[HN Gopher] Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
___________________________________________________________________
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
Author : yuppiemephisto
Score : 146 points
Date : 2024-11-26 22:18 UTC (7 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.moderndescartes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.moderndescartes.com)
| zero-sharp wrote:
| You've had musical training since you were 5? And you say
|
| "Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my
| clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he
| played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn't think so,
| because I couldn't name notes for any instrument other than the
| clarinet."
|
| Okay, so then this doesn't seem like an article written for the
| average musician (person).
| Rochus wrote:
| > _I learned perfect pitch as an adult._
|
| Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect
| pitch would be good for.
| dhosek wrote:
| I had a friend in high school who had amazing pitch
| recognition. I still remember being at band camp and watching
| him with a cassette player and a stack of manuscript paper
| transcribing the "Get Away" break from Chicago a measure or two
| at a time. He'd play a bar of music, then write down all the
| parts. It really ruined me because I assumed this was a binary
| thing, you either had it or you didn't and didn't realize it
| could be learned until I eventually learned it.
| Rochus wrote:
| Perfect pitch is in no way necessary for this. Interval
| listening is sufficient. The additional benefit of perfect
| pitch would be, that your friend would know the basic key of
| the tune without first playing one note on the piano. For
| example, I don't have perfect pitch, but I can play along
| with any pop song immediately, without sheet music and
| without knowing the piece. I just have to press a few keys on
| the keyboard to find the root note.
| criddell wrote:
| Or both. You don't have to choose one or the other and I think
| the two skills could be very complementary.
| Rochus wrote:
| With perfect pitch, you save yourself the five dollars for a
| tuning fork. In my forty years of experience as a musician, I
| have yet to encounter any other benefit.
| linux_is_nice wrote:
| > By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my
| musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch... for piano
| only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying
| microtuning differences;
|
| I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific
| perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the
| individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch.
|
| > Don't learn a non-C instrument
|
| I would recommend against this because it severely limits your
| options for instruments to play.
| mdwhatcott wrote:
| Yeah, this advice doesn't hold up--even the OP mentions
| learning the clarinet, which is a B-flat instrument. I also
| play the clarinet and developed the same ability to detect each
| note by its timbre. I also think there is a kinesthetic element
| to each note--the way the instrument vibrates, the back-
| pressure or resistance you feel while playing, that becomes
| associated with the timbre the longer you play.
| linux_is_nice wrote:
| As a clarinet player myself, I think it's an instrument
| that's pretty unique in just how different the timbres of
| each note are, like Bb or an open G.
| mrob wrote:
| Recorders also have big variation in timbre (and volume)
| with different notes.
| dhruvrajvanshi wrote:
| > I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--
| the way the instrument vibrates
|
| Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing.
|
| In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their
| vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is
| changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest
| piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an
| anchor.
| mrob wrote:
| Every instrument is a C instrument if you want it to be.
| "Transposing instrument" is a misleading name. They're really
| just instruments for which Western staff notation is
| conventionally written transposed. If you're writing all your
| own notation for your own personal use or playing by ear it's
| irrelevant. The transposition isn't part of the instrument.
| muglug wrote:
| I could write a similar article "lose perfect pitch in 15 years".
|
| My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years
| after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of
| stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440.
|
| And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I
| think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it --
| tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.
| droideqa wrote:
| Or you could just take depakote[0].
|
| [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
| drumttocs8 wrote:
| Honestly fascinating.
|
| Any first-hand experience?
| hirvi74 wrote:
| I do not know anyone that has taken Depakote for the purpose
| of perfect pitch. The individuals that I have known have
| taken it for severe psychotic/mood disorders. From what I
| remember, it's not a fun time for the side-effects can be
| absolutely brutal.
| Aeglaecia wrote:
| was waiting for the inevitable hdac inhibitor comment seeing as
| vorinostat was recently so often spruiked by a vested
| individual on reddit. to other readers, these are literally
| chemotherapy drugs that globally inhibit cell formation, albeit
| taken at much lower dosages than therapeutic.
| w-m wrote:
| Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in
| some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to
| impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying
| to develop it :)
|
| A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute
| pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample
| group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to
| sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random
| chance would be 8.3%.
|
| It's a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current
| earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against
| the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you
| never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
|
| Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular
| song on demand (there's references to that too in the paper - it
| also works better than random chance, but less so than the
| involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off
| with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can
| immediately check whether you were right, e.g. "Tom's Diner".
| I've been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey's
| cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube.
| I'm more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just
| listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
|
| [0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps
| amatecha wrote:
| I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the
| "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current
| favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I
| were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be
| transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact
| correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard
| somehow fades, or something...
| zeta0134 wrote:
| This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a
| pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music
| teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear"
| after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with
| blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for
| whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in
| perfect clarity in the proper key.
|
| I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then
| explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at
| me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
| jsphweid wrote:
| This post isn't compelling to me.
|
| > a completely useless skill
|
| It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task,
| but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly
| anyone who studies music at the university level or above would
| find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly
| incorrect.
|
| > Random chance would be 8.3%.
|
| A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center
| magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern
| western tuning (Equal Temperament).
| w-m wrote:
| This criticism isn't compelling to me.
|
| The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates
| that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps
| exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute
| pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was
| tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love"
| played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he
| might just have picked up a reference note from the piano or
| his in-ear monitors, like a filthy commoner. Usually when
| making music, having good relative pitch is required, and a
| reference instrument is mostly handy, making perfect pitch
| somewhat redundant. But do tell what you're doing with
| perfect pitch, I'm curious.
