a tutor. During the session another student and I sang a melody. I thought I was singing the same notes, but the tutor said that we were actually singing parallel perfect 5ths (I was the one singning a 5th higher).
Has anyone heard of anything like this?
I could completely see how it would be possible to hear overtones over the fundamental. I find that it depends on the timbre of the instrument. Certain very metallic organ pipes have very pronounced overtones (volume-wise) which make it difficult for me to hear the fundamental. Carillons as well have very pronounced overtones. I could imagine that if your sense of what a note really "is" isn't based on volume relative to its overtones, that you would perceive notes the way you describe.
Have you noticed this to be different depending on what kind of notes you are singing back (i.e. the instrument type)? Have you tried doing it with just electronically-generated fundamentals (very minimal overtones)?
On a somewhat related note, has anyone else ever heard the "eternal" scale upwards? It's a series of chromatic notes that slowly morph the overtones over the scale until, at one point, you realize that scale isn't actually traveling upwards... it's just going around in circles.
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"That leap of logic should have broken his legs." - Janissy