Perfect Pitch And Color Blindness
- Posted by Daniel Flück on March 25th, 2006 filed in Thoughts
Gareth writes about the Perfect Pitch and tells a very nice analogy between a perfect pitch and color blindness:
There is a very good analogy to perfect pitch - that it is like seeing in colour instead of being colourblind - but it is still just an analogy. When you look at a picture and see a colour such as pink, can you tell me how you know it is pink and not, say, bright orange? No, you can’t. You just know. Similarly, I hear G and I hear that it has all the qualities of G-ness. That’s all. It doesn’t cause bright purple spots to float around that tell me it is a G.
I like this analogy very much. But head over and read the whole article at Dusk Puppy.
Further Reading:
Gareths article about Perfect Pitch
Wikipedia: Perfect Pitch
March 26th, 2006 at 0:10
Daniel, have you read the book, “The Man who mistook his wife for a hat” by medical scientist, Oliver Sacks? Excellent reading. One of the cases he discusses is of an architect and artist who gets knocked on his head and loses his color vision. He is initially depressed, but in a year’s time he has forgotten what it was like to see in color, and moreover, his visual acuity is dramatically improved. He then draws exclusively in black and white.
March 26th, 2006 at 18:01
Thanks for the tip Murli. It sounds really interesting. And as I didn’t order a book for quite a while I think I head over to Amazon and get it - I hope it’s good brain food :-)