|
| And on curiosity, I went to your website and randomly
| listened to "The Fugue Song" [0]. Really loved it! Very nice
| moment when the singing comes in, repeating the phrase from
| the fugy guitar intro. Good song! (I'm a total sucker for
| Nina Simone's "Love Me Or Leave me", do you know that? A song
| where she's inserting some counterpoint improvisations in the
| middle). I'm listening to a bit of "Hiss" now.
|
| > 8.3%
|
| Rounded to the next semitone of course, I left that detail
| out, it's in the paper.
|
| [0]: https://josephweidinger.com/project/the_fugue_song/
| whstl wrote:
| It's just an anecdote, but: I remember playing in a band
| with an amateur musician friend who told me had perfect
| pitch, and it was "very annoying", according to him, when
| we transposed songs to fit our voices. They just "sounded
| wrong" to him. He would make beginner mistakes since he
| relied on pitch memory rather than listening to us to know
| what to play/sing.
|
| I have no idea how it works in general, but it seems like
| it was a problem for at least this one guy.
| jsphweid wrote:
| xD Well I didn't expect it to go there. I don't know that
| song but I'll have to listen to it when I get home.
|
| I don't have perfect pitch but it's not too hard to imagine
| what I could do with it. For me, it'd simply make a lot of
| tasks faster. I've spent a lot of time throughout my life
| transcribing music. I can do it relatively quickly but
| there's lots of moments where I have to confirm things, or
| poke around notes finding the matching notes, struggling to
| clarify shades of a chord based on the presence of notes.
|
| Reading music will be easier for people with AP, especially
| in singing situations. Even if you're a pianist it will
| still be helpful. There are a few Marc-Andre Hamelin
| interviews out there where he describes some of the
| advantages. It's easier to read music if you know
| immediately what it's going to sound like. Again, this is
| possible with relative pitch, but it's just more work and
| slower.
|
| Arranging and composing away from the keyboard will be much
| easier with perfect pitch.
|
| As time goes on, it'll be less important, most likely. And
| yes, there are some downsides obviously. In my final aural
| training class in music school, we had a competition at the
| very end of the year for fun. It came down to a team of 3 I
| was on vs. a team of 3 that had a guy with AP. The final
| task was to sight-sing a musical 'round' (a composition
| where the melody repeats in the various voices at different
| points in different voices overlapping each other). The guy
| with AP actually ruined it for his team. They mistakenly
| chose him to finish the round instead of start it. Mid-way
| through their performance, the pitch on their team had
| drifted so heavily they were in-between notes on the piano
| when he took over. He tried to sing 'relative' to everyone
| else but it was so hard for him. It was so unnatural for
| him to sing out of key, he couldn't do it; it sounded
| really bad. Great guy though and a ridiculously good
| violinist.
| dhruvrajvanshi wrote:
| > A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal
| center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our
| modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
|
| Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall
| into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the
| correct pitch.
| jsphweid wrote:
| It's not called "in-the-ballpark" pitch, it's called
| perfect/absolute pitch. Being up to a quarter tone off is a
| large error in music. Thinking of pitch in terms of 12
| buckets is not musically useful. The vast majority of music
| is based off consonance where being even a few hertz off
| means unpleasant dissonance. TLDR: Thinking of pitch as 12
| buckets is mostly irrelevant.
| 123124dfasd wrote:
| This is more common than people thought. I don't remember who
| said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of
| All Star - Smash Mouth for example.
|
| Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it.
| Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but
| through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for
| long enough of time.
| laurieg wrote:
| Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch
| perception as it applies to languages.
|
| As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch
| accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example
| Zhu (chopsticks) and Qiao (bridge) are both "hashi" but with a
| different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I
| couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly
| and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in
| normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without
| this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't
| bother me too much.
|
| One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to
| words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch
| accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing
| that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could
| actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a
| difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis.
| It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like
| learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never
| noticed it before.
|
| Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There
| are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a
| similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the
| difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
| dberst wrote:
| I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn
| relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only
| 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many
| people can recognize implicitly
|
| Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable
| with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an
| octave or two.
|
| Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8
| notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably
| already know
|
| If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference
| for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or
| learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For
| example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the
| song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd
| (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article
| seems to have far better information than I could give you
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition
|
| You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or
| quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down
| the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.
|
| Best of luck!!
| carey wrote:
| You have a fencepost error; the notes in Western music in
| equal temperament are C, C#/D, D, D#/E, E, F, F#/G, G, G#/A,
| A, A#/B, B, then c an octave higher is the thirteenth.
| dberst wrote:
| Ah thank you for the correction, I'm just a hobbyist and
| have not practiced in a few years
| carey wrote:
| It's accurate to say that there are twelve intervals,
| anyway, which is the point you were making.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| In my experience the Japanese don't refer to this as a change
| in pitch, but as you say, they consider it an emphasis.
|
| The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it
| "Accent for Japanese dialects".
|
| That is to say, I don't think this is pitch as in musical pitch
| perfect.
| vunderba wrote:
| yeah I was wondering the same thing. I'm only marginally
| familiar with Japanese, but studied mandarin in Taiwan for
| years and Chinese is considered a significantly more "tonal"
| language in terms of pitching up, pitching down, etc.
|
| I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any
| correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native
| language though.
| laurieg wrote:
| It is not referred to as a change in pitch, usually people
| call it intonation or accent, but the actual change in sounds
| is a change in pitch.
|
| The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a
| mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it
| sounds completely wrong.
|
| The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh"
| but it's the same basic idea.
| rybosome wrote:
| I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than
| not: * aurally identify key signatures *
| aurally identify chords * sing a given note on command
|
| It wasn't until I was into my early twenties that I could do
| this. For me, the single biggest stepping stone was building the
| connection between what I could hear in my head from a song that
| I remember clearly with the underlying music theory.
|
| Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the
| key signature of songs I liked: * Pink Floyd's
| "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor * The famous motif in
| Beethoven's 5th is in C minor * Blues Traveller's "Hook" is
| in A * Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat *
| Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor * etc.
