Just saw Minority Report

[arib]

It was a fun movie, with some plot holes.

John Williams must have scored this around the same time he did Episode II, as there were several similar themes, and a few cases where there were phrases in the music that were identical.

After mentioning this to my folks, Mom suggested I get tested to see if I have perfect pitch, as she didn't catch it, and she has much more musical training than I do. How does one get this done?

Comments

[kayre]

You can pretty much figure out for yourself. First thing in the morning, *before you have heard ANYTHING musical* (even musical interludes during the news), pick a favorite song that you have on CD and hum the first few notes (out loud-- if you just think them, you'll convince yourself you were right), then start the track and see if you're right. If you can do that consistently, you have very good pitch memory, and could learn from there to identify individual notes.

Of course, this is only relevant to the 'identical phrases' issue if they were in the same key. Williams does have a fairly limited musical 'vocabulary' so it would be no surprise to find that he's using identical short phrases, or even longer passages. He's wonderfully talented, of course-- he just doesn't have a broad range of styles.

˝

[hakamadare.livejournal.com]

well, it depends on what you mean by the term "perfect pitch". i've most commonly heard that term used to mean "the ability to correctly identify the frequency of a given tone", i.e. if i play a note on a (correctly tuned) piano, and you say "oh, that's A above middle C", and you're correct.

perfect pitch tends to be much more a curse than a blessing to musicians (though it's damn useful if you're a piano tuner), as non-digital instruments are rarely if ever perfectly in tune. it can make it very difficult to play in ensembles (in which it's more important to be in tune with the other musicians than it is to be absolutely in tune).

what i suspect you may have is good relative pitch (which is far more useful than perfect pitch). relative pitch is the ability to correctly distinguish intervals, i.e. the "space between" two tones. melodies are made up of intervals, and being able to tell intervals apart is critical to being able to write or perform music.

(incidentally, ari - how much music theory have you had? is this all stuff you know already? if so, i apologize for boring you.)

if you want to be tested for relative pitch, just ask me next time you see me, and i'll sing a bunch of intervals for you and see how you do (of course, if there's a piano handy, that's even better). i certainly don't have performer-quality pitch, but i can generally do well enough for something like this.

-steve

[cellio]

I recognized some of the music in Minority Report and I haven't seen Episode 2. I think there are phrases he just uses a lot.

Perfect pitch probably isn't what's at work here. What you have is a good memory for phrases -- maybe melodies, maybe the underlying support structures. This is somewhat orthogonal to music training -- training can cause you to improve this skill, but it shows up as raw untrained talent too.