From Jim Lawton
Your article gave me an idea for a way to achieve correct pitch which I have
not seen mentioned elsewhere.
It had not struck me before that people using tonal languages are actually
operating on absolute rather than relative pitch. We must sound very monotonous
to them! Not only that, but each of us speaking a non-tonal language adopts his
or her own “monotone”, that is, the pitch of my and anyone else’s voice does not
vary from day to day.
I am an amateur singer, and as the article correctly points out, many singers
and musicians without perfect pitch are able to correctly pitch melodies in
relation to a given start note. It is achieving the start note which is the
problem.
After reading the article, I realised that my natural speaking voice is
pitched at E. I then made myself a phrase, “This is the pitch for meeeeeeeee”,
and having spoken it, I can find any other start note I want relative to my
native E.
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