[HN Gopher] Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire ab...
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Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch
(2012)
Author : marcorentap
Score : 269 points
Date : 2023-04-29 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com)
| Tade0 wrote:
| I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons
| growing in a certain pattern?
|
| When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too
| loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something
| akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a
| sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase
| wheel using your hand.
|
| It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in identifying pitch,
| because the distortion would just sound differently depending on
| pitch - I associated it with a few notes and could roughly
| identify them - especially the lower ones (E, D and C#
| specifically).
|
| The effect faded over time and now I can't do it any more.
|
| In any case, non-newtonian fluids exhibit such distortion and the
| body is full of them(most notably blood). I wonder if they play
| any role in this?
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech
| impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear,
| confirmed by tuning fork.
|
| From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian
| or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number
| of engines it had without looking.
|
| My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my
| left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, and it
| sounds like water is perpetually in my left ear.
| stevekemp wrote:
| I used to recognize cars by their engine-noises, and hear
| bats when I was walking home through various parks late at
| night up until I was early twenties.
|
| These days too much loud metal, and age, have taken their
| toll, and I have no ability to do either of these things any
| more.
| tomcam wrote:
| That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank
| you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute
| sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and
| friends and it's a hard thing to explain with no one else
| notices.
|
| For me however it's a largely positive experience. I am
| hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds,
| voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed
| digital music.
|
| On the other hand, musicians playing or singing out of tune,
| gives me a visceral response, and I have been down to leave
| clubs when a musician is having a slightly off night.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising)
| misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above
| average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point
| where artifacts from music compression bother me that much.
| I don't have an official testing result to prove or define
| this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice
| things in the ambient sound environment that most others
| either don't notice or tune out, and this has at least as
| many downsides as benefits.
|
| If someone is a loud chewer, or drink slurper, it's as if I
| can hear every single bit of muscle and conjunctiva flexing
| and saliva sloshing around inside their jaw, and the glorp
| glorp sound of their swallows, if we're both in an
| otherwise quiet room. Or if there is a car alarm going off
| or dog barking three blocks away, sounds other people
| appear to be completely unaware of or passively filter out
| can sometimes drive me into quiet boiling stress that is
| completely irrational yet impossible to reason myself out
| of, and i just have to leave.
| tomcam wrote:
| Exactly as you describe. Agonizing but it sounds insane
| to people so you can't say anything. I excuse myself from
| social situations more than once a week.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Oh, this is a _fun_ (deep-fried sarcasm here) thing to
| have, ask me how I know.
|
| It's not well researched, but apparently what you (or
| actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response.
|
| I started using it to gauge whether I'm upset with a
| particular person over something, because it would
| intensify in such cases, and reflect on that.
|
| Also helped my friend manually remove breath and lip
| sounds from a recording he was doing for an indie mod for
| a game because, well, with enough compression it was
| painful to listen to for me.
| tomcam wrote:
| > apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a
| fight-or-flight response.
|
| OK I can come out of the closet. These sounds provoke a
| kind of panic inside me, but I never connected it to
| fight or flight. Feels very right to me.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I see red. I'm surprised I had any friends in school,
| because I was just awful to people.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| The only known condition for hearing one's eyeball move is
| a 3rd window somewhere in the inner ear, so there's no
| meaningful differential diagnosis. I received a formal
| diagnosis by an otolaryngologist (via high-resolution CT of
| the superior canal) and audiology but I already knew the
| conclusion.
|
| I could get brain surgery and I'm "a good candidate" for
| it, but do I really want a surgeon cutting a large hole in
| the side of my head, jacking up my brain, and then packing
| my superior canal with my spare tissue*?
|
| * I flatly refuse to have tissue implanted that isn't my
| own.
| aphexcx wrote:
| What you heard is likely a rare hearing disorder called
| Diplacusis or Polyacusis - aka hearing additional erroneous
| pitches:
| https://www.neilsperlingmd.com/blog/2018/05/everything-you-n...
|
| I've had it in my right ear ever since being exposed to a loud
| engine for 9+ hours in 2021. It gets noticeable for loud
| sounds, especially in the 3700-5200hz range; in my right ear,
| I'll hear a high-pitched ringing overtone on top of whatever
| external I'm hearing. It's quite frustrating, but seems to come
| and go. Nice to hear that it faded over time for you - gives me
| hope!
| Tade0 wrote:
| I think it was three years before it stopped being unpleasant
| and another three that made it largely go away.
|
| I remember designing an amplifier circuit for a college
| project, listening to the output sine wave while looking at
| the frequency domain and thinking "that unpleasant feeling is
| just the THD being over 0,5%".
|
| Fingers crossed for your recovery!
| Infernal wrote:
| I'm really curious about the circumstances of a loud engine
| for 9+ hours. Were you involved in auto racing or something?
| seanhunter wrote:
| Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other
| things. People learn to identify the pitches because they sound
| different and learn the names for them.
