Concepts on Voice Pitch
Voice pitch is an interesting thing to think about. On an instrument, one simply presses a key or covers a hole to create a pitch. But the human voice can create any singing pitch, including an infinite of vocal pitches in between the twelve pitches of the Western scale. In fact, if you are singing alone without any accompaniment, who can say if you are singing on pitch or singing off pitch in a real key? You might be singing in between notes!
In India, there are many many more voice pitches in their ragas than there are in our Western scales: twenty-two plus notes in an octave compared to our twelve. Thus the intervals between their voice pitches are much smaller, and one imagines that it must be very difficult to sing exactly in tune. However, since they grow up hearing music in this way their ears must be more fine-tuned than ours. I wonder if drives Westerners with perfect pitch crazy to hear such music, with so much movement between the notes, or if they find it intriguing. After all, having more voice pitches to choose from makes for a much wider harmonic and melodic expressive palette, with more room for subtlety and finesse of the music.
I wonder if people in India have a higher frequency of perfect pitch because of this? And I wonder if they are more concerned with the pitches themselves, or simply the intervals between the notes in their ragas. For example, when we play a major scale we are very concerned about whether it is C major or D major, etc.–we don’t want a major scale starting on a random voice pitch between C and C#/Db. I wonder whether it is the same with a raga.