|
| Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just
| recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in "Comfortably
| Numb". Huh, The Beatles "Across The Universe" sounds tonally like
| "Eet" - I guess it is also in D-flat.
|
| A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key,
| which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
| jebarker wrote:
| > A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key,
| which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across
| songs.
|
| This is gold. I similarly maintain lists of melodies that
| prominently feature certain intervals.
| dberst wrote:
| I'd be happy to see any "songs all in the same key" type
| playlists if anyone wants to share one
|
| I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would
| be handy to have a few of these
| smitelli wrote:
| Not a playlist, but I've always hit up Song Key Finder[1]
| when trying to figure out what songs might fit together for
| mashup-type purposes. They rank the songs by popularity
| within their user community.
|
| [1]: https://www.songkeyfinder.com/
| yaur wrote:
| Not a playlist per se, but https://www.hooktheory.com/cheat-
| sheet/key-popularity
|
| Has popular songs for each key and mode
| 20k wrote:
| Its worth noting that adults can learn something called pseudo
| absolute pitch, which sounds similar to what you're describing.
| The difference (which you're also describing) is that it
| requires reinforcement, and is a bit less accurate than having
| perfect pitch
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| It seems like a "bit less accurate" is a misnomer here. If
| you can successfully employ this technique, and use
| calibrated test equipment to measure it, you have in fact
| demonstrated your accuracy in recalling the pitch of notes,
| also known as perfect pitch. The means of achieving this
| recall do not in any way affect the accuracy of the results,
| because the results exclusively speak for themselves.
| vunderba wrote:
| Uhh.... What? There's no guarantee that the song you hear
| ringing in your head after a certain time has passed is going
| to be in the original key, in fact there's a very good chance
| (depending on your range) that you'll end up subtly transposing
| it to a different key when you try singing it in the shower
| apropos of nothing.
|
| This is by no means a guaranteed method to learn perfect pitch.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| I believe my claim of having perfect pitch stands on solid
| ground, and consists largely of what OP is describing. That's
| because I can demonstrate it. I wouldn't go so far as to say
| that the described method is a reasonable way to _acquire_
| perfect pitch, but I do contend that what is described is a
| reasonable method of demonstrating and explaining one's
| perfect pitch. If you do have perfect pitch, that is
| reflected in the fact that you don't transpose the music you
| hear on in your head.
|
| This idea of recalling songs is an easy way to explain
| perfect pitch to others in a way they can easily try for
| themselves. If you can sing the first note to a song, and
| then afterwards you actually listen to that song, and you are
| actually in tune, then you have perfect pitch. That's a far
| cry from being able to name the note, or rattle off the notes
| in a chord, but in my view the mental recall is the true
| innate essence that undergirds every other component of the
| umbrella of perfect pitch.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah I would agree that with proper practice (assuming you
| have a "locked in" song for every semitone in a scale) -
| that this could probably be extrapolated to being able to
| hear a random note on an instrument and then naming that
| note, and vice versa singing a given note on command.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| An even easier method, which I was taught is interval
| training. The jaws theme is a minor second. Do re mi
| starts with a major second, and so on. Interval training
| is easier, imo, and would then allow you to memorize
| fewer songs with absolute notes.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah agreed. I did interval training as part of a sight
| singing class a while back.
| sowbug wrote:
| The ability is common:
| https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-
| memory-u...
| vunderba wrote:
| Interesting but prior studies in a more controlled
| environment show that the ability to recall a song in the
| correct key is only about 15%.
|
| From the article: _" Psychologists wanted to study
| "earworms," the types of songs that get stuck in your head
| and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to
| sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record
| them on their phones when prompted at random times
| throughout the day. When researchers analyzed the
| recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them
| perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were
| based upon.
|
| More specifically, 44.7 percent of recordings had a pitch
| error of 0 semitones, and 68.9 percent were accurate within
| 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were
| recently published in the journal Attention, Perception, &
| Psychophysics."_
|
| This study seems extraordinarily suspect because it's
| essentially relying on good faith that the person recalling
| this song hasn't just literally heard this song on the
| radio a few hours before that or in the morning, and now
| it's an "earworm."
|
| EDIT: The actual published paper makes it more clear how
| this study was done. Participants (N = 30, convenience
| sample) were surveyed at random times over a week and asked
| to produce a sung recording of any music they were
| experiencing in their heads. This is a little bit more
| reliable, but still hard to say how long this pitch perfect
| recall lasted from the last time that they actually heard
| the song.
| hirvi74 wrote:
| What you are describing is known as "perfect _relative_ pitch.
| " It's quite a feat to acquire it -- takes many years of
| practice.
|
| My understanding of true, perfect pitch is something a bit more
| innate. Individual with perfect pitch do not need to rely on
| any other techniques.
|
| I've known people with both types. If anything, the practical
| differences are not significant enough to truly matter from my
| observations. Many of the folks with true, perfect pitch have
| told me that it is a curse more than a blessing. These people
| tend to hear notes even when they _do not want to_ e.g.,
| toilets flushing in an out of tune C, the pitches in people 's
| voices, the pitches of jet engines, CPU coil whining in D#,
| etc..
|
| When a lot of modern life is constant noise and out of tune, it
| can be somewhat distressing for people with perfect pitch, or
| at least, so they have told me. I can't imagine turning off a
| song on the radio solely because it's a few cents out of tune,
| but hey, I knew people that would.
| lyricaljoke wrote:
| Many of the responses to this comment imply that this is
| something fundamentally different than perfect pitch and give
| it some different name ("pseudo absolute pitch", "perfect
| relative pitch", etc.). While I concede that most people think
| of perfect pitch as something that is instilled in some way in
| early childhood rather than achievable through practice, I
| guess I would ask those commenters... why do you think the
| latter is fundamentally different, or is using some separate
| mechanism?
