Hearing Music just by looking at the score file

[jeremy]

Hi,
There is a famous scene in film Amadeus of Milos Forman, that always fascinated me.
It is the scene where Mozart's wife give his music score to Salierie. This one, just by reading the score file could hear immediately all the music, as if it was played live.
I am mediocre musician, so if I can read a melody, I can hummed it in order to hear, but there is no way that I can do what Salierie is doing in film.
I would to know, if it is a fiction, or if some people are able to hear a symphony work just by reading the music.
Thanks
Jeremy

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=PGSzeHKgHfI&feature=related

http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=A5BpzmTIZMU&feature=related

[AndrewG]

Colleagues, you absolutely should not feel yourself harmed if you do not have the absolute sense of pitch. Remember that Tchaikovsky did not have it.

Well, I have it. Sometimes it hurts. First of all, I cannot hear music if I do not distinguish absolutely all notes. 1/4 or less tone differences from the standard sometimes force me guessing what I hear, which is done subconsciously. I cannot stop this. Sometimes I cannot enjoy the music only because of this. I remember what catastrophe it was in my childhood when I found that my piano is down the standard pitch. Most gramophone disks were also shifted in pitch. If you hear well relative to some basic notes of the piece, it's good enough and probably saves you from the problems I mentioned...

[Henry Butcher]

If you want perfect pitch...carry a tuning fork around with you....every where.

But, all sight reading musicians are able to ear what they see on the printed page.

[Kento]

That's the great thing about using singing as a tool for learning perfect pitch; while piano helps internalizing the keys, especially the sharps and flats, voice is a "relative pitch instrument" so there's a lot more mental work that has to happen to sightread! I found I mainly developed my perfect pitch after singing in a very good choir for a while and singing chromatically difficult composers like Jean Langlais.