11–12 of 12 posts
It's now possible to view all 2048 scales (but hear only one), here. (This topic reminds me of that of prime numbers in many ways.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzee0jwMqpw (Bonus mind-melter: Double Harmonic Major. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-HZXm61Cv4 )
So people with perfect pitch often complain about headaches when, say, a choir starts to lose pitch. This is because they can hear how the pitches sung by the choir have drifted away from the pitches notated on in the part they are reading from. That knowledge can apparently be quite distracting. However, I have never heard a student with perfect pitch complain or even inquire about internal inconsistencies in tuning…
People without perfect pitch (even non-musicians) can often hear that an equal-temperament major triad is a little bit more dissonant than a just-temperament major triad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcCkn0p7HDE . I don't have perfect pitch, but as a guitarist I often tune my 3rd string to be a little bit flat (relative to equal temperament), because many chords I play have their major 3rd on that string and it so…
What I'm saying is that there seems to be a disconnect between the various theories of tuning systems and the way humans perceive melodic interval distances. It seems like people who have perfect pitch do a good, consistent job of organizing their memory of sounds into frequency bins. It also seems like what they are not doing is memorizing an idealized set of integer ratios-- or even any interval relationships in particular-- and then singing those intervals back in melodies.
If they could do the latter then you'd expect them to sing those intervals in melodic patterns that end up on a frequency measurably different from where they started. People with perfect pitch obviously have the ability to know when that happens, but I don't hear them describe that conundrum. It makes me speculate that what they are doing is leaping around "frequency lily pads" from memory rather than iterating over a list of well-defined intervals.