[HN Gopher] Perfect pitch study: Why can't we identify music not...
___________________________________________________________________
Perfect pitch study: Why can't we identify music notes as well as
colors?
Author : mzs
Score : 119 points
Date : 2021-08-31 17:23 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.uchicago.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.uchicago.edu)
| The_rationalist wrote:
| There is a drug that allow perfect pitch to be learned past early
| childhood
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about
| it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life
| while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other
| drawbacks.
|
| Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
| fjfaase wrote:
| I know an artist who has worked on creating colour palettes (for
| a living, through commissions and art works) and creating light
| art works, who claims that most people are very poor at
| precieving colours because our brains so quickly adapt to
| changing lightning conditions. His conclusion is that there is no
| such thing as absolute colour perception.
| kazinator wrote:
| We do not identify colors well.
|
| The eye is receptive to three colors, that's it.
|
| We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture
| of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas
| we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having
| harmonics).
|
| We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But
| there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate
| as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you
| think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put
| them side by side, you generally find that they are totally
| different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored
| surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not
| uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all
| directions.
|
| When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch,
| but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves.
| Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the
| result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In
| relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also,
| regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man,
| woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered.
| Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near
| to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a"
| versus a slightly lower "a".
| utexaspunk wrote:
| >We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a
| mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure
| color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of
| notes having harmonics).
|
| Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the
| difference?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't think polarity has anything to do with this. The idea
| is that we can't distinguish at all between two independent
| light waves, one at ~600nm (red) and one at ~540nm (green),
| vs a single light wave at ~580nm (yellow).
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the
| difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where
| there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as
| long as they fall on the cones similarly.
|
| Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which
| the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not.
| Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4
| is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are
| constructed culturally.
|
| The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different
| purposes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. The ear is a one-channel spectrum analyzer and the
| eye is a camera with a two very distinct regions each serving
| different purposes. Both of these then have a ton of post-
| processing done in the brain before their outputs are
| presented to higher order functions.
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| I'll agree and add one example: from a repeated sequence of
| played notes, and a repeated sequence of flashing colors - I
| can readily identify a modified note, however not a modified
| color. For context imagagine 10 seconds of a song VS 10 seconds
| of flashing lights... If on the 3rd repetition of the pattern,
| one random note was changed and one random color was changed,
| which change would be most immediately obvious?
| khazhoux wrote:
| > We may be able to point at a red object and call it red
|
| That's still better than most people's pitch recognition. Play
| any note in the C scale to a random person (even someone who
| plays an instrument and has some musical skills) and their note
| identification will be barely a guess.
| akomtu wrote:
| I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer.
| It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or
| violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do
| the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can
| hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to
| notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Harmonics _and_ base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed
| string have a completely different shape, the first is going to
| decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of
| the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly
| triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or
| open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative
| strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that
| some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes
| of vibration.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| "Base wave form" (ignoring transients and such) doesn't
| matter for humans, and how a wave is perceived by humans is
| determined by the set of harmonics it contains.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fair enough, the waveform is the relative strength of the
| harmonics. But it's a convenient short-cut to 'the whole of
| the relative strength of each harmonic as compared to the
| fundamental, as well as which harmonics are present'.
|
| A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a
| pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
| poetaster wrote:
| And modulating the string on a cello to harmonize with a
| reed is extraordinarily rich in harmonics.
| zwieback wrote:
| One of the papers quoted by this paper is something I always
| wondered about: how can anyone have absolute pitch when you can
| detune your intrument slightly, e.g. if the Oboe gives the A and
| everyone tunes to that there's no guarantee that it's 440. Not
| everyone picks 440 for A anyway so really absolute pitch has a
| basic cultural reference.
|
| Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds
| with some exposure.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or they find it _extremely_ annoying. I once played a piece
| with notes that were hanging just below or above their 'true'
| pitch and then slowly home in on it and the listener could not
| stand it and asked for it to be switched off.
|
| If you want to test yourself against it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM
|
| Enjoy :)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is basically rounding the
| frequency to the nearest pitch in your resolution. As a
| pianist, my resolution is more or less half of a semitone, so I
| can tell that a note is off, but it doesn't get _really_
| annoying until it 's so off that it's close to rounding to the
| next note.
|
| This resolution differs from person to person, mostly based on
| how they use it. I had a piano tuner visit my house yesterday
| as it so happens and his resolution was to about 10 cents. It
| was amazing.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| I had a music teacher who said that perfect pitch was when
| you tossed a banjo in a dumpster and it landed on an
| accordion that was already there :)
| zwieback wrote:
| Do you think that over time you could "re-tune" yourself to
| different pitches, e.g. if you listened to a ton of music
| that's detuned by half a semitone that eventually you'd think
| that that's the new normal? Or maybe it's something that gets
| hardwired at a young age and then you're stuck with it?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I'm probably too old for that, but yes.
|
| Actually I'm now in my 50s and perfect pitch starts going
| south as you get older, at least for me and a number of
| others I know. I easily get locked into thinking things are
| a half-step lower than they really are.
| davepeck wrote:
| This tracks exactly with my experience. I'm in my 40s and
| my pitch is definitely no longer perfect -- it's close,
| though? It's not uncommon for me to be semitone off these
| days.
|
| Is this a studied aspect of perfect pitch? I've never
| read about it but, talking to friends, it seems like a
| common experience.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I had some fun with my piano tuner to 'check' his tuning
| using a stroboscope for each individual string (not a choir)
| after he was done and it was quite amazing to see how
| accurate he was. And what blows me away is how fast an
| experienced tuner can work, what would take me hours - and
| with tremendous fatigue in hearing afterwards - takes him 1/2
| hour and with much better results.
| joegahona wrote:
| What is your reaction to some of the historical-tuning
| recordings that have proliferated in the past decade or so,
| especially on piano? Do you see aesthetic value in those
| tunings, when taken as a whole piece, or are you so locked in
| to equal temperament that it's irritating to hear alternative
| tunings?
|
| I have a pretty decent relative pitch but not perfect
| pitch... to me these tunings sound interesting but I can't
| say I derive any more pleasure from them. Sometimes they give
| me the feeling of not quite having my footing underneath
| myself. They're more of an oddity.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Those tunings are not so off as to be annoying, so I don't
| really have much of an opinion of them except to think that
| they're kinda silly. Other tunings (like 31 EDO) I just
| can't handle.
| joegahona wrote:
| Never heard of 31 EDO till now. Indeed, pretty brutal
| even for this non-perfect-pitch person:
| https://youtu.be/hLjnNflnvEQ
| layer8 wrote:
| On the other hand, we can't see color intervals and chords.
| jacobolus wrote:
| We can't identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all
| relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a
| visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of
| one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant
| training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be
| learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in
| isolation is just as difficult.
|
| (Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs.
| color identification, because the physical mechanisms and
| resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can
| reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red,
| Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal,
| and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when
| you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there
| are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular'
| Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a
| practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a
| standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones
| has no real equivalent in color.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably
| distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green,
| Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and
| to add Black and White allows for all the grays.
|
| If you're not deaf you should be able to distinguish between
| wide swaths of the scale too. Especially once you give the
| swaths names and get used to that.
|
| > It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder
| because there are many more variations than there are notes
| on our 'regular' Western scales
|
| Not if you stick to pure single wavelengths. You could divide
| that into a mere 50 colors and I doubt people would have a
| chance at naming them reliably.
| dhosek wrote:
| For all we know, there may be an equivalent light octave to
| the sound octave (mathematically it would make sense). The
| catch is that the frequency range of visible light falls
| entirely within a single "octave," but then if you think
| about the color wheel which puts red next to violet which are
| at opposite ends of the color spectrum and it suddenly makes
| sense.
| jacquesm wrote:
| In fact it would be only about half an octave.
