All I can speak from is my personal experience, and my experience has been
that 1) my relative pitch is very good as well, and 2) I don't know anyone
with perfect pitch who doesn't also have good relative pitch (though I
think someone brought up a friend of a friend during this thread who had
absolute pitch but poor relative pitch).

I don't know if this is because perfect pitch and relative pitch are
intrinsically correlated, or because they're both strongly correlated with
playing and listening to a lot of music.  But I certainly don't know anyone
who can name two simultaneous sounds as being a C and G but has to think
about it before naming the resulting dyad as a perfect fifth.

Chris Bonds wrote:

>One thing we havene't yet touched on is the effect of AP on the hearing
>of modulations.  If a composer uses a particularly remote modulation (I'm
>thinking now of a sudden twist to F# minor toward the end of the last
>movement of Brahms's D minor violin sonata) one would need a sense of
>relative pitch in order to appreciate the drama; otherwise one key is
>just the same as another, right?

On the contrary, different keys sound very different.  F# minor has a very
different timbral quality to my ear from D minor.  If I had to nail it down
with words I'd say that F# minor is more raspy and metallic and D minor is
more soft and stringy.  Of course everyone has different associations (at
least I don't see orange-blue with purple flecks like Messiaen).

I suppose my assertion is that absolute pitch does not hinder relative
pitch; if it does anything, it helps it, since it's easier to internally
represent musical events.

>But conversely, some absolute pitch may be of help in nailing down REALLY
>distant-in-time key relations, for example in the a capella part late
>in Verdi's requiem where the chorus sings the opening "Requiem, requiem
>eternam" not in the original key of A minor but 1/2 step higher in B-flat
>minor.  It's a chilling moment made more so if one "feels" the key change.

Agreed.

I think I may have already said this the other day, but to me the assertion
that absolute pitch can make it harder to hear what's really going on in
the music is analogous to an assertion that being able to spell makes it
harder to appreciate good oratory.

Dan Schmidt | http://www.dfan.org