|
| There are many skills which are much easier to instill in early
| childhood and are simply harder to master if approached in
| adulthood -- language learning, certain athletic skills, and
| more -- but we would never consider any of these impossible to
| achieve through study. Sure, maybe the maximum achievable skill
| level is less than what could have been possible if study began
| in early childhood, but we would not say that it is impossible
| for adults to achieve a level of mastery, or that those who
| gained a skill through serious practice must be using some
| separate mechanism than those who learned it in early life.
|
| I contend that it is the same with absolute pitch. After all,
| there is not even a perfect level of absolute pitch mastery! In
| layman's terms, "perfect pitch" is usually understood to mean
| that a person can immediately name a pitch when played -- on a
| 12-tone western music scale. But some people people with
| perfect pitch have better precision than that and can estimate
| quarter tones, etc. If a note is played that's 20 cents sharper
| than Ab, and person #1 says "that's an Ab" while person #2 says
| "that's a note a touch sharper than Ab", most people consider
| neither statement to disqualify them from having absolute
| pitch. But there is a difference. Moreover, no person on Earth
| can name a pitch down to, say, a couple decimals of absolute
| frequency value. Doesn't this imply that the skill exists as
| achievable points on a spectrum, not as a flat binary?
| vunderba wrote:
| In fact, there is an interesting historical anecdote about
| polish-american pianistic prodigy Josef Hofmann related to
| absolute pitch:
|
| _" Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear.
| Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork
| supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and
| it was."_
|
| This is incredibly impressive for two reasons:
|
| - It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely
| to semitone identification
|
| - A pure tone from a tuning fork doesn't have any of the
| characteristic overtones, timbre, etc. that you'd get from an
| instrument to help identify the sound
| bennettnate5 wrote:
| I imagine the gold standard of perfect pitch would be
| identifying exactly how many cents sharp or flat a given
| sound is--you could tune a piano by ear if you had that.
| ithkuil wrote:
| You can tune a piano by ear by listening to the beating.
| You need one note to be tuned according to a given
| reference but that reference doesn't have to be 440 hz
| dhruvrajvanshi wrote:
| - It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely
| to semitone identification
|
| Why would it be? There's nothing fundamental about a
| semitone. It's an arbitrary division that varies across
| different musical systems.
| vunderba wrote:
| I'm not saying that it is but _MOST_ people when they
| think of perfect pitch - they think in terms of note
| identification (e.g. semitones), A, A#, etc.
|
| My point was more about how everyone's ability falls
| along a "Hz Range Level".
| almostnormal wrote:
| > While I concede that most people think of perfect pitch as
| something that is instilled in some way in early childhood
| rather than achievable through practice, I guess I would ask
| those commenters... why do you think the latter is
| fundamentally different, or is using some separate mechanism?
|
| As soon as having learned some relative pitch, it becomes
| very difficult to train absolute pitch. One single note a
| day. For the second note the brain will switch to relative
| mode, and there's no progress on absolute. Forcing the
| ear/brain to run in absolute mode seems possible, but is
| difficult consistently enough to practice absolute.
|
| Source: Experimenting with my own ability (or lack thereof).
| losvedir wrote:
| I personally do believe that there is something fundamentally
| different about perfect pitch perception, and think of it
| more like discussions around aphantasia or maybe synesthesia.
| I followed along with this guy's research years ago on his
| quest to understand and obtain perfect pitch [0] and was
| pretty obsessed myself. I had a number of friends with
| perfect pitch and would do random experiments and quiz them
| ("ooh, you're drunk, can you tell what note this is?" etc).
|
| From that link:
|
| > _For the same reason, absolute listeners do not perceive
| pitch "height". They do not perceive pitches as "higher" or
| "lower" or physically "next to" each other. As musicians, of
| course, absolute listeners learn that, metaphorically,
| pitches are "higher" and "lower" than each other, because
| they can see these relationships on a page of sheet music.
| They also learn that, theoretically, "distance" between notes
| exists, because you can count the semitones that separate
| them, and you can see the "distance" between keys on an
| instrument. But, to an absolute listener, neither "height"
| nor "distance" has any direct perceptual reality._
|
| > _For example, when a non-absolute listener hears a guitar
| slide, we literally hear something moving down. But an
| absolute listener 's experience is nearer to the color-
| changing rectangle above. They hear a series of discrete
| pitches, changing--not moving--from one to another. Although
| they know the sound has "descended" from their knowledge of
| the musical scale, the sound does not give them a literal
| experience of downward movement as it does to non-absolute
| listeners._
|
| The link has a gif of a box moving through the color spectrum
| which helps understand the point.
|
| [0] http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/
| smitelli wrote:
| I'm fascinated by this discussion because of how imprecise the
| terms "perfect," "absolute," "pseudo-absolute," etc. are. It's
| doubly interesting because we're describing things that happen
| in our own minds, with each of us having potentially different
| abilities and training and no common reference to what a
| "typical" person can do.
|
| For me, sometimes, I can hear the opening note or chord of one
| song and it will immediately remind me of another unrelated
| song. When I check, they're almost always either in the same
| key or a semitone off. It happens most reliably when the
| timbres are similar. It's not a conscious thing, and the more I
| try to make it happen the less it ever does. Oddly enough
| though, I am _terrible_ at identifying intervals. (Major third,
| perfect fifth, yeah, I know they 're different and I can hear
| that, but ask me out of the blue which one was just played and
| I'll manage to get it wrong.)
|
| Another thing I can do is play what is essentially a "mental
| recording" of a song I know well in my head. It's like if I had
| an iPod, and I felt some urge to listen to "La Grange" by ZZ
| Top, I can hear it in my head -- guitars, drums, vocals. I can
| skip around to whatever part interests me. I find that when I
| start tapping out the rhythms of what I'm recalling, or humming
| along with its melody, my recollection is pretty spot on when
| played against a real recording on speakers. Again maybe a
| semitone off at worst.