|
| Nerd note: the name "Perfect pitch" is something of a misnomer
| because the frequencies the note names refer to is a social
| construct which has changed over time[1]. A=440 is the
| predominant concert pitch now but since "pitch taste" generally
| gets brighter/sharper over time A=443 is used now by the Berlin
| Philharmonic for example instead as a concert pitch. In the
| Baroque period we know (from looking at surviving fixed-pitch
| instruments like historical organs) that their reference A was
| generally a bit flatter than that but it's not consistent.
| Nowadays musicians playing historically-informed performances
| have settled on A=415 as a common baroque pitch standard
| because it's helpful for everyone to agree so they can have
| instruments made that play that pitch standard.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch...
| bmitc wrote:
| > Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other
| things.
|
| Is that true though? I had a friend in college who had
| perfect pitch. I asked him all the time how he learned it,
| and he said he didn't know. It just started happening. He
| never explicitly trained for it.
|
| It also wasn't just about notes. He could nearly
| instantaneously tell chords and keys from the radio or going
| to the symphony. I would test him using my guitar as well, an
| instrument he didn't play.
|
| It's quite rare to obtain skills by never practicing them.
| [deleted]
| kortilla wrote:
| He practiced somehow if he knew the names. You can practice
| a skill without being trained.
| kayson wrote:
| I don't think "pitch taste" is a good way of describing it.
| It's not about the pitch itself. It's about the timbre.
| Musicians wanted a brighter sound, which they could
| accomplish, for example, by tightening their strings a little
| more. I personally really like a darker mellow sound and very
| much enjoy the 415 A and historically informed performances.
| I also think pushing to a 443 modern A is stupid and tune all
| my ensembles to 440. There is a little practical bonus to
| starting higher, though, which is that it helps mitigate the
| tendency of pitch to drop over the course of the piece.
| overgard wrote:
| I've heard that some people with absolute pitch lose it as they
| age (50's and 60's), but they tend to lose it in a weird way.
| Apparently, they still have absolute pitch in a sense, but it
| just kind of shifts over time so it's a little offset. It'd be
| like if you could still see color, but all the sudden your blues
| started to look purple or something like that. Curious if anyone
| with absolute pitch can confirm.
| troupe wrote:
| If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach
| children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them.
| They practice by associating a different colored flag with each
| chord.
| cvg wrote:
| Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color
| rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each
| key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have
| this same color, key association.
| cosarara wrote:
| But not every synesthetic person sees the same colors for
| every key, right?
| altairprime wrote:
| I have a step in my fashion work where I pause and consider
| what the colors I'm selecting will look and feel like to a
| normal person. Converting back and forth between
| [optimistic-seaglass-springtime] and "teal" isn't very
| accurate, but I'm certainly accustomed to it. I'm going to
| try this technique soon now that I know about it; as I'm
| already color sensitive to pitch, I suspect the value will
| be in training that sensitivity rather than memorizing
| their hues.
| j7ake wrote:
| Anybody got a link to the article ? Or can summarise what the
| chord identification strategy is ?
| Willson50 wrote:
| https://sci-hub.ru/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html these seems to describe
| it.
| adverbly wrote:
| Is there software available for training this?
| somenewaccount1 wrote:
| What is absolute pitch?
| bjoli wrote:
| I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony
| orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week,
| achieve and sustain perfect pitch.
|
| I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice
| it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note
| was to put in in relation to my own voice.
|
| Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful),
| I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.
| freedomben wrote:
| How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I
| can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about
| it not being possible)
| 49531 wrote:
| There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and
| then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note
| is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error
| learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of
| create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use
| a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others
| out there.
| sparky_z wrote:
| That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a
| standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being
| able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself,
| without hearing the 1st note to reference from.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have
| acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for
| 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the
| pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked
| long-term.
| C-x_C-f wrote:
| I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around
| I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the
| standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that
| strategy makes sense
| [deleted]
| ska wrote:
| There is some good evidence that children whose first
| language is tonal (e.g. chinese) develop perfect pitch at
| much higher rates than those whose is not (e.g. english).
| This strongly suggests that at least if you catch it at the
| right developmental stage, it is learnable.
|
| I haven't seen anything equivalent for learning later in life
| though, although ear-training exercises clearly make your
| estimation better if you are disciplined about it, but that
| is relative, not absolute.
| diydsp wrote:
| There are a handful of Android apps. Some use samples. Others
| have addl ear training exercises that are even more useful
| than PP.
| vnorilo wrote:
| Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My
| "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what
| each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately.
|
| For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I
| will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a
| reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the
| perfect pitch folks do.
|
| Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you
| said, it is not that useful.
| psutor wrote:
| Same here, also as a former bassoonist - each note on the
| bassoon has extremely unique timbre, and I find it very easy
| to identify them.
|
| No perfect pitch for other instruments.
| fsckboy wrote:
| from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of
| negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a
| lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not
| enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be
| aggravated if I don't have to?"
| muxator wrote:
| Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the
| same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a
| timbre plus relative pitch sensibility.
|
| I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.
| samstave wrote:
| May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means?
|
| (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I
| was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be
| owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I
| attribute it to 'bad actors'
| hluska wrote:
| Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to
| distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played.
| Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on
| command.
|
| If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a
| piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a
| continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch
| after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect
| pitch for a short time after they stop playing and others
| (apparently) always have it. In that aspect, it's a little
| like memory.
|
| Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald are two famous people you've
| likely heard who had absolute pitch though I have never read
| or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly
| useful. Of the musicians I know who have worked to develop
| it, it's mostly kind of a party trick.
|
| If you're interested in perfect pitch, you should likely
| learn about relative pitch as well. Whereas perfect pitch
| refers to the ability to correctly distinguish a note cold,
| relative pitch refers to the ability to distinguish notes in
| relation to each other.
| h0h0h0h0111 wrote:
| >I have never read or heard anything that suggests either
| found it terribly useful
|
| Allegedly, Mozart transcribed Allegri's Miserere after
| hearing it performed once in the Vatican:
| https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-
| all....
|
| Perhaps apocryphal, but sounds pretty useful to me.
| Bud wrote:
| [dead]
| Gunax wrote:
| But how accurate does it have to be to be considered
| perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high
| frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to
| the frequency?
| samstave wrote:
| thank you for the 'perfect pitch' response <3
| coliveira wrote:
| Perfect pitch means that you can identify (give the name of)
| different pitches without the help of instruments. This is a
| rare ability even for trained musicians.
| samstave wrote:
| We need a GPT for musical pitch. (unpack that)
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| The (fast) fourier transform has been around for a few
| centuries. It's kind of a big deal.
| klysm wrote:
| I'm curious how much initial effort it took you to get decent
| at it
| 0x445442 wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't know perfect pitch was something you
| could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn
| player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His
| teachers always told us it was something you're born with.
| opan wrote:
| I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good
| speller was something you were born with (she was not the
| best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good,
| to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how
| people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how
| they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from
| people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's
| cube.
| belter wrote:
| How far does it go on your own case? Are there degrees of it?
|
| Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video
| below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's
| own?
|
| https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY
| helaoban wrote:
| Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive
| considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a
| certain age (at least that's layman my understanding).
|
| Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and
| now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a
| new language?).
| hluska wrote:
| The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has
| been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago's study
| is most famous but results have been replicated at many other
| schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine.
|
| The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as
| artists they're better off spending their time elsewhere.
| musicale wrote:
| I hadn't actually heard of the Chicago work before, but
| this is interesting:
|
| "These results suggest that the acquisition of intermediate
| absolute pitch ability (significantly above chance but
| below ''true'' AP performance) depends on an individual's
| general auditory working memory ability" [1]
|
| Apparently learned absolute pitch wasn't as accurate as
| "true" perfect pitch.
|
| [1] https://www.academia.edu/download/52277554/Auditory_wor
| king_...
| coliveira wrote:
| Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that
| Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference
| between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is
| relatively the same. Things would be different if every key
| had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the
| case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought
| about different keys having different moods.
| pjlegato wrote:
| That statement is not true of Western music in general,
| only of most (not all) classical and poular music since
| roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament,"
| tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became
| popular.[1]
|
| Much Western music, such as that written during the the
| Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as
| certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern
| classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc.
| use a variety of other systems such as some form of just
| intonation[2], where different keys sound very different
| as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same
| interval.
|
| Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of
| equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such
| as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American
| music.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation
| nostrademons wrote:
| I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy
| ear-training component.
|
| The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of
| "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words,
| perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or
| you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce
| absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect
| pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory
| is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command.
| But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl
| in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist)
| could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session;
| if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was
| usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in
| cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a
| pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a
| specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note
| without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to
| another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music
| training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds.
|
| It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're
| young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an
| adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads
| to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or
| training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to
| speak it without an accent.
| [deleted]
| vnorilo wrote:
| I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon
| as perfect (absolute) pitch.
|
| I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of
| random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset"
| our ears. Only works for relative ears.
|
| Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I
| practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches
| it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it
| lose focus by a semitone or three.
|
| Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored,
| no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also
| a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they
| need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their
| "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just
| shrug and accept the new A4.
| nostrademons wrote:
| I think there's different components to pitch memory,
| including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect
| there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear
| a chord as a single unit while others pick out the
| individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear
| for timbre.)
|
| I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have
| anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on
| 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you
| describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I
| try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently
| sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I
| don't have perfect pitch.)
| klipt wrote:
| Have a look at this study about moving the "absolute"
| pitch anchor: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/r
| eleases/perfect-p...
|
| Maybe you could apply their methodology to yourself to
| retrain your A to 440Hz?
| unc0n wrote:
| When I played in a youth orchestra our music director
| told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he
| said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be
| others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many
| recordings with such tuning.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| 441+ is also very common in the US. Top-tier orchestras
| rarely use 440 at this point.
| klipt wrote:
| > Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always
| anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them
|
| Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was
| an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a
| long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over
| the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study
| found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not
| just immediately after but also months later.
|
| https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-
| p...
| humanizersequel wrote:
| Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch
| being detuned "months later."
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| > ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour
| session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she
| was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came
| in cold.
|
| > had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were
| working on a specific interval, I could remember and
| reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano,
| but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it.
|
| This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a
| spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've
| basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting
| curves -- I wonder what would happen if you tried to train
| _with the specific goal of extending that window,_ rather
| than just noting what your window is during other training.
| Maybe it 's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect
| pitch in this way?
|
| Especially in your case, since you already have data that
| your window of 5-10 minutes _could_ extend to 1.5 hours, it
| seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you 'd
| spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this --
| e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week,
| then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc...
| nostrademons wrote:
| We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to
| developing better relative pitch and being able to name
| intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh
| hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the
| session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick
| aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth
| it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch,
| because you'll almost always have a reference note
| available.
|
| It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the
| psych and music departments got together though. If I were
| still in college I'd suggest it. :-)
| levitate wrote:
| Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there
| are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B'
| instead.
| kombinatorix wrote:
| Not necessarily. In Germany and probably also other parts of
| the world B is called H and B flat is called B.
| ketzu wrote:
| For funny historical reasons, the english tone B is called H in
| some countries, especially northern and central europe.
| (English B-flat is called B there) Wherever that figure is
| from.
| captainmuon wrote:
| I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute
| pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that
| tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically
| laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask
| that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years
| later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how
| they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the
| (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and
| just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.)
| intrasight wrote:
| Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at
| 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which
| I'm hearing all the fucking time.
| pb060 wrote:
| Why do you hear a persistent 60hz sound? Could it be linked to
| the AC frequency? I couldn't find anything about it online.
| illwrks wrote:
| Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious
| how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did
| some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our
| daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family
| and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are).
| tzs wrote:
| Is absolute pitch something you would actually want? From what
| I've read as people with absolute pitch get into late middle age
| in many their reference drifts and they start to perceive music
| that is in tune as being out of tune. For some this makes it hard
| to continue to enjoy music.
|
| People with relative pitch can learn specific notes well enough
| to be able to recognize them given the constraint that the note
| is being played roughly in tune on an instrument tuned to the
| common tunings of the music they are familiar with, and they can
| learn to recognize intervals.
|
| This allows them with practice to identify notes almost as fast
| as someone with absolute pitch, and allows them to do all the
| practical musical things people with absolute pitch can do.
| 49531 wrote:
| Yea, absolute pitch is not very valuable for musicians.
| Interval training is much more common, where you train on the
| differences between notes (maj 3rd, minor 6th etc.). Good
| interval skills make improvisation and composition much easier.
| If you know the key you're in having absolute pitch doesn't
| really add anything, and if you're lacking in understanding
| intervals it won't make up for it.
| BearOso wrote:
| Most kids achieve level, upright pitch at ages 2-3. It's the yaw
| and roll you have to worry about. Those are literally all over
| the place.
| racedude wrote:
| Wrong kind of pitch. Read the article.
| jpgvm wrote:
| [flagged]
| tomcam wrote:
| I think you may have missed a little humor being committed
| jvm___ wrote:
| Maybe your missed the tone of their comment?
| tinco wrote:
| If your kid can achieve absolute pitch in geometric space,
| like.. epsg:4978? That would be epic. Your kid could always
| tell you what coordinates you're at if you're standing at a
| known angle.
| windowshopping wrote:
| What does "epsg:4978" mean?
| rightbyte wrote:
| A longer name for WGS 84.
| tinco wrote:
| Sort of but not exactly. The way I'd explain it as
| someone who's had to deal with a lot but has not been
| formally trained in it is that WGS 84 is a system for
| reasoning about the earth spatially. EPSG:4978 and its
| more commonly used sister EPSG:4326 are standardized ways
| of writing down coordinates relative to the WGS84 model
| of the earth.
|
| The "joke" in my comment is that EPSG:4978 coordinates
| are written down in distance in meters from the center of
| the earth, as a sort of absolute position that's nice to
| use in maths. In contrast to EPSG:4326 where coordinates
| are written down (usually in degrees) relative to the
| equator and a line through some place in England over an
| idealized representation of the surface of the earth.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Interval-training is a lot more useful. Regardless of what key
| you're in, particularly if you're not playing (or don't know how
| to play) from sheet music. E.g. given two notes, what is the
| distance between them in semitones.
|
| Once you can recognize any interval then, given a pitch, you can
| identify the other notes in any chord (major, minor, etc.) it's a
| part of. Useful for tuning instruments (e.g. guitar). Useful for
| understanding chord notation (charts), and what chords are being
| used (progressions). Useful for quickly figuring out all the
| notes in a melody. (Especially one you want to remember.) Useful
| for deciding what -scale- is being used (dorian, phrygian,
| pentatonic, etc.)
| adamgordonbell wrote:
| Many people have absolute pitch for certain well known sounds.
|
| Who can't tell if a sine wave sound is higher or lower than the
| emergency broadcast tone. That tone is 1000 hz.
|
| So, that is absolute pitch, just low resolution. I'm assuming if
| you can add in a lot of reference points that you know well, you
| could get better resolution.
| irq wrote:
| Can we get a (2012) added to the headline here?
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| I was forced to learn piano when I was 6, really hated it and
| ended in 2 years. When I really got into music in high school and
| started playing guitar it's an amazing feeling to discover I
| actually have perfect pitch. However the perfect pitch I have is
| an inferior one, I sometimes even miss a note by a half step,
| curious if someone is the same.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| A summary of the teaching method, which dates back to apparently
| 1991
|
| https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html
| tomcam wrote:
| My theory and composition teacher in college went through this
| same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and
| asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the
| kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize
| pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however,
| because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL,
| whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening to an exhaust
| pipe.
|
| I also had a classmate who could identify any pitch to the exact
| frequency, so A443 versus A440, for example. Of course we tested
| him.
| dekhn wrote:
| In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to
| click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86
| code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office
| mate that I could make my computer play A440.
|
| He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I
| checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying
| long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said
| he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost
| everything was out of tune.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| I remember watching a documentary about this savant and his
| ability was perfect pitch and now you are totally ruining the
| story.
| tomcam wrote:
| Lol I hate myself! But I'm sure the doc will be more
| interesting to you than my teacher's 1920s kindergarten
| tales. I found her fascinating though.
| joanne123 wrote:
| [flagged]
| crispinb wrote:
| I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of
| decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with
| music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and
| reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names
| and sound.
|
| But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort
| of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it,
| I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick
| intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further
| off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear
| I'll nearly always start on the right note.
|
| What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect
| it could be developed it were a priority.
| raincole wrote:
| While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually
| "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV)
| capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute
| notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
| wrs wrote:
| As an amateur musician and composer who doesn't have it, seems
| like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I
| don't know what else. You must still be able to "switch modes"
| to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn't even hear musical
| structures the same way, because aside from timbre they're all
| relative.
| nrook wrote:
| As an amateur who does have it, yes, it's super awesome for
| transcription. However, I don't think it's very useful for
| anything else.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| My mom says it's helpful for her as a music teacher. It was
| annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she'd be
| cooking in the kitchen and I'd be playing in the other room
| and she'd call out when I made a mistake. But that's probably
| just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a
| fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in
| competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I'm sure
| perfect pitch is only a small part of it but it helps.
| sidibe wrote:
| It seems like hearing someone make a mistake, especially on
| a piano (vs a trombone or violin), isn't related at all to
| perfect pitch... unless the mistake is playing the whole
| piece in the wrong key
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I used to moonlight as a harpsichord tuner, and I didn't know
| anyone in the field or any piano tuners with perfect pitch.
| As I understand it, it doesn't help at all because perfect
| pitch is not precise enough to tell 440 Hz from 440.1 Hz for
| example, while you can do that easily with a tuning fork
| (once you learn how to listen for the beats). On the
| flipside, unequal temperaments - which are frequently used if
| you are a harpsichord tuner - are hell for people with
| perfect pitch who listen to only equally-tempered music. When
| you "merely" have relative pitch, unequal temperaments can
| actually be nice.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Equal temperament strikes again.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Not that useful if you have very good relative pitch. One
| advantage is you can walk in a jam and start playing from bar
| 1, instead of having to figure out which key they're in.
| However if you have good relative pitch you can also figure it
| out within 10 seconds.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| It can be useful, but it's not necessary to have perfect pitch
| to be a musician. Relative pitch (the ability to identify notes
| relative to each other) can be learned and is good enough.
| 49531 wrote:
| Nah you're right, intervals ear training will always give you
| more bang for your buck than absolute pitch, and even though
| absolute pitch is trainable, I don't know any serious musicians
| who have put effort into it. This is why I think folks think
| absolute pitch is innate (it isn't): some folks just have a
| knack for it, and those who don't quickly learn that the effort
| to build the skill isn't worth the payoff.
| canjobear wrote:
| My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is
| that it's more an annoyance than anything. They're always
| hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch.
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Have you really met people with perfect pitch with that level
| of resolution, like can tell 440hz from 432hz? I always
| thought that was a myth.
| raincole wrote:
| How much "resolution" do their ears have? Like can someone
| with absolute pitch tell whether an instrument is in 12-ET or
| just intonation without a reference?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| I have very good relative pitch and used to moonlight as a
| harpsichord tuner. I can tell you if an instrument is in
| equal temperament - an equal-tempered fifth and an equal-
| tempered third have very distinctive sounds. With enough
| time, I can also identify most of the common baroque
| temperaments: Just Intonation and quarter-comma meantone
| stick out like a sore thumb, but tunings like Werckmeister
| and the others that attempt to be close to equally tempered
| are harder to pick out by ear since you really need to hear
| a lot of the circle of fifths to identify which one is
| used.
|
| However, this skill isn't due to hearing a precise gap
| between the two notes, but listening to the beating of the
| overtones of the notes. It's a very different skill than
| what you learn in school to identify intervals.
|
| Also, professional string players can often tune equal
| tempered fifths (~2 cents flat of a pure fifth) precisely
| on their instruments.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Perfect pitch is a simplification, it's not really binary
| like you either have it or don't. People have varying
| ability, practice, and speed at identifying a note relative
| to a reference, and "perfect" is how we describe being past
| some threshold.
|
| When we talk about perfect pitch we're usually assuming
| 12-tet tuned to A440 but you correctly homed in on the
| "problem" with perfect pitch. Is that C a little sharp, or
| did they just tune to A446 for some reason? Just
| intonation, microtonal scales, there are a lot of notes out
| there. How do you know they're "wrong" and not just trying
| to play the note that sounds out of tune to your ear.
| "Perfect" has to be established against some intention, we
| just usually assume 12-tet A440.
|
| Anyway the ability is at least somewhat a matter of
| practice and training, so you can develop it against any
| consistent reference, regardless of the tuning or
| intonation system.
| iainmerrick wrote:
| That's a question about relative pitches, not absolute -
| you can definitely hear if e.g. the third is a little sharp
| or flat even if you don't have perfect absolute pitch.
|
| More generally, I think the answer is "pretty high-
| resolution". Lots of people can definitely hear the
| difference between equal and just temperament.
|
| IIRC most people's hearing is accurate to around 10 cents
| (a tenth of a semitone). Wikipedia suggests musicians
| generally tune to within 12 cents, and the "just noticeable
| difference" is 5-6.
|
| You'd only need absolute accuracy better than 50 cents to
| be able to correctly name a note on the piano. I'd guess
| most people with perfect pitch are more accurate than that,
| likely around the same ~10 cents mark.
|
| Anecdotally, I have a musician friend with perfect pitch
| who finds it annoying sometime, as they find it unsettling
| when music is tuned slightly sharp or flat; so I think
| their sensitivity is much finer than a semitone.
| hammyhavoc wrote:
| Microtonality is a rabbit hole you'll likely enjoy.
| colanderman wrote:
| Intonation is a matter of relative pitch. I have good
| relative pitch, and can distinguish intonation to a degree.
|
| People with absolute pitch can nonetheless distinguish
| pitch with better than semitone accuracy. This is why it's
| often a hindrance, because if an ensemble is tuned to a
| slightly different reference, it is quite noticeable to
| them.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| I've wondered if it's possible to train exact, frequency-
| based pitch, instead of this relative tuning-based
| absolute pitch. I wonder if that would be as discordant
| to the trained ear when switching to another tuning.
| troupe wrote:
| I sincerely doubt that if you ask a professional musician
| with perfect pitch if they would "turn it off" they would say
| yes.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Is it necessarily something like "turned on h24 in every
| single sound"? I would be rather surprised that it would be
| the case in general.
| zuminator wrote:
| A person with perfect pitch can no more turn off knowing
| the pitch of a sound than a person with relative pitch
| can turn off knowing if one sound is a higher pitch than
| another.
| crabkin wrote:
| I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more
| "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open
| minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I
| love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any
| problem appreciating what they like.
| florbo wrote:
| Heh, I'm that friend in my circle. I certainly don't bash
| anyone's music preferences but everyone has to know _why_ a
| song /artist "just isn't my thing," and I get the "snob"
| label. Ah well.
|
| But I get where your friend is coming from. When I hear
| something off pitch, for whatever reason, it's just
| distracting and pure cacophony.
| recursive wrote:
| It's very useful for a session musician. You could pick up a
| song without hunting for the key.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in
| certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
| wrs wrote:
| Ah, this answers my question above about "switching modes"
| to relative. Sounds like that's not a thing. But can you
| hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you're
| not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing
| interval math all the time!
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good
| as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music
| majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the
| professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's
| a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and
| people learn to write down the chords based on relative
| position. But I and another student with perfect pitch
| would ace the class by just writing down the chords based
| on what they actually were. This went on until he started
| playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#.
| Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and
| everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone
| except for us two, who were totally hosed.
|
| When I went to my parent's church, the organist would
| spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a
| half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for
| me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't
| match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank
| just between us two, and he knew that I was the only
| other person in the room who knew what he had done to me.
| UnnoTed wrote:
| Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing
| songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part
| of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't
| sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians
| from the church try to find the song key and chords in real
| time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good
| ear.
|
| In this video you can see an example of how it is:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF4onowI1xw
|
| [1]: https://pt-m-wikipedia-
| org.translate.goog/wiki/Harpa_Crist%C...
| chimpanzee wrote:
| Thanks for the video link! Very cool. The poor singing
| combined with the on-the-fly guitar tuning gave the piece
| a grungy punk-like feel, at least to my ears. I rather
| enjoyed it.
|
| A cute (translated) comment from the video: "To sing with
| this guitarist is easy! Just praise the Lord and he does
| the rest!"
| 123pie123 wrote:
| I'm really impressed by the guitarist making her sound
| better and her pitch was all over the place
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| Why do you need to transpose? You mean when playing a
| transposed instrument like woodwinds / brass?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Jazz. Jazz is all about transposition.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah my mom is a piano teacher and described the same
| difficulty. In university (USSR) they would play the same
| song twice. The first time she got all the notes and the
| second time she'd fill in the melody. Other students
| without perfect pitch would be able to transcribe the
| entire thing the first time and just use the second time to
| correct any mistakes they made.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune
| instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone
| flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a
| mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the
| sound that's coming out.
| dwringer wrote:
| With good enough sense of relative pitch it's almost a non-
| issue as one is usually only a half step away from in-key and
| that can be played off as deliberate.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a
| lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz,
| not just what's on the top 40 radio.
|
| Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They
| are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to
| understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can
| be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes
| if we had a language codified that way.
| hgsgm wrote:
| Most kids are exposed to language a lot in their childhood,
| they don't automatically learn to produce "perfect words".
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| This is more like learning phonemes. It significantly helps
| language acquisition to expose your children to a lot of
| different word sounds. Similarly, if you only play top 40 pop
| music or baroque music, your child likely won't be able to
| acquire perfect pitch.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They do, most kids learn to say words perfectly imitating
| what they hear, including regional accents. Of course some
| people have speech impediments but it's a minority.
| medler wrote:
| I am very skeptical that a child can learn perfect pitch merely
| by listening to classical music.
| [deleted]
| ouid wrote:
| I have tinnitus, so i only need perfect relative pitch.
| kqr wrote:
| There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse
| "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch".
|
| After the first note is known, the two are mostly
| indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can,
| once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify
| everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect
| pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch
| don't even need to be told what that first note is.
|
| (This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and
| tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance,
| whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need
| to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or
| minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the
| same.)
| Engineering-MD wrote:
| Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up
| during a critical period in early life. However, there was a
| fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug
| (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill!
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
| [deleted]
| pachico wrote:
| Aged 2-6?
|
| Am I the only one thinking "leave them kids alone!"?
| hansoolo wrote:
| No, you aren't alone. It sounds so weird and elitist...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| It sounds like the system is based on a few mins of audio
| flashcards each day.
|
| Has anyone here tried this?
| blindriver wrote:
| My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me
| and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch
| is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times
| he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes
| from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale
| the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all
| fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect
| pitch.
| vajrabum wrote:
| Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the
| viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently
| unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters
| with very high accuracy.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
|
| For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a
| difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed
| instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. Also,
| conductors frequently have perfect pitch, probably because a
| strong musical memory and being able to sight sing on pitch from
| a score are valuable and depend to a certain extent on perfect
| pitch. See here for a lot more.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory
|
| Perfect pitch is also apparently more common in people who speak
| tonal languages like Mandarin.
| tylerhou wrote:
| There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral
| singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning
| if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen
| naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.)
|
| Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch
| lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an
| accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as
| blue-ish green instead of green. It might be difficult to
| adjust to no longer being able to see the world in color.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
| freedomben wrote:
| > _Another downside is that almost all people with perfect
| pitch lose it when they hit a certain age._
|
| What age (or age range) is that?
| dwdz wrote:
| 50-60 years old, according to Rick Beato
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rx08qWtFak
| ojosilva wrote:
| Absolute pitch is a curse for musicians. It's not even an asset
| unless you are a piano tuner or a transcription professional of
| some sort. Not many conductors have it. Only a handful of the
| great musicians in history, from classical to jazz to pop
| happened to have AP. It's a parlor trick. And many musicians
| thought to have perfect pitch actually were just great
| recognizing pitches - pitch memory - which is different from
| perfect pitch. I can recognize pitches with a ~50% accuracy
| just because I can either recall the note, or bend my vocal
| chords as if I would start singing the note and, from pure
| muscle memory, say "this is probably an E".
|
| Absolute pitch basically spoils the musician's ability to deal
| with varying pitch and musical temperament[1] situations and
| instruments. It can drive them nuts, ie if given a C to sing
| but actually have to detune or transpose it on the fly. It's
| also detrimental for anyone's ability to purely enjoy music.
| _Relative pitch_ on the other hand is so much more important.
| Absolute pitch in fact can mess with your relative pitch, as C
| and Ab are just that C and Ab, not a minor 6th.
|
| Also, a good sense of being in tune when playing with others
| is, obviously, fundamental but also a relative, not absolute,
| in essence. Knowing you are playing in tune, not perfectly
| pitched, is the asset needed by bowed string players. Relative
| pitch, not AP, is an asset for someone who needs to sight sing
| on pitch - just listen to your tuning fork and find that C or
| Ab.
|
| Music is not a perfect craft, it's not about being digitally
| precise. Making music is not about frequencies, or hitting
| absolute hertz. Even pitch itself is not "perfect", it's a
| flawed system that people, in part for the sake of
| standardization, settled upon. Pitch is a size that does not
| fit all. So why would anyone be proud of have frequencies
| memorized?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament
| 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote:
| > For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed
| instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch.
|
| The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for
| professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch
| looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a
| professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There
| is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained
| musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone
| (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people
| that do not have it).
|
| It is more like a "shortcut" when it comes to ear training, but
| ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a
| professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically
| the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal
| when it comes to the things a musician actually does.
|
| Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that
| makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the
| real world.
|
| Also noteworthy that there _are_ disadvantages to perfect pitch
| (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and
| interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already
| linked.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
| avodonosov wrote:
| In another video Rick Beato said he facilitated development of
| his son's perfect pitch by exposing him to a lot of complex
| music in early age.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM&t=598s
|
| His hypothesis, based on some studies, is that children in ealy
| age have ability for perfect pitch but later loose it, if it's
| not utilized. The same way as young children are able to
| percieve any phoneme of any language, but later loose this
| ability and only recognise phonemes of the language spoken in
| the family (that's a known scientific fact).
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo&t=783s
| mhh__ wrote:
| Dylan is very impressive but I find there to be something
| disturbing in that dynamic
| freedomben wrote:
| What do you find disturbing in that dynamic?
| vnorilo wrote:
| Perfect pitch is by no means a requirement for musicians,
| although it is more common than in the general population, even
| more so for conductors.
|
| But intonation is equally easy/hard for absolute and relative
| ears. Some tasks, like transposition, can require _more_
| practice for people with perfect pitch.
|
| Source: lived experience from my doctorate in music from
| Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.
| amelius wrote:
| Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute
| pitch?
|
| And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a
| color and you say it's #f3eb20 ?
|
| Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?
| flappyeagle wrote:
| We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at
| something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or
| "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".
| eternauta3k wrote:
| Kind of, your eyes are doing automatic white balance.
| stefncb wrote:
| We can tell if something is red or blue, but red and blue are
| huge spectra. That's like telling the first third of a piano
| keyboard from the second. Even I can do it. Absolute pitch is
| more like telling exactly what wavelength it is (to a certain
| degree of course). Most people can't do that.
| OscarCunningham wrote:
| I can hear a note and say whether it's high, low, or in the
| middle. But perfect pitch further requires a resolution of 1
| semitone.
| opan wrote:
| Have you never argued over colors before? I wouldn't trust
| eyes to be that accurate or objective.
| Paianni wrote:
| It makes composition easier. By that I mean, I can mentally
| simulate music and pick out the sequence of tones to write it
| down in sheet music or a DAW piano roll, and I don't need to
| 'calibrate' my pitch beforehand.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Not that helpful. It's a bit akin to being able to tell which
| individual letters are in a word spoken. It might make some
| genres of music less enjoyable as they sound too predictable.
| It does help to play improvisation with other musicians.
| schrectacular wrote:
| As far as I know there is a similar but probably not exactly
| the same, "super sellers" - perfume companies hire those with
| the skill to be their perfumers or "noses".
| canadianwriter wrote:
| Even in music it is not that helpful to be honest. Eg. most
| live shows you tune the instruments to the piano. If the piano
| is slightly out of tune, someone with perfect pitch will be
| annoyed the entire time trying to deal with that while everyone
| else hears a perfectly good concert.
|
| having good relative pitch is way more useful.
|
| Many musicians with perfect pitch have also been really
| obsessed with tuning in their recordings and it sets off a lot
| of anxiety for them cause they can hear themselves the smallest
| amount off, when no one else can and the performance makes it a
| perfect take to use in the song.
|
| It can be helpful I guess for composing, but as someone who
| does composing, it's not hard to just tinker with a piano to
| get the notes I want, no need to be able to perfectly hum them
| when I think of them.
| dbalatero wrote:
| Relative pitch is quite helpful to have. However, I have
| absolute pitch and I find it quite helpful as well.
|
| - I can hear things in my head and play them directly on the
| instrument more or less on the first try
|
| - I can improvise with others and catch what key/etc they are
| in quickly
|
| - As we practice, we get a sort of kinetic/physical memory for
| remembering music, but also this can feedback into that "hear
| things in head, play them on the instrument" - so I feel like
| memorizing things can be assisted by absolute pitch
|
| - I can remember music I heard and play it back easier
|
| There's a lot of people saying it's not helpful, but I have to
| wonder if they have experienced having it or not? If they have
| it and find it unhelpful that's fine... but I've experienced it
| as nothing _but_ helpful to me.
| b800h wrote:
| You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one
| of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the
| starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ
| in our church is a quarter-tone sharp.
|
| The goal should be very very very good relative pitch.
| tpmx wrote:
| Electronic frequency counters are pretty accurate and cheap these
| days; I don't think we necessarily need to use human children for
| this task.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| To me, the ultimate test of perfect pitch is: "can you whistle
| (or hum) an F# below middle C?" (or some other random note)
| analog31 wrote:
| Just tested myself. Pass.
|
| However, I played a rehearsal and two concerts this week. I
| know that my pitch dissipates after a period of time. As a kid,
| I could tune my cello by ear, but I noticed after coming back
| from a long family vacation, I had lost that ability. It came
| back quickly, but still, it means that I don't really have
| perfect pitch.
| elecush wrote:
| Lately I have a theory about perfect pitch training as an 18+
| year old human, I think we will achieve it (my friend and I) via
| the following: Using Tuesdays to practice E chord songs, using
| Thursdays to practice C# minor chord songs. One day play only E
| songs, one day play only C#m songs, do this several weeks, pick 2
| new chords for 2 fresh days, repeat.
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