quantum, I just love your posts.
Two things about this conversation caught my attention. One is the assumption, or at least implication, that people with perfect pitch are automatically disturbed by hearing imperfect tuning. This is simply not true. If you meet enough people with this skill and ask around, eventually you will find some with fantastic ears who are not bothered by it. Or are bothered when they hear professionals who are out of tune, but not at all when it's beginners (nor are they upset by train whistles and other sounds of life, if you know what I mean).
Second, in or out of whose tuning? Yes, I understand about things that are just plain off. I deal with this all the time, and I'm sympathetic. But I also want to play a bit of devil's advocate, because although I have perfect pitch according to the generally agreed definition here, I also know that there are always higher possible levels of hearing, and subtler nuances of pitch to discern and understand. Plus, saying "perfect pitch" in this context doesn't cover countless other tuning systems that we don't have experience with and which would make our perfect pitch seem not very perfect.
There are tuning systems that:
(1) don't pertain to our instrument, like just intonation, used by string players and hopefully choirs. Ask most pianists to sing a real acoustic major or minor third, and see what you get; this isn't a put-down, just an example of different experiences;
(2) are not standard in modern use, like Pythagorean tuning, a popular choice in the middle ages--I don't care for this tuning, but I can't say it's wrong, although it will sound very out of tune to someone who doesn't know what it is; similarly, the many tunings used in the baroque era, not just adjusting to all the different regional A's, but also a great variety of possibilities for each interval; and
(3) are just not part of our collective Western culture. For example, classical Indian music divides the octave into, I believe, 26 notes. People who grow up with those sounds hear our Western classical music and think it sounds simplistic and lacks color, because we use so few notes. Some Eastern languages are inflected, meaning that the same syllable can be shaped in several different ways (pitchwise) and each way has a completely different meaning. Talk about perfect pitch.
Absolute pitch is the recognition of sound. Not every sound, just the ones we have experienced and understand. That leaves a great many musical sounds unaccounted for, that most perfect pitchers are unacquainted with and cannot distinquish. I don't think there's anything wrong with this, but I do think it's important to acknowledge that none of us has heard and understood all musical sounds, so we are only responding to and judging sounds according to what we know and believe, which can be extremely useful but also may be incomplete. Whether we are disturbed by the sounds we hear has much more to do with expectations, and how we feel about those expectations being unmet, than it has to do with the actual sounds themselves. And it is humbling to think about all the sounds we don't even know about, and the fact that less educated people of other cultures and experiences may be able to discern musical matters that we cannot.
In case I haven't expressed very well where I fit in with all of this, let me be very clear that I don't know ANYTHING about classical Indian music, any Eastern music, or most of the baroque tunings. I confess that new sounds seem weird and wrong to me, and I don't like hearing things I don't understand--because then do I still have good ears? I realize there are many sounds I haven't learned about and never will. Well, that about covers my thoughts. Cheers, everyone.
Topic: Absolute Pitch...?