|
| Both of those suggest to me that, somewhere in there, I do have
| an absolute pitch reference that I'm drawing from in an
| undisciplined way. If I sat down and practiced I bet I could
| refine it, but... why? Might be a neat party trick, but aside
| from that I don't really feel like I'm missing anything without
| it.
| vunderba wrote:
| For some there is joy in the act itself even if the benefits
| are dubious at best. Just look at how much time we as a
| species have spent on mastering the rubik's cube.
| Slow_Hand wrote:
| The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is
| played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch
| (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute
| pitch.
|
| If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear
| a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch
| based on the interval between the two.
|
| Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual
| musician, but if you're a dedicated musician the skill is an
| asset that allows you to execute a whole lot quicker.
| Occasionally it can be a curse, because you're more sensitive
| to out-of-tune notes.
| bennettnate5 wrote:
| The definition of relative pitch is unfortunately
| ambiguous, however--I've heard it defined as being able to
| pick out one note or several note, but having to rely on
| that reference note from memory to determine the pitch of
| other notes. I have A flat and E flat burned into my mind
| from playing Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf rag so many times as
| a teenager, so if I think hard I can figure out what any
| note is based on that reference. I can't quickly identify a
| note without doing that in my mind though, so I don't claim
| to have perfect pitch.
| ithkuil wrote:
| You have a slow perfect pitch
| dghf wrote:
| > The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note
| is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that
| pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as
| absolute pitch.
|
| How does that work with variations in concert pitch? As I
| understand it, although the most common standard is to tune
| the A above middle C to 440 Hz, it's not universal.
|
| Are the differences too small to matter? Or does music
| played on instruments tuned to a different standard sound
| "off"? Or are the other standards sufficiently rare that
| most musicians will never encounter them?
| dhruvrajvanshi wrote:
| Perfect pitch means that you can identify 440 Hz. Whether
| you call it A or slightly flat A is a matter of
| convention.
|
| It's like saying water melts at 0 degrees Celcius vs 33
| Fahrenheit. As long as you're talking about the same
| temperature, it doesn't matter.
| JeremyHerrman wrote:
| I also have a repertoire of songs whose keys I've memorized to
| function as anchors, then using relative pitch to gauge
| whatever note I'm trying to discern.
|
| I'd like to skip this relative pitch translation and jump
| straight to recognizing each note directly, but I have gaps in
| coverage. I'm happy you brought up "Comfortably Numb" since
| it's also burned into my neurons - just now I thought about it
| for a moment, went to the keyboard and hit B exactly! Also love
| "Hook" and will never be able to forget that harmonica intro.
|
| Some of my songs: * Vampire Weekend - "Mansard
| Roof" in F major * Radiohead - "Everything in its right
| place" first chord: C major * Queen - "Bohemian Rhapsody"
| piano part in Bb major
| crowcroft wrote:
| This is the way. Most people don't have 'absolute perfect
| pitch' but, almost anyone can train themselves to have relative
| pitch, which can mostly give the same result. That is when you
| are given a good starting point to refer from, you can then
| work out where something is relative to that starting point.
|
| That's why tuning forks and pitch pipes exist. You need a
| source of truth to ground things in, and then you can train
| yourself to hear the relative distance between notes from
| there.
| uptownfunk wrote:
| Can you share the playlists?
| soylentcola wrote:
| I've got far from perfect pitch, but I can relate. In high
| school (mid 90's) I took up guitar and figured out that I could
| use (the memory of) the intro to "November Rain" by Guns N'
| Roses as a way to mentally get an "E" in my head to tune the
| lowest string and go from there.
|
| I'd heard the song so many times that I found I could recall
| the low, then high E at the start and that's really all you
| need to get the rest in tune.
| folkrav wrote:
| I don't have perfect pitch, but I basically have a 440Hz sine
| embedded in my brain which I can use for tuning stuff and figure
| out the rest through relative pitch. Perfect pitch sounds
| actually extremely distracting as a listener...
| bluGill wrote:
| In my city we tune to A=441 I have no idea why but when in
| Rome...
| dhosek wrote:
| It's very much a regional thing where Europeans tend to tune
| higher than Americans, as I recall. A lot is going to be
| dictated by the pitch of the local church organ.
|
| Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as
| testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
| bluGill wrote:
| A440 was standardized in 1939. There was an earlier attempt
| to standardize on A435 in the late 1800s, but they
| specified a temperature uncomfortably cold, when you move
| something (I'm not sure what) tuned at A435 to a more
| comfortable room temperature you get close to A440, and
| from there a little rounding and we have A440. Before the
| 1850s every town had their own standard which was mostly
| based on whatever the A note of their organ was. Turning a
| pipe organ takes an expert hours and costs a lot of money
| so if it is in tune without you make everyone else tune
| their instrument to the organ. The tuning fork was invented
| in 1711, before then we didn't even have a way to move a
| tuning between downs - the act of transporting most
| instrument changes the tuning.
| dhosek wrote:
| There's also a standard of using the metric system, but
| there are still plenty of backwards places that don't
| follow it. One of the instruments I play is flute and
| while there is some flexibility possible to adjust the
| pitch by moving the headjoint in or out, there is an
| idealized pitch for the best intonation.1 Most student
| instruments are A440 but some intermediate and
| professional models are tuned to A442 or A444.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. Granted, the player's technique also affects
| intonation so this is not insurmountable.
| antegamisou wrote:
| As expected, another one of the many that conflates well trained
| relative pitch with absolute.