| dhosek wrote:
| Unless I've done my math wrong, it's roughly a doubling
| of frequency between the two ends of the spectrum, that
| makes an octave. From Wikipedia: "A typical human eye
| will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to about 750
| nanometers.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to
| a band in the vicinity of 400-790 THz."
| mikewarot wrote:
| There are 88 notes on a piano, but there are at least 2000
| pantone colors... I'd be surprised if there are more than 10
| people total who can correctly match them all.
|
| The difficulty of both problems is understated.
| AfterShave wrote:
| While the farnsworth-munsell 100 hue test is definitely
| doable. I'd love to see a bigger test just for the hell of
| it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'd be surprised if anybody would be able to do the color
| test.
|
| At the same time: even if people can't tune a piano they
| can usually fairly reliably tell when one is out of tune.
|
| But more impressive than absolute pitch to me is to be able
| to identify a four-note chord at once.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A piano is particularly easy to tell if it is out of tune
| because most notes have multiple strings. They beat
| against each other horrendously when one of the strings
| is at a different frequency than the other. If all the
| strings for a single note were out of tune by the same
| amount most people would think the piano was fine.
|
| Can most people tell when a guitar is out of tune? A
| guitar so badly out of tune it plays different notes is
| recognizable by almost everyone, but a guitar only a
| little out of tune would not be noticed by most, IME.
| lhorie wrote:
| The weird aspect about our perception of colors is how our
| brains interpret them _relative_ to nearby colors (e.g. https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:C...)
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, but that's optical illusion territory, similar things
| will happen with music, there are all kinds of acoustical
| illusions:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
|
| As well as the 'missing fundamental' I linked to in another
| comment in this thread.
|
| If you pick some Jazz piece apart it isn't rare at all to
| come across a chord that sounds absolutely awful. But then
| you play the piece as intended and it all makes sense
| within the larger context of the notes/chords/intervals
| around that chord. This never ceases to surprise me.
| nautilius wrote:
| How do you explain optical phenomena such as the viral dress
| phenomenon then?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres.
| ..
| nitrogen wrote:
| Part of that was variations in displays. Cheap laptop LCDs
| especially crush white levels and black levels if not
| viewed from exactly the right angle.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That is based on the color of the illumination and this of
| course affects the perceived color. It's the difference
| between emitted and reflected light, but in the case of a
| comparison with musical notes it would be fair to only use
| emitted light.
|
| There is no exact equivalent to reflected light with its
| own color illuminating a colored drawing. Though it would
| be interesting to see if such a thing could be constructed
| somehow artificially using a device that receives sounds
| and then somehow frequency shifts them before emitting them
| again. That would be a fun experiment!
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > It's the difference between emitted and reflected light
|
| Wat?
|
| Everyone who observed that optical illusion did so by
| observing it on an emitted light panel.
|
| Color perception is entirely relative. There are
| countless images that demonstrate this. For example:
| http://www.optical-illusionist.com/illusions/same-color-
| illu...
|
| When we perceive emitted light color we're also
| perceiving RGB emissions that are blended. I love giant
| LED panels that when you get close you can clearly see
| the individual colors. It's a trip.
|
| Humans are horrible (incapable?) at evaluating absolute
| color. It's entirely relative.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah ok, that's simply an optical illusion. The brain is
| full of pre-processing that you can mess with in order to
| trick it to see things that aren't there and to shift
| colors around as well as to play with figure-background.
| But that is a case of 'bad faith', you could do the same
| for audio illusions, it wouldn't help to draw any further
| equivalence between the visual and the auditory system.
|
| Both work on the perception of waves with a certain
| periodic repetition but there the equivalence ends, there
| is no such thing as 'timbre' in vision, we simply don't
| work with harmonics there and the shape of the wave in
| sound is very important and non existent in vision (you
| can see a single photon in sufficiently dark adapted
| conditions, your eye as a fundamental particle
| detector!).
| nautilius wrote:
| You may want to amend your original statement "Of course
| we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can
| reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors
| [...]" then, because clearly that's not the case as you
| state yourself.
| ikura wrote:
| I think a Ring Modulator might have some equivalence.
| Depending on the frequency you set it to the ability to
| accurately detect the frequency of the input notes can
| diminish quite drastically.
| nautilius wrote:
| But then still everyone would have the identical
| misconception. Clearly, that was not the case.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Even if we can reliably identify 12 unique divisions of
| spectral color, that's still very different from the 12
| semitones in Western music, because the 12 spectral colors
| would span the entire range of human spectral color
| perception, whereas the 12 semitones repeat every octave, and
| humans can hear up to 10 octaves.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a
| baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone.
|
| It's when you start trying to distinguish the same type of
| sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless
| trained, ideally from a young age).
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick
| out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes.
| However, this is much more difficult if not nearly
| impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre
| changes can even differ between two semitones depending on
| the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B
| on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B
| is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st
| position.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, this is very clear on wind instruments where the
| timbre can change substantially from one note to the
| next. The saxophone is notorious for this, it is
| technically a woodwind and it is absolutely unplayable if
| you don't tune the individual notes as you play them, you
| have to use your embouchure to get the notes to match
| pitch. Especially noticeable when playing with other
| instruments.
|
| https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-
| staff/2020/1/30/...
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from
| middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of
| course that only works for the range that I can whistle.
| pimlottc wrote:
| "Everyone can do it, aside from those who can't"
| Grustaf wrote:
| Brightness is not related to colours, and while colours are
| "relative" in the sense that colour perception is influenced by
| context, it's still the case that you can accurately identify
| lots of colours in an absolute sense, given a specific context.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You can also accurately identify a lot of sounds, given a
| specific context.
|
| But if you had to identify colors with the same precision
| that you expect someone to identify pitches to be considered
| to have "perfect pitch", it would be very difficult for
| almost everyone. If you took random chips from the
| Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test, one at a time, and had to
| give the correct numerical code for each hue, you would not
| be able to do it. (Which is why the test itself only requires
| that people put the hues in order when comparing them side by
| side, not identify each one absolutely.)
| Grustaf wrote:
| I mean you can easily identify 5-10 absolute colour
| frequencies, but how many can identify even a single
| absolute tone?
|
| Ordering things in relative order isn't very relevant to
| this discussion I think, since the point was about the
| difficulty in detecting absolute sound frequencies. And of
| course, anyone can put all the notes on a piano in relative
| order.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Identifying 5-10 absolute colors is similar in difficulty
| to being able to identify whether a note is bass,
| baritone, tenor or soprano. Which anybody who knows what
| those 4 words mean would be able to do.
|
| Except for border or overlapping notes of course. Giving
| them one of those would be like expecting cyan to be
| consistently labelled as blue or green.
| Grustaf wrote:
| "bass, baritone, tenor or soprano", that's only four
| categories, that's much less than 10. And I would guess
| that timbre will play in here as well, since the human
| voice is pretty restricted. A bass is not just a
| frequency shifted soprano.
|
| Play a note and ask someone to reproduce it after ten
| seconds or so. How close would people come? Then show
| them a card with a certain pure colour and then ask them
| to reproduce that with a hue slider.
|
| Don't you think people would come much closer with the
| colours?
|
| Don't confuse language and perception, we are not talking
| about labels such as "cyan" here, that's not directly
| relevant.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I'd do a lot better at reproducing the
| note.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The difference between red and blue is half an octave in
| frequency. So 4 tones is about right.
| sfink wrote:
| Heh. Personal anecdote: at 10 seconds I would do as you
| expect, but if the gap were longer I would do much better
| with sound.