|
| _Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long
| learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I
| went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say,
| "this piece is probably in D major", to being able to trace along
| the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to
| instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren't
| discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days
| for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more
| good days._
|
| All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received
| substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author,
| and that is ofc commendable.
|
| However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils
| down to at the very least being able to _immediately_ [1]
| recognize the Hz aka note-name of _any_ pitch-producing entity
| (keyboard /string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush,
| drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.)
| with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions
| like being able to identify every single note of a specific
| cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each
| AP possessor is able to distinguish.
|
| Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the
| distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days.
|
| All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy
| for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes
| even the notorious Valproate study [2].
|
| I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific
| interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one
| can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many
| musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not
| possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more
| important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however
| the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is
| perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected.
|
| But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-
| ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not
| obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what
| everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive
| for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't
| developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and
| would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist
| obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP
| possessor superiority comes from.
|
| [1] https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png
|
| [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
| 20k wrote:
| So, I've got perfect pitch, and its not quite that black and
| white. For context, I can do all the regular perfect pitch
| superpowers (except for door rattles, which don't really rattle
| with a single tone), and have had it from a young age. When I
| first remember having it, I could only reliably recognise an A
| (and would have to count upwards to other notes), but
| unambiguously meet any definition as an adult
|
| Many things that are considered perfect pitch skills take
| practice, and the OP is absolutely correct in that certain
| timbres are easier to classify than others. As a kid I would
| have had a harder time telling you the pitches if two woodwind
| instruments were playing a chord, vs two stringed instruments,
| due to familiarity. Its something you tend to work on
| accidentally as a background process as a musician
|
| Much of perfect pitch discrimination is an active process
| though, eg being able to split up a song into its constituent
| parts and pick out the notes of each line is something you have
| to learn. All perfect pitch does is give you the ability to
| perform that discrimination, but anything more than that is a
| skill. For things that people consider to be perfect pitch
| skills (tone classification in a cluster), there absolutely are
| good days and bad days
|
| Lots of pitches in nature aren't especially clean - nor are
| musical instruments, which is what makes them of varying ease
| to classify when you're unfamiliar. There are harmonics that
| can be make it hard to classify, or the central tone can be
| washed out in noise or similar tones. Its like trying to
| identify the dominant frequency in white noise, it takes
| practice
|
| Its likely that OP had perfect pitch as a kid (demonstrating
| pitch classification), and simply never really capitalised on
| it mentally to develop it. Because you're right in that no
| adult has ever experimentally been demonstrated to have learnt
| this, even with extensive training and musical experience
| dfan wrote:
| I agree with all of the above, including the hypothesis that
| the OP likely had absolute pitch to some degree as a child
| and not thought about it. Everyone I personally know with
| perfect pitch (including myself) started engaging with music
| seriously very early on in life. (I don't know quickly I
| acquired it because it's always been as easy as identifying
| colors and I didn't know it was unusual until my piano
| teacher noticed.)
|
| For me piano is definitely the easiest instrument to
| identify, I'm sure largely because it's what I've played all
| my life. Pipe organs are the worst. I assume that in general
| the purity of the tone correlates negatively with ease of
| identification.
| jsphweid wrote:
| Huge +1 to this post. Lots of other posts are off-base about
| the basic definition.
|
| I've always had strong relative pitch ability and many people
| mistake my ability for perfect pitch. But in most practical
| applications, it's not just the _answer_ you arrive at that
| makes the definition so (because this can be faked), it's _how_
| you know it.
|
| People with absolute pitch just _know_ it without thinking --
| no tricks, no mental reference note, no memorizing songs, no
| relying on a certain instrument's timbre, etc., they just know
| it.
| mastercheif wrote:
| I have perfect pitch-your color analogy is exactly how I describe
| my bewilderment that it isn't the default state for humans.
| analog31 wrote:
| I had "temporarily perfect" pitch when I was younger, especially
| when I was regularly playing the cello. I could pick up my cello
| and tune it without a reference, and I could recognize a note or
| key that was being played. I kind of took it for granted.
|
| Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks
| -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have
| one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a
| few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of
| short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's
| not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining.
| I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking
| things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing.
|
| I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a
| spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.
| mafuyu wrote:
| I've often heard people say that "true" perfect pitch can only
| be accomplished with synesthesia, but I have no idea if it's
| true. Back when I played clarinet, I had decent relative pitch
| and I could ballpark a B-flat tuning note if I thought hard
| enough. That was enough to work my way to an absolute pitch,
| but it took a while.
|
| I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect
| pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see
| it being a spectrum as well.
| atto wrote:
| I can also do this, don't have perfect pitch, was also a cello
| player, and have a guess.
|
| Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches,
| and our brain can pattern match _that_ more effectively than
| pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct
| timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to
| an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get
| pretty close.
|
| Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have
| brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar
| method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
| brilee wrote:
| It sounds like you had something similar to what I had with the
| clarinet in middle school.
| masspro wrote:
| I accidentally trained myself by playing with SimTunes
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes> a lot as a kid. But I
| think it trained me to be slightly flat. Electronically perfect
| notes sound wrong, and I tune things down when that's an option.
| I wish I cared enough to try running SimTunes today and see if A
| was 440 Hz or not.
| browningstreet wrote:
| Beato has a course for it. He says he used to have it but it has
| drifted over time. He also claims his young daughter has it now.
| bluGill wrote:
| Someone introduce the author to microtunings. there is a whole -
| much more harmonic - world out there. Equal temperment is a
| harmonic disaster and it is time to end it. (there are advantages
| to equal temperment but harmony is lost)
| drivebyhooting wrote:
| I'm not convinced. Share a microtonal piece that can stand up
| against something by Chopin or any other great composer.
| bitwize wrote:
| For that you will have to look outside the west. Consider
| traditional Arabic maqam music.
| bluGill wrote:
| With some effort you can find the microtonal chords Chopin
| was thinking of and prove it yourself. There are of course
| places where it isn't clear which chord Chopin was thinking
| of though, so it would be fun to hear different people do
| this assignment...
|
| To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires
| a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you
| it. Such a person may not even exist today.
| brilee wrote:
| Choral/string music is quite nice - the musicians have an
| opportunity to bend pitch as locally appropriate to make
| perfect intervals. I definitely did this when I was singing in
| a chorus. But piano is still my first love :)
| mrob wrote:
| You can use equal temperament with any number of divisions of
| the octave (or other interval, e.g. Bohen-Pierce tuning's equal
| division of the "tritave" into 13). Some of these provide
| excellent approximations of common just intonation intervals,
| e.g. dividing the octave into 53 gives you fifths that are only
| 0.07 cents off the just interval, and all other intervals in
| standard 5-limit Western harmony within 1.5 cents of just. It's
| simpler to compose with than stacking frequency ratios and in
| practice sounds equally good.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is something else to introduce the author to. The author
| clearly thinks there are 12 notes to an octave, which is by
| far the most common tuning system but it isn't the only one.
| vunderba wrote:
| It should be noted that a lot of people mistake relative pitch
| for perfect pitch.
|
| Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other
| instrument), play _one random_ note, and you can instantly tell
| me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can
| just do it.
|
| Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a
| tritone versus a perfect fifth for example.
|
| You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy
| fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they
| possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.
| brilee wrote:
| > Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other
| instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell
| me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you
| can just do it.
|
| Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen
| on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
| vunderba wrote:
| I don't think anyone's gatekeeping it - it's important that
| you define something as it actually is otherwise it ceases to
| lose all meaning. (Cough _fascism_ cough).
| Rochus wrote:
| That's correct. Relative pitch gives you 99.9% of the benefits,
| with 0.1% remaining for perfect pitch.
| illwrks wrote:
| Nothing but a random comment, but my daughter has near perfect
| pitch and it amazes me to no end. She can hear a note and 99%
| of the time tell you exactly what it is. She loves telling me
| when I'm off key in the car singing along to things. She's only
| just turned 11.
| crtified wrote:
| Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform -
| there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of
| perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the
| particular harmonic structures that they've trained their ear to,
| e.g. a particular instrument.
|
| And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay
| would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed
| to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary
| frequency in some manner.
|
| Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop
| great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative
| pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic
| analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can
| audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast
| and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual
| listener.
| vunderba wrote:
| Yeah - there has been some speculation that the additional
| overlaying of a sound (overtones, timbre variations, etc) can
| help someone who has absolute pitch - whereas even those with
| the ability can sometimes struggle with something more pure -
| like a sine wave.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| I have...good pitch? If you play notes on a piano I will guess
| right significantly more often than I could by chance, and my
| misses will often be one note away. Not perfect pitch, and not
| useful in any event.
| mrcptthrowaway wrote:
| 20% to 30% of autistic people seem to have perfect pitch [1, 2].
|
| Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical
| perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than
| neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic
| people (35) [3].
|
| I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect
| pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep
| difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a
| kid).
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/h... -
| not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best,
| this is way too high.
|
| [2] More sources talk about it, but can't seem to find it right
| now. I'm pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don't want to
| do the research.
|
| [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/
| adastra22 wrote:
| As someone clinically tone deaf (and no desire to change), this
| comments section is wild. Y'all experience sound very differently
| than me.
| musicale wrote:
| The perfect pitch skill I admire the most is being able to count
| cycles/recognize/sing pitches by frequency and/or sing various
| types of temperament.
|
| Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be
| tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are
| designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant
| sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque
| instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and
| flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that
| choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried
| music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.
| propoganda wrote:
| Not a single Rick Beato mention? Come on guys you're losing out
| on a massive circlejerk opportunity!
| slmjkdbtl wrote:
| I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2
| years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2
| years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument
| as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because
| thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.
| criddell wrote:
| My kids somehow have perfect pitch. They hear a microwave beep
| and can say "that's b-flat". They say it's the same as looking
| at some shoes and naming the color.
|
| From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in
| them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience
| they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them
| when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from
| playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names
| until they were older and started taking music lessons.
| thih9 wrote:
| > Don't learn a non-C instrument
|
| I didn't expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.
| dhosek wrote:
| The thing that really accelerated my pitch learning was choral
| singing (in particular, with a serious classically-oriented choir
| at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago). If you're singing the notes,
| they really get internalized. At the peak of my skills, I was
| able to compose a fully harmonized melody on a walk and then play
| it on piano when I got home.
| trgn wrote:
| I'm middle aged and looking for a new hobby, and for this
| reason alone I might take up singing, to be able to play by ear
| much more easily on my instrument (iso by trial and error, I
| get there eventually but it's not effortless).
|
| I'm held back by a sense of embarrassment when singing. I feel
| weird singing by myself (always have), let alone with others
| around. I don't have this same embarrassment making mistakes
| when playing an instrument. Any tips on how to help with that?
| dhosek wrote:
| I think it helped that I was a regular attendee at Mass
| before becoming a chorister so I had the advantage of years
| of singing in the congregation where you're surrounded by
| people singing (or not) of various skill levels and it's kind
| of expected that you sing around others. Most church choirs
| are pretty welcoming though and tend to be a bit desperate
| for male voices. Only the Cathedral choir had an audition
| process.1 Beyond that, I think a big part of it is to just
| accept that you'll be with other amateurs and you won't be
| the only one who makes mistakes on occasion.
|
| [?]
|
| 1. The cathedral choir kind of spoiled me for choral singing
| though. In most church choirs, the accompanist will play
| choral parts one at a time for the singers to hear them. At
| Holy Name, they just played all four parts together and you
| had to hear your part in the chord.