|
| I discovered relatively recently that I simply cannot
| remember colors. My vision is fine, and my short-term
| memory for colors is also fine. If I'm in a room and you
| ask me to close my eyes and say what color the walls are,
| I can do it. But if you ask me the color of the wall of
| my bedroom, where I go every night, then I will only be
| able to tell you if we recently painted it and verbally
| discussed paint colors. (I think it's a shade of blue? Or
| maybe green. Possibly gray. My family likes to pester me
| with this question, so you'd think I would memorize the
| answer at some point, but I haven't.)
|
| I'm kind of curious how common this is. But since I lived
| several decades without noticing it in myself, I wouldn't
| be surprised if it wasn't very well recognized.
| watwut wrote:
| People will fail the pure color test and that is all
| there is to it. They will know it was light blue, but
| won't be able to choose correct light blue. Nad they will
| sux even more with mixed non-primary colors.
|
| Reproducing visual properties is much harder then you
| think.
| Grustaf wrote:
| There is no "fail", it's just a matter of how many
| colours one can distinguish, vs how many absolute tone
| frequencies.
| watwut wrote:
| Infinite amount of both. But there is also issue of
| remembering which is not as easy as people assume and of
| comparing.
|
| And of light conditions and context affecting your
| perception. And so on.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Infinite? Not at all, we're talking about identifying
| absolute frequencies here, not just telling them apart.
| For sound I'd say it's less than five, for colour perhaps
| a dozen.
| roberto wrote:
| > If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a
| visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12)
|
| Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
| spiraling_shape wrote:
| The visual light spectrum starts at around 380nm, if we
| arbitrarily assign that to be "C", and we ascend(ascending
| wavelength, descending frequency) from that with the same
| 12-tone "equal temperament" used in music we get:
|
| C 380
|
| B 402.595975856532 ~violet
|
| - 426.535578357562
|
| A 451.898703701034 ~blue
|
| - 478.769998960052
|
| G 507.239144584613 ~green
|
| - 537.401153701776
|
| F 569.356689213139 ~yellow
|
| E 603.212399747916
|
| - 639.081275592823
|
| D 677.083025786658 ~red
|
| - 717.344477638087
|
| C 760 infrared
|
| With 760 being one "octave" below 380, though the visual
| spectrum ends at around 740, which means the visual light
| spectrum is a bit less than one octave.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If your ear had only 3 types of detectors which only
| detected 3 specific frequency distributions within about
| half an octave but could locate stimuli within your field
| of hearing with pinpoint accuracy, after a lifetime of
| using that equipment you would probably be able to make
| relatively fine distinctions in pitch in that very limited
| range.
|
| Instead, the human cochlea contains thousands of little
| pitch detectors spread over 10 octaves, and the perceptual
| architecture and typical training built around it is
| designed to detect relative pitches (e.g. noticing the
| difference between two different people's voices more
| strongly than the absolute frequency of the fundamental
| pitch of either voice).
|
| Eyes and ears just have fundamentally different physical
| mechanisms and we make sense of visual and auditory stimuli
| in fundamentally different ways. They are not really
| directly comparable.
|
| In both cases, however, our perception is strongly context-
| relative.
| nwatson wrote:
| But yellow isn't necessarily just a spike at 569.356...
| There are plenty of other combinations of frequencies that
| together will stimulate the green- and red-cones enough to
| create a perception of (nearly?) the exact same yellow.
| spiraling_shape wrote:
| Right. I put the tildes before the color names to
| indicate that they are "around here".
| mhh__ wrote:
| Memorising pitches as Colour (or concepts, to be less sycophantic
| to the title) can actually be a good way of "feeling" the notes
| of a scale.
|
| Perfect pitch is the one thing that really makes me jealous in
| music. Unless you have a lot of tuition, technique requires a
| certain amount of luck in terms of finding the right habits and
| obsessions, but I can work out how I would improve - pitch
| however is totally off the table unless you have from an early
| age.
| ltbarcly3 wrote:
| Didn't read, but isn't it obvious?
|
| - We have several chemicals in our retina's that respond to
| specific frequencies of light according to some curve. They are
| calibrated. There is no such calibrated mechanism for how you
| detect sounds.
|
| - We actually suck at identifying colors. Every 5 year old has
| seen the 'shadow' optical illusion where two parts of a picture
| are exactly the same color and they look totally different.
| srcreigh wrote:
| The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different
| sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a
| female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
|
| Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to
| determine exact rgb values of a color.
|
| What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks
| still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to
| 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if
| this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is
| something deeper there.
| Grustaf wrote:
| > Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a
| female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
|
| That's about timbre, not pitch.
| srcreigh wrote:
| That's my point. I believe red vs blue is more like violin vs
| voice than A440 vs Exyz.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But it isn't. To make it a bit more specific:
|
| Red vs Blue is ~700 nm vs ~475 nm (about because they are
| ranges rather than specific frequencies where most people
| who are not vision impaired will agree something is either
| red or blue).
|
| Violin vs voice is more like 'triangular wave form with f,
| 2f, 3f, 4f, etc as the harmonics and voice would be 'mostly
| sinusoidal waveform with a bunch of vocal 'chords' acting
| as strings each of them with a sligthly different base
| pitch, with those same harmonics.
|
| But if you were to compare for instance to a reed
| instrument the harmonics would look completely different.
|
| Some singers by the way are capable of controlling their
| vocal chords in such a way that they can create rising and
| falling pitches at the same time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas
| srcreigh wrote:
| Although I concede and agree with you on a basic level
| that base frequency is more like color than timbre, there
| are some other interesting factors.
|
| One. Almost all instruments have different timbre
| depending on the pitch. At least at large scales, your
| voice's deepest note does not have the same timbre as
| your midrange, or your highest note. Similarly with
| pianos. I wonder if this is also true on a micro level
| between A and B on a piano?
|
| Two. As I mentioned above, perfect pitch folks _don't
| recognize sine waves as well as piano notes_. Why? That's
| very curious.
|
| In any case, I was also going to mention that musical
| notes are interesting because they loop. A is 440Hz and
| 880Hz. I was expecting to find something like 2x blue
| frequency = yellow, which would highlight a difference
| between color and sound. However, interestingly, that is
| not the case. The entire visible spectrum of light is
| within one "octave" of frequency. Fascinating... :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, it is fascinating, highly recommended book about
| sound:
|
| "The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus.
| akomtu wrote:
| 7 octaves above cover the UV spectrum and 7 octaves below
| cover the IR spectrum. I guess our eyes could see 14
| octaves with 50 instead of 3 sensors per pixel.
|
| A more practical solution is a separate device, I mean
| organ, that works like our ear but for em waves: just one
| "pixel" but with lots of sensors and complex
| postprocessing to detect harmonics. This way we could
| hear em waves.
|
| Such a device can be built, actually.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not octaves. An octave is a doubling of frequency. When
| you go seven octaves below 'red' you are much, much lower
| than IR and when you go 7 octaves above blue you are
| _way_ higher than UV.
| akomtu wrote:
| Am I? 7 octaves above 400nm is 3-4nm, somewhere between
| extreme UV and x-ray. 7 octaves below 700nm is about
| 0.7mm - the end of IR and beginning of microwave
| spectrum. Unless I'm really missing something in my
| calculations.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It's not though, red and blue have specific frequencies,
| just like a 440 Hz sine has.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, red and blue have a 'range' where most people will
| agree on what's red and what's blue. They are not exact
| frequencies but frequency bands that have been culturally
| defined. You can most easily see this in green, there are
| 100's of 'greens' but we call all of them green.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Sure, but we are still talking about bands of
| _frequencies_, not sets of harmonics (although there are
| colours that are not pure). So it would correspond to
| identifying 440 Hz with a tolerance of N Hz.
|
| And we are not talking about colour naming, we are
| talking about colour perception. So the situation would
| be "here's a particular green colour, please find a patch
| from this heap that has the same colour."
|
| I mean, just because the word "green" is very broad
| doesn't mean we can't _see_ the difference.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course we are not talking about harmonics, the first
| overtone of 'red' would be a bit above ultra-violet and
| invisible.
|
| And as for green, yes that is the best color to do that
| test with because we have the biggest discriminatory
| capability for green. And most people would be able to
| distinguish with a large degree of accuracy an
| increasingly high frequency shade of green given similar
| intensity. But once you start varying the intensity and
| the hue at the same time I think people will get confused
| quite rapidly as to which shade has the higher frequency
| hue.
|
| Color is much more 'loose' than sound, that's why we
| 'tune' our instruments and why painters don't necessarily
| need to 'tune' their palettes so precisely to be able to
| make something that looks harmonious.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Sure, it's complex, but the basic point still stands.
| Most people will probably be able to accurately identify
| 10-20 different colours, if we fix the luminosity etc and
| they are given cards with each colour.
|
| When it comes to sound though, even many musicians won't
| be able to find even a single absolute note, even if we
| fix the timbre, intensity etc.
|
| So colour and sound are definitely fundamentally
| different, which I don't find very surprising, there are
| few situations in the wild where it would help us to be
| able to distinguish absolute frequencies, timbre is more
| important.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is known as timbre is technically the degree to which
| certain harmonics are present or not.
|
| The most interesting case of this is the missing fundamental,
| which we apparently re-create in our heads to hear it even
| when it isn't really present!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
|
| This really threw my for a loop while building my mp3->midi
| convertor.
| Grustaf wrote:
| I know what timbre is, that's my point. The difference
| between a violin and a piano is not about frequency.
| ogma wrote:
| And their point is that timbre is determined by the
| intensity of the overtones, which are frequencies.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Who says we can identify colours well?
|
| Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception
| of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly
| opened my eyes, pun intended.
|
| As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to
| play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the
| skill unfold.
|
| Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as
| distinct as different people's voices.
|
| The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's
| "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then
| FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...)
|
| I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another
| level.
|
| I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that
| there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even
| imagine until one begins to acquire them.
|
| I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs
| so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I
| can sort of see what that must be like.
| ThomPete wrote:
| you can learn relative pitch not absolute pitch. Absolute pitch
| is only possible before 3 years old or something like that.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| There is some indication that valproic acid makes it possible
| for adults, though
| (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/)
| gerbilly wrote:
| Prove it.
|
| This is just argument by assertion.
| tralarpa wrote:
| Maybe 3, maybe 6, maybe 9. Different sources give different
| numbers. But "there are no known cases of an adult
| successfully acquiring [Absolute Pitch]" (from the
| Valproate paper).
| jacquesm wrote:
| He's not in your pay.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Yeah, and I don't have to take his word for it either.
| swalls wrote:
| Absolute pitch may not be possible to learn as an adult, but
| what they're describing is having good pitch memory, which is
| different from absolute/perfect pitch, and is definitely
| something you can develop with a bit of practice.
| dylan604 wrote:
| you keep replying with this like it is absolute. why do you
| feel so strongly about this "fact"?
| dekhn wrote:
| This is, in fact, current mainstream scientific position.
| There is a lot of distinction in abilities between absolute
| and relative.
|
| What I personally experienced is there are some individuals
| who can identify specific notes down to the unit frequency
| (I played a 439Hz tone, the person said "Uh you're a hertz
| short" and I fixed the bug in my program). That level of
| ability is generally believed to be not learnable after the
| brain loses a certain amount of plasticicity.
|
| Continuing from my own experience, people who do not have
| absolute pitch at that level can improve their skills in
| pitch detection including: identifying intervals,
| identifying octave, identifying common notes in an octave,
| and people like me who can barely tell you the interval
| between two notes can improve their pitch detection
| somewhat.
|
| Whta is rarely or never observed it people with relative
| pitch gaining perfect absolute pitch after growing up,
| regardless of the amount of training.
| gerbilly wrote:
| > rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch
|
| This seems like hair splitting to me. You even refute
| yourself by including the word _rarely_.
| dekhn wrote:
| human physiology is not self-consistent, nor is the
| language I use to communicate those facts./
| dylan604 wrote:
| > and people like me who can barely tell you the interval
| between two notes
|
| And a musician probably couldn't tell the difference
| between = vs == or & vs &&. If you don't recognize that
| someone that spends all of their time doing something
| will be better at that something compared to someone
| else, then there's just a large disconnect. Also, the
| concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new
| concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of
| a concept.
| chatbot2 wrote:
| As someone who studied music throughout school and played
| for quite some time, there is clearly be something innate
| about perfect pitch. I think a good allegory is people
| who can multiply giant numbers in their heads easily
| (previously referred to as "idiot savants" though that
| term sounds ridiculous now). While the rest of us can
| certainly practice and improve our multiplication skills,
| we'll always be missing some connection that allows them
| to do so effortlessly.
|
| The link below is a study which shows that the
| distribution of pitch recognition among the general
| populace is bimodal (you have to scroll down a bit). This
| matches with my experience that, irrespective of
| practice, people either have it or they don't.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
| mannykannot wrote:
| You do not have to experience the difference between = vs
| == or & vs && in order to learn it - in fact, that would
| be a difficult way to go about it.
|
| This is an issue in the interminable debate over Frank
| Jackson's "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment,
| where anti-materialists seem to think that if you cannot
| learn what it is like to learn what seeing colors is like
| from a science book, then materialism must be false.
| Presumably they would hold the same position over
| learning perfect pitch.
|
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
| dylan604 wrote:
| >You do not have to experience the difference
|
| Except, I think every dev on here knows from "learning"
| the diff between =/== yet has had the typo error in an if
| test where == was meant, but ended with a single =. Yes,
| it gets much easier to know why things are misbehaving
| after experiencing it enough, but it did require that
| experience to really "learn" it.
|
| Same with any skilled trade. You can learn it by watching
| or reading, but the real learning comes from the doing
| repetitively. Some might call this practice. Pilots call
| it hours on stick. Devs with enough of this are called
| senior. Of course there are people that are naturally
| gifted with skills that will excel more than highly
| practiced people, but that doesn't mean practiced people
| can't get to the same levels.
| mannykannot wrote:
| We have all done that, even though we _do_ know the
| difference (we really have learned it, not just
| "learned" it, and if asked, could explain it.) What you
| learn from this experience is merely to pay close
| attention.
|
| What makes a pilot or dev 'senior' is mostly a
| combination of a sense of what is normal (and which
| deviations are significant), and good judgement. While
| these are skills learned by experience, they still can,
| to a degree, be _communicated_ in language, but skills
| like perfect pitch can only be _described_ in language -
| if you get it wrong, no-one can explain what you could
| have done to get a better outcome.
| fn-mote wrote:
| > You do not have to experience the difference between =
| vs == or & vs && in order to learn it
|
| My experience with one kind of "magical skill" that
| software engineers have is: someone reports strange
| problems with some application (that you did not write).
| You watch them reproduce the buggy behavior and you see
| one step which seems "off" - not what you would have
| done. You try the same process but with the step you
| think seems right and it works. Person goes off happy
| that their problem is "fixed".
|
| Now of course this is "learned" but in a whole-systems
| way that just looks like magic for someone from the
| outside. It's not an exact parallel, but I think it's an
| interesting one.
|
| (Sorry I don't have a concrete example, but it happens
| with some regularity. Like "I think you should let the
| cable modem power up before turning on the other devices"
| or "That screen seems to be flickering a lot, have you
| tried swapping the power cord to the other side." or "I
| don't think you should be crossing those cables, try
| running them all parallel." All little by themselves,
| magic together.)
| ivanhoe wrote:
| > Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is
| not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so
| shocking of a concept.
|
| It seems you really wish to believe anything can be
| mastered at any level, but it's just not true - no matter
| how disturbing that might sound. In pretty much any kind
| of mastery you can improve to some point and then your
| learning curve starts getting into the saturation due to
| your various genetical and psychological limitations.
| Your gains start getting smaller and smaller, and since
| life is limited it also limits what can be accomplished
| during it. People who were born with certain
| talent/predisposition will always win in that race
| (presuming they also work as hard as you), simply as they
| start off from a better starting position. You can't just
| decide as an adult to become a new Usain Bolt or Jordan
| or Novak Djokovic. If you haven't already started
| training hard as a kid it's just too late for you, no
| matter how much you wish it. And perfect pitch is just
| another extreme example of that as it seems to be closely
| related to the phase of speech development in kids, which
| ends when we're 8-11 years old. Try to pick up some
| foreign language that you know nothing of, just by
| listening and watching people use it, without any other
| help. And then compare your progress to a 2 or 3 years
| old kid who does the same seemingly effortlessly, even
| with the most complex languages in the world. Rick Beato
| has an interesting theory that kids can be directed to
| develop the perfect pitch by exposing them to a lot of
| advanced music with complex harmonies and scales, as the
| brain - he believes - treats music same as speech and
| recognizes the pitch of a sound as encoded information.
| But again it works only with kids. From what I've read
| about it there's no a single case known that someone
| beyond doubt proved to have had trained themselves a
| perfect pitch hearing as an adult.
| empeyot wrote:
| "In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary
| adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child
| passes about six years old [...]. (Although [...] there are
| exceptions of sort [...])" in Prof. Anders Ericsson's book
| "Peak" in which he presents results from his research area of
| expert performance. He also quotes a published study in which
| childs aged 2 to 6 consistently were taught perfect pitch: "A
| longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute
| pitch: A practical report of training with the 'chord
| identification method'"
| hirvi74 wrote:
| You can apparently get Perfect Pitch from the medication
| Valporate, according to some study years back. Though, I do
| not recall how effective it was. It was significant enough
| to be detected though.
| MandieD wrote:
| I wonder how much overlap there is with the ability to
| easily gain native-level proficiency in a language. We're
| raising our child bilingual, partially because no one
| should learn German from me (started in college, speak well
| enough to get through life, but everyone knows I'm a native
| English speaker), but I'd be ok with our child learning
| English from my husband, as he speaks well enough that
| Americans think he's British. His mother, who also learned
| in high school and university, taught him for a maternity
| leave year at age 4, then left it to the school system,
| which didn't expose him to English again until he was 10.
| His younger sister does not speak English nearly as well as
| he does. I'm quite sure that early exposure is why he
| doesn't have a German-sounding accent when speaking
| English.
| mr_toad wrote:
| > Who says we can identify colours well?
|
| We don't really. We have three receptors that respond to
| different wavelengths (plus black and white) and our brains
| stitch together a composite image.
|
| Animals can have fewer or more receptors, and see more or fewer
| colours. Just like a person who is red-green colourblind, and
| sees them as the 'same', some animals and even rare people can
| see different colours where we see only one. We are all
| effectively colourblind to some extent.
| adyer07 wrote:
| The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me -
| it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus
| musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint
| (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate
| _relative_ color, not _absolute_ color. Learning to look at an
| apple and see warmer /cooler bits of red, for example. As the
| article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and
| then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in
| between.
|
| There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson,
| mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder
| what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into
| two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously
| through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities,
| each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when
| that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other,
| filtering out effects due to changing light sources and
| qualities.
|
| That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can
| tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at
| filtering out common timbres.
|
| I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine
| wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same
| position.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sound perception is _extremely_ parallel at the physical level,
| each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid
| filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer).
|
| Your characterization is not in line with how things actually
| work.
|
| > I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine
| wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same
| position.
|
| I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than
| identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical
| level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct
| (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum
| analyzer).
|
| But isn't the result a curve that can be expressed as the
| simple superposition of waves? That simply can't be done for
| vision. (edit: without breaking time by encoding scanlines -
| which is just serializing it.)
|
| > I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than
| identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
|
| I'd take it. I'd imagine it'd be as easy to train somebody to
| recognize 12 pitches from a particular piano in a particular
| room as it would to train someone on sine waves. But my point
| was it'd be easier to train them on either than on pitch in
| general, from many different instruments with different
| timbres.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Some people can identify music notes as well as colour. One
| should note that colours perception may also essentially differ
| from one individual to another. Early training works wonder for
| music. Colours are everywhere, and most people can see, whereas
| most people don't train to recognize individual notes. That skill
| is not that useful, including for trained musicians. Most people
| can agree that the sky is _blue_. However, a trained painter may
| be able to see much more nuance.
| mywittyname wrote:
| There is a training aspect to identifying color as well. People
| from cultures without the name for a color group have
| difficulty identifying a color as distinct without a name for
| such group.
|
| Heck, even people from the same cultures will disagree on the
| classification of the same color experienced in the same
| situation. Remember the dress controversy a while back? People
| couldn't agree whether or not it was black & blue or white &
| gold.
| Grustaf wrote:
| > One should note that colours perception may also essentially
| differ from one individual to another.
|
| Sure, but most people can reliably and predictably name some
| dozen colours.
|
| > That skill is not that useful, including for trained
| musicians.
|
| If people in general had had perfect pitch, music might have
| looked different from today. Absolute pitch would probably have
| been an important feature. The reason it isn't important is
| precisely because most people can't perceive it.
| laurieg wrote:
| I recently learnt to differentiate notes in a scale using an
| app[1]. Basically, you listen to a few chords for musical context
| and then you hear a note and have to choose which note it as.
| When I started I couldn't do it at all. After a few weeks I was
| able to tell which note I was hearing pretty reliably.
|
| I think the analogy to colours is absolutely correct. There's no
| calculation in my brain when I hear one these notes. I just hear
| it and think "That's a third". It feels exactly looking at a
| colour and thinking "That's red".
|
| The fact that the identification is not a conscious thought leads
| me to believe that learning notes by relating them songs and
| musical phrases you know is probably not the best way to do it.
|
| Note: this is not learning absolute pitch/perfect pitch. It's
| 'just' relative pitch, but having gone from not having that
| ability the change was quite large and quick.
|
| [1]
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fe...
| sirwitti wrote:
| I studied musicology with a focus on perception of sound.
|
| As far as I understand it, we evolved to be able to perceive
| distinct colors because it's relevant to distinguish surfaces
| from another visually.
|
| For auditory sensations on the other hand rough pitch estimations
| sufficed but relations between pitches (think of hearing 2
| pitches. you probably won't know the exact note or frequency but
| have learned to recognize patterns in the relations between them
| - e.g. musical intervals) which comes down to periodicities in
| the signal turned out to be a lot more relevant or helpful.
|
| As to why we needed to be able to relate pitches to one another:
| Without looking up literature on the topic I hypothezise that it
| might be a byproduct of the way we calculate a single perceived
| pitch out of a harmonic frequency spectrum.
|
| When hearing a note that is not a sinus wave in the frequency
| spectrum there are at least parts of the multiples of the base
| frequency.
|
| Since we do something like frequency analysis by detecting
| periodicities our brain tries to determine a single pitch for the
| signal, which it does by calculating the base frequency of
| harmonic spectrum (this works even of only part of the harmonics
| are availabe.).
|
| In order to do that the processing needs to treat the base
| frequency differently than the overtones.
|
| Since overtones roughly correlate with western musical intervals
| and we needed the processing to get extract them. We might have
| gotten relative pitch perception and part od what is music as a
| byproduct.
|
| Anecdata for this: Try determining the existence and intervals of
| notes when the higher note is an octave or an octave and a fifth
| above the first one (1st and 2nd overtone). Depending on the
| instrument this can be quite hard.
|
| Disclaimer: These are my interpretations / theories, but since
| I'm not working in this field, the literature might tell a
| different story.
| hkopp wrote:
| Ich you are interested in that kind of stuff, you may want to
| check out Rick Beato on Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato
|
| I never expected that one could process music so effortlessly,
| until I saw some of his videos. E.g., in some of his videos, he
| listens to a melody once and can then immediately play it on
| guitar or piano. If you want to dip your toes, I recommend
| starting with videos of the "What makes this song great" series.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Without having read the link, one obvious answer is that colour
| vision helps us tell what plants are ripe, but detecting absolute
| frequencies probably has little survival value.
| toast0 wrote:
| A shared understanding of what colors are what helps us
| communicate as well. Of course, some of that is reinforcing,
| but I would never tell people I'm at the house where the
| windchime rings about a middle C; but I would tell them I've
| got a white fence and a red door.
| chmod600 wrote:
| A lot of optical illusions seem to play with relative color, so
| are we really so good at identifying absolute color?
| yesenadam wrote:
| Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find
| it _so_ weird that most people don 't have perfect pitch! As if
| you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite
| seeing them all your life.
|
| Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes;
| hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the
| notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same
| time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians
| don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they
| manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They
| develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a
| fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't
| think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just
| know what the interval is.
|
| Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to
| accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an
| instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when
| you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by,
| you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc.
| Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce
| the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the
| illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the
| fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental
| pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to
| hear.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| >musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like
| that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't,
| I'm not sure.
|
| Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome
| different limitations.
|
| Every instrument only has so many notes it can play.
|
| There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students
| where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the
| neck on each string. Simple and not an actual _musical_
| exercise.
|
| It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest
| beginners before they even have much musical material under
| their belt to even practice or rehearse.
|
| If you are not already playing every note of your instrument
| every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the
| notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have
| been missing.
|
| They've been missing you.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We're _terrible_ at identifying colours, because colour is
| context dependent. Which makes it easy to create colour illusions
| like these:
|
| http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm
|
| We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled
| conditions.
|
| No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers,
| commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such -
| minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-
| calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled
| ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.
| swayvil wrote:
| As for the "Why". Speaking as a guy who meditates.
|
| We usually don't actually perceive stuff. Sights, sounds,
| thoughts, smells.
|
| What we perceive is a reaction to the actual perception. Or a
| reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Down that chain a bit.
| Ending, more or less, with an idea.
|
| Those reactions are like a fog between you and the actual
| perception.
|
| When we concentrate, or meditate, or otherwise get a clearer,
| closer look at the perception, we see it in an uncommon way.
|
| We see the "truer" form. And much that was hidden becomes
| evident.
|
| This is the main power of the artist, musician, athlete,
| scientist.
| akomtu wrote:
| There's no shortage of casually meditating "gurus" here who
| confuse their opinion with wisdom. It would be more honest to
| preface such "revelations" with a humble "such and such book
| says that..."
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is
| based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between
| the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you
| divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them
| (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think
| you'd see very similar performance.
|
| Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even
| _that_ good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
| watwut wrote:
| Significant proportion of population is color blind to some
| extend. The rest sux about identifying colors too, just somewhat
| less.
| twirlock wrote:
| Perfect absolute pitch would not be convenient for certain types
| of creativity, e.g. improv. It's not conducive to an
| understanding of modality.
| poetaster wrote:
| No one has mentioned microtonak music. The breadth of perception
| on the continuum becomes more similar between sight and sound
| when you discriminate more. Think the carnatic system. Or Harry
| Partch. Or the oud. Modal music in microtunings gets very
| colourful.
| lmilcin wrote:
| We can't identify colors accurately either. As various
| paradoxical pictures show. Color is something created inside our
| brain using context information (additional information about the
| scene).
|
| Gray can become black or white depending on what is around, and
| so other colors can change.
|
| Photography is my hobby and I have a small project with idea of
| making photos interesting solely by manipulating context to
| change meaning of color in the photo.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| I've found that the only unteachable component of perfect pitch
| is the ability to internalize music in tune. If you can do this,
| you have perfect pitch. The ability to identify the note, or
| intervals, or the components of chords is all done through
| mnemonic devices.
| pjdorrell wrote:
| Some observations:
|
| * The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our
| ears is absolute.
|
| * Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to
| calculate relative pitch.
|
| * Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical"
| skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the
| musical quality of music.
|
| Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as
| an "amazing" skill.
|
| But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should
| be amazed by is relative pitch perception.
|
| My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists
| because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute
| pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical
| function.
|
| It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute
| pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative
| pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to
| distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a
| deep rumbling sound.
| patrakov wrote:
| The summary says that the timbre plays an important role in
| recognizing the notes. I partially agree with this observation,
| but on the piano, there might be something else than the timbre.
|
| Some years ago, I played the "perfect pitch" flash game
| (http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.sw...
| , still playable if you download the swf and then submit it to
| https://ruffle.rs/demo/ as a local file). Even though I am not a
| musician, I quickly learned to identify the notes on the medium
| difficulty level, and often guessed the first note in the session
| correctly. BUT, I did not only use the pitch to guess the note.
|
| In that particular game, the pre-recorded sounds of the piano
| notes show some non-even volume envelope, or some other way they
| change their sound over time, unique for each note. So I learned
| that a "meow-meow-meow" must be an E, and a note that acquires
| some rattle at the end must be a D. I even reported that as a bug
| - only to get an email that a piano does sound like that. Of
| course this knowledge is useless for pure tones, or short-enough
| notes that are not given a chance to "meow" or to rattle, or, in
| fact, for anything else than this game.
| psychometry wrote:
| >They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a
| dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have:
| Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum.
|
| Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article.
|
| I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for
| notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as
| hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes.
|
| I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three
| or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative
| pitch and chord theory.
|
| I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I
| could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
|
| There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the
| things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've
| seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing
| mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in
| bizarre 15-note chords.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect.
|
| > I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I
| could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
|
| But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that
| initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from
| there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a
| random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one
| reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that
| one random note and getting it to within some tolerance.
|
| > I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants
| doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note
| in bizarre 15-note chords
|
| That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same
| time these savants often seem to have to have given up
| something else.
| poetaster wrote:
| The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid
| fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is
| always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on
| sax.
| dhosek wrote:
| The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really
| tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer
| ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so
| that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that
| key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered
| twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered--I
| had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and
| things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the
| church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to
| playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on
| organ.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It
| all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period
| correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with
| other instruments.
|
| There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing.
|
| A great piece of open source software for anybody that is
| even remotely serious about this:
|
| http://piano-tuner.org/
| kqr wrote:
| What fascinates me about this topic is that both "absolute pitch"
| and "absolute colour recognition" is essentially cultural.
|
| We are born with perfect pitch but lose it when we don't use it.
| How our culture uses and names colour determines which we can
| perceive absolutely.
|
| The point is they're more similar than they seem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > We are born with perfect pitch
|
| I know there are some studies on this but it's far from
| conclusive enough to state this without any further qualifiers.
| I suppose you are indirectly referring to the study referenced
| in this article?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford
| itronitron wrote:
| There are also individual differences in how people perceive
| color (not just how they label them), even among those who are
| not color blind.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening
| expertise of most people.
|
| Isn't naming CSS colors also beyond the visual expertise of most
| people?
|
| Granted there are more CSS colors than there are keys on a piano.
|
| Still-- give me a color scheme with 80 distinct colors and I'll
| give you poor scores of test subjects.
| dhosek wrote:
| I had the "misfortune" of having a friend in high school who was
| preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify
| pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex
| arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, _that_ time), he was
| sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of
| manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing
| the "Get Away" break from Chicago 's "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" by
| playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then
| repeating the process.
|
| My take away from this was that this was something that either
| you could or couldn't do and there was no in-between.
|
| Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of
| demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being
| produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7
| days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for
| rehearsals.1 By the end of the process, I was transcribing
| straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a
| piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I
| could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song
| that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head.
|
| So, it is a learnable experience.
|
| But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly
| losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear
| implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my
| ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In
| researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone
| deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the
| hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to
| recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case
| with a CI.
|
| ------
|
| 1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from
| my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and
| brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music
| at rehearsal.
| lhorie wrote:
| > I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of
| a song
|
| I've seen this being described as _relative pitch_ , which is
| apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to
| acquire via practice.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch.
| While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute
| pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if
| done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely
| indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it
| becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians
| are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period
| of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones.
|
| In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than
| absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as
| people get older and because it works better in ensembles since
| A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque
| performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard.
| Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind
| instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on
| chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major
| thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment).
| Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments
| since it feels wrong.
| tbihl wrote:
| > because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a
| reference pitch for a very long period of time.
|
| Not just highly skilled ones. I just checked, and I still
| have my A-flat 2 reference note that I've been carrying
| around since 2013, having not used it for at least 5 years
| and barely doing any singing/piano these days.
| tstrimple wrote:
| How do you know? I don't mean this in a challenging way.
| Just that I'm completely ignorant to how one would even
| test these things.
| strogonoff wrote:
| To test whether your memory of a pitch is correct, you
| can just sing a note then listen to a reference sound in
| close succession. Absolute pitch ability is not required
| to tell whether pitches match.
| jimmaswell wrote:
| Can't you just listen to a song you know well in your
| head, and be aware what the notes are?
| alfonsodev wrote:
| the reference note needs to be listened in your ear to
| check wether the note you are imagining matches the
| reality, if it does then you can confidently (if you have
| trained it) find the intervals.
| noduerme wrote:
| Fascinating remark. I don't have perfect (abs) pitch and
| never heard of the relative variety. But I grew up playing
| piano, mostly on my own time, which means I'm extremely
| comfortable playing anything I hear in C, and just slightly
| slower at repeating things in A#. My brain has to transpose.
| But now I play pedal steel slide, and I have a trick to
| picking up any song quickly. I find the root chord of a song
| and intentionally forget what it was... so I'm not playing in
| F or A. I remap my brain at the start of that song to
| _remember that tone as C_. And then I can find everything
| without thinking about it. If I think "where's the 7th of
| C#" I'd have to do a few steps in my head. But once I've got
| the hands synced with an artificial idea of "C" I know
| exactly where my options are. So in a way it really may be
| better than perfect pitch, because I can remap a song's scale
| to a keyboard in my head and then strum one or two times
| between songs and "remap" the "C". I realize that makes me
| uh... hahah not Mozart. But it works to let me forget what
| I'm playing and just play.
| hashhar wrote:
| This sounds very similar to how DAW (digital audio
| workstation) software has features to "transpose" pitch.
| You essentially just move one of the notes to where you
| want it to be and all other notes get transposed relative
| to it.
| BeniBoy wrote:
| Same experience here with a pedal steel. That's why I am
| now pushing my bandmates to adopt the Nashville Notation
| System which only deals in relative position of chords in
| the scale[1].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System
| noduerme wrote:
| Hah! I love that there's another PSG player on HN who
| gets this right away... that's awesome. I never heard of
| this system specifically... I feel like a singer holding
| up 3, 4 or 5 fingers has been the way I've been cued lots
| of times to changes in a song I barely knew, without me
| even thinking that was a system. I bet they didn't
| either. Separately, I know zero music theory... but PSG
| really was what let my brain get comfortable with a 3rd
| of a 4th being a 6th that was two frets down from the 5th
| of the root... I think probably engaging your knees and
| ankles in reaching for the physical positions in time
| builds almost like a muscle memory of the musical
| relationships... like the kind of control you get driving
| a manual car... but only if you already have the tones
| you're looking for in your head, and you know where
| you're going. PSG is the most mindbending realtime puzzle
| to play... so it makes sense that players need tricks to
| know where to go from a certain position (especially if
| you find yourself stuck in one when you jump into a song)
| cameronh90 wrote:
| So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or
| Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted,
| even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped
| up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too
| long.
|
| This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute
| pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
| shannifin wrote:
| This supports the article's assessment that "it may be
| better thought of as a continuous spectrum." Long term
| memory for the key or opening note of a particular song
| seems to be a more widespread skill than naming the pitch
| class of a pitch without such context. From wikipedia:
| "People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular
| songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV
| themes have been shifted into the wrong key." https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re...
|
| See also: "The Levitin Effect"
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI
| gavinray wrote:
| Time-stretching algorithms like Elastique/ZTX make up for
| the change in time by compensating and keeping a neutral
| pitch
|
| AFAIK, in most audio/visual software tools used by
| professionals, this is baked in and so you'd have to
| purposefully pitch-shift it up and make it noticeable for
| this to happen.
|
| IE, when I mess around in REAPER, and my song is set to
| 110BPM, listening to/dragging in a 170BPM loop keeps the
| exact same pitch (nearly, it's quite amazing) as the
| original it's just stretch/compressed to fit into 110BPM.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| While true, it is somewhat tangential to what I'm talking
| about.
|
| The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was
| stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.
| CheezeIt wrote:
| Huh, I just tested out tThe Simpsons and yeah, I got the
| key dead on.
| jcheng wrote:
| Wow!! I just tried it too and nailed it--I certainly
| wasn't expecting that!
| ThomPete wrote:
| i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch
| after the age of 3.
| [deleted]
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3
| other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?
| CogniDizz wrote:
| There is also the valproic acid study where the window of
| the critical period appeared to be reopened in a two week
| study of 24 adult individuals.
|
| Valproic acid is used as an anticonvulsant and mood
| stabilizer, thought to enhance brain plasticity, and
| (unfortunately) can cause big problems in livers.
|
| When there is greater understanding of the pathways
| affected there could be safer options for re-entering the
| critical period after the window has closed.
|
| (edit: age of critical window discussed in the study here
| - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013
| .0010...)
| dsego wrote:
| Probably Rick Beato.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Heh. You'll enjoy this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fuXCBJLKc
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It is possible, but it requires some native talent and a
| painful amount of practice.
|
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-
| may-...
|
| https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-
| pitch...
| benzible wrote:
| Rick Beato disagrees, although he puts the limit at 6 yo,
| not 3... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM
| The_rationalist wrote:
| There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do htt
| ps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010..
| .
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > perfect relative pitch is completely learnable
|
| Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
| Bud wrote:
| The same way it's taught if you go to music school.
| Practice. Have music played to you, and write it down.
| Start with very short pitch sequences; this will require
| you, of course, to learn to recognize intervals accurately.
| Then move on to longer and more complex sequences. Lather,
| rinse, repeat.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I used to have a music teacher who taught me to practice by
| associating the openings of common songs with each interval
|
| I've forgotten most of them now but the Jaws theme "duh-
| duh-duh-duh" is a minor 2nd, Twinkle Twinkle little star is
| a perfect 5th, and "my bon-" of My Bonnie Lies Over the
| Ocean" is a major 6th
| klodolph wrote:
| Practice transcribing music. There are also simple ear
| training applications you can get for your phone. Relative
| pitch is a fairly simple concept, so there's a
| proliferation of apps that teach it, at least to a basic
| level.
|
| It's also common to have a library of songs in your head
| that start off with each interval. Everything from "Fur
| Elise" for the minor second, to "Somewhere Over the
| Rainbow" for an octave.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've put some links in a comment below to help with pitch
| and interval training.
| pvarangot wrote:
| If a beginners point of view is useful, let me tell you I'm
| using Ear Trainer on iOS and was using Complete Ear
| Training on Android, I've only been doing it for like six
| or eight months with a break in-between. I went from
| nothing to being able to recognize m2, M2, m3, M3, P4 and
| P5 upwards and I'm working on m3/M3 downwards and
| harmonically now, usually with 85%/90% accuracy. I can also
| tell major from minor 7th chords apart with like 70%
| accuracy and tell the major and minor scale and their
| pentatonics apart upwards and downwards with above 80%. All
| this with different root notes, same root note is way
| easier.
|
| If you are interested in transcribing I would recommend a
| teacher. My girlfriend can arrange live on piano and has
| insanely good absolute pitch and she helped me on moments
| of extreme confusion and frustration that I wouldn't have
| gotten out of on my own. Also I have a tuner app on iOS
| that plays a reference pitch and also tells you what
| interval you sang, it's called TonalEnergy Tuner. I didn't
| need to sing until I got into learning downwards intervals,
| and I think I would never would be able to learn those
| without being able to sing do re mi in tune. Singing for
| some reason really helps you "imagine" and remember tunes.
|
| On the same amount of time I am now very seldom but
| sometimes able to transcribe very simple synth lead
| melodies to my synthesizer, as I was also learning basic
| sound design in parallel to this.
|
| One year ago I didn't even know you could learn absolute
| pitch as an adult, I'm 37. I'm completely mind blown by the
| fact I learnt what I learnt so far and sometimes I just
| don't believe it happened and am scared it will just like
| completely go away or something because it's like a very
| alien thing for me to be able to do. I don't even know what
| my objective is but it's probably being able to musicalize
| things in my mind and being able to jam with friends.
| bitwize wrote:
| I've been told I have fantastic relative pitch (but not
| perfect pitch) and it's exactly as you describe. For me, it's
| the theme to Super Mario Bros. I _know_ what that sounds like
| in my head, and I know also that it 's in C major. Taking the
| root of that will get me within epsilon of middle C, just
| from my head (I can also take the E or G from the first six
| notes), and then I can reckon whatever note I'm listening to
| on the C scale. I suspect most instances of "perfect" pitch
| are this skill, honed to a much greater degree.
| nefitty wrote:
| Oh wow. This is an amazing life hack. I can hear the SMB
| song perfectly in my head, and now other sounds in my
| environment are clearly falling on one side or the other of
| that C. This is going to help a lot with my writing!
| Akronymus wrote:
| > I know what that sounds like in my head
|
| as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune?
|
| For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice
| approximating it.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Nice one. Somehow I've never chosen a C reference. That's a
| good one.
|
| I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me"
| for D, E.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing
| your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present
| day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears
| ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only
| very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment
| of music.
| smegger001 wrote:
| i wonder how long until they can match average default human
| hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed
| it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the
| sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the
| peripheral auditory system. If we were to exceed human
| hearing would people then get implants without a medical
| need?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing
| changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop
| perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it
| keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function
| of the various components of the cochlear channel getting
| stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not
| sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to
| recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear
| win already.
| jbarham wrote:
| I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it
| prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken
| up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh that's great to hear. I'm slowly losing my hearing and
| to know that there are solutions that work even with music
| now is super good. Do you happen to know how many channels
| your implant has and whether it has any particular tricks
| up its sleeve? Maybe make & model?
| jbarham wrote:
| I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many
| channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing
| the number of channels doesn't have a significant
| difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be
| simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real
| smarts are in the external processor, which is custom
| programmed or "mapped" for each recipient.
|
| I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it
| sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main
| benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and
| the batteries last longer.
|
| Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally
| a last resort since implanting them will usually remove
| any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear
| has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors
| will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to
| augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids
| before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is
| almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that
| does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies.
| Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf.
|
| Hope that helps.
| jeffwass wrote:
| Thanks for this information, I've been recently going through
| some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what
| they are able to pick out.
|
| Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music
| now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ?
|
| Also which implant model do you feel is best for music
| listenability?
|
| My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is
| very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She's still getting
| used to the new way of listening post-implantation.
| [deleted]
| davidjade wrote:
| I can relate to this as something I never thought possible
| either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr)
| I've made progress that almost feels magical.
|
| I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some
| prior music education as a child) but never had a solid
| grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out
| of thin air at all.
|
| For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the
| results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard
| work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with
| who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them.
|
| Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not
| absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms.
| It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it
| feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks.
| It absolutely can be a learned skill.
|
| Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book
| covers they are anything but that.
|
| https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-train...
|
| There are 5 books in the series.
| asimpletune wrote:
| That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a
| very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around
| that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always
| people who didn't really put any time into music that would
| talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic
| gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I
| perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their
| kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people
| who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's
| just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100%
| accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff
| all the time.
|
| Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who
| were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who
| just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it.
|
| In general, I would say that people who don't really do music
| are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate
| musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always
| the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth
| is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't
| really make all that much of a difference in the end, after
| practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things
| that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the
| real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have
| that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it
| in whatever aspect you please.
|
| And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano
| is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the
| _character_ of the sound.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like
| to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out
| polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if
| he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I
| say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not
| because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is
| that he has fun making music (which he does).
|
| There is a similar thing about music theory where people from
| the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something
| you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it
| after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all
| that much about a particular piece of theory until they need
| it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that
| they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the
| theory behind it.
| zoomablemind wrote:
| > ...There is a similar thing about music theory where
| people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it
| is something you cram some theory for and then you can go
| and make it after you pass your exam...
|
| Theory offers some shortcuts, like circle of fifth, chords,
| composition, rhythmic patterns etc. which one could of
| course discover personally, but if there's any focus on a
| particular style of music, then there's a respective theory
| package for learning that, just like with any craft.
|
| In any way, practice and really doing it, while it's still
| fun, makes the real difference!
|
| Btw, perfect pitch is a nifty shortcut too. I can imagine
| an excitement of being able to read store signs easily for
| the first time, it probably could be that liberating with
| the perfect pitch (guessing here).
|
| ...Just to eventually find oneself drowning in the sea of
| meaningless text around our lives, just as a miriad of
| music sources may turn into a meaningless yet pervasive
| cacophony.
| retsibsi wrote:
| > The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but
| it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the
| end, after practice.
|
| The people you are comparing, though, are mostly people with
| at least a moderate 'knack' for music; those without it are
| unlikely ever to make it into the 'after practice' category,
| because it will be too frustrating and unrewarding to
| continue for the long haul.
|
| > If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make
| music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's
| fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please.
|
| I don't think this is necessarily very distinct from talent.
| Skills that come relatively naturally to us are usually more
| fun to practice than skills we can only make slow, halting,
| unimpressive progress at.
| ackbar03 wrote:
| I'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played
| saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have
| anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a
| pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I
| thought that was pretty badass
| dylan604 wrote:
| I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like
| this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it,
| and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes.
|
| Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing
| the transcribing was still more talented than I.
| DennisP wrote:
| Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of
| reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without
| anything to compare it with?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note
| (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably
| detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is
| higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any
| random note. So identification without some kind of extra
| mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some
| tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano
| takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to
| develop that skill because it would be very useful.
|
| There are some interesting websites for this:
|
| https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
|
| https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
| a9h74j wrote:
| Rick Beato on YT tells stories of musicians realizing that they
| are losing their perfect pitch.
|
| Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training
| around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable
| skill.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord
| progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a
| bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower
| than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing).
| They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct
| what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive
| knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I.
|
| Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of
| work in transcription because unless the piece is doing
| something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an
| equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you
| just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest
| of it can usually be inferred.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord
| progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a
| bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower
| than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing).
| They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct
| what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive
| knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I.
|
| Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of
| work in transcription because unless the piece is doing
| something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an
| equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you
| just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest
| of it can usually be inferred.
| leoc wrote:
| Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of
| perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 .
|
| Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
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