| trgn wrote:
| great thx! biggest issue now is to relapse my lapsed status
| ;)
|
| > they just played all four parts together
|
| .. that sounds like baptism by fire
| tzs wrote:
| Careful what you wish for.
|
| * Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a
| small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low
| your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of
| vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts.
|
| * Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who
| had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or
| 60s because their perfect pitch was now off and everything
| sounded wrong to them.
| bowsamic wrote:
| Yeah I've also heard that it's more of an annoyance than it's
| worth, in fact I'm not really sure of anyone who has said it's
| a benefit in any way. It's just not really an aspect of music
| that people usually enjoy anyway. Naturally, music is
| engineered more to be relatively pitched rather than absolute
| mrob wrote:
| It's useful if you're singing a song that starts a cappella
| and has instruments join later. Admittedly, this is not
| common. Only example I can think of is The Smashing Pumpkins
| - Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
| mrob wrote:
| Also:
|
| * "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal.
|
| * 12 tone equal temperament is not universal.
|
| * Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect
| speeds.
|
| * Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the
| tuning will vary with temperature. Nobody is going to tune a
| pipe organ in a drafty church every time the weather changes.
|
| * DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow
| for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0],
| which changes the tuning.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching
| tzs wrote:
| OT: what ever happened to AB repeat?
|
| I remember that most of my CD players, and my MP3 players, and I
| think my iPods had AB repeat. For those who have not used a
| player with AB repeat, what it did was let you mark two points on
| a song ("A" and "B") and then it would loop the section between
| those two points.
|
| It was great if you were trying to transcribe a song or figure
| out how to play it on your instrument. You could put a couple
| chords or a section of the melody on AB repeat until you got it
| and then move on.
|
| The major streaming players don't seem to have this. Nor does
| Apple's Music player when playing local files.
|
| You can download a song (if your streaming service supports it)
| or record it (if downloads are not supported) and then open it in
| GarageBand or something similar which should have a way to repeat
| a section.
|
| That works but is a bit of a hassle, and sometimes you might want
| to try to figure out a song when you aren't at your computer.
| swyx wrote:
| > Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying
| lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of
| frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform
| devices. And then, your brain then does something stupidly
| complicated to this set of clean inputs, so that you can
| instantly tell whose voice is whose in a multi-speaker
| environment, and so that you can detect the slightest tremor in
| somebody's voice that might clue you in on their mental state as
| they say those words. We undergo decades of musical training so
| that we can train our brains to unwind all of this complicated
| processing and extract pure tones from this jumble of sound.
|
| i always wondered why we dont seem to have developed ML models
| that can do this yet. its not like the synthetic data is hard to
| generate, if data limitations are the excuse.
| mcnichol wrote:
| I feel like this article is more of a "Here's all the things I
| think about perfect pitch and my journey with music"
|
| Maybe I took the title too literally.
|
| As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels
| mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been
| the most helpful:
|
| * Get a string instrument
|
| * Strum the strings
|
| * Try to tune the first string by ear
|
| * Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner.
|
| This way will you see how progressively your feeling of "in tune"
| can be measured in hertz.
|
| I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz).
|
| I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the
| note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good
| where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun
| and a little less "maintenance".
|
| The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity
| to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is
| something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that
| kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I
| "feel" I've hit that note I'm aiming for. As I've said, I can get
| within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it
| is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close.
|
| Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you'll
| surprise yourself.
| golly_ned wrote:
| I appreciated the detail of the article and its structure as a
| narrative rather than as a simple step-by-step presentation of
| a how-to.
|
| The article also presents different senses of perfect pitch,
| and categorizes your sense as being at the lowest threshold (or
| lower).
| mcnichol wrote:
| I'm not saying I didn't appreciate it. It just read like a
| story of their journey and reflection.
|
| I think "My journey of learning perfect pitch over 15 years"
| is more apt
|
| Learn perfect pitch in 15 years sounds more like a step by
| step article.
|
| I would have clicked both, just expect something closer to
| the latter.
| junar wrote:
| Why would you measure in Hz and not cents [1]?
|
| 5 Hz is going to be larger practical pitch difference at G3
| (196 Hz) compared to E5 (659 Hz).
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)
| zzzbra wrote:
| love to see someone I went to high school with on HN's front page
| :)
| bunderbunder wrote:
| Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute
| pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good
| relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute
| pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend
| to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means
| they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That
| could be a challenging thing to have to do late in your musical
| career.
| kqr wrote:
| Also with perfect pitch you hear when things are even a tiny
| bit out of tune (and this will annoy you!) even if everything
| is just fine relatively speaking and you're the only one of 500
| musically trained people who is even capable of noticing.
| omnicognate wrote:
| As described to me by a couple of professional musicians who
| have absolute pitch (I don't) it's not so much that you lose it
| as that it shifts. For example the qualia you experienced for a
| B might now be felt in response to a slightly flat C, the whole
| sensation having shifted by a bit less than a semitone.
|
| This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and
| was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for
| the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough
| to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a
| blessing for musicians.
| lpnotes wrote:
| I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir
| director identified it and realized I could name all the notes
| from a random key played on the piano.
|
| Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch
| was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was
| better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my
| case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a
| much lower or higher register.
|
| Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect
| Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without
| perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first
| six notes of a melody at a time.
| https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being
| added daily. Enjoy!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I've been doing directed ear training online for several years
| now - if you think you have perfect pitch, you can actually test
| it at tonedear.com (I don't). I've been working instead on the
| first lesson, interval training. It plays two tones next to each
| other and you're supposed to identify if they're a major third,
| perfect fifth, octave, etc. I've been doing it for over two years
| and I've definitely gotten better, although I'm still not even at
| 100% at interval recognition.
| empeyot wrote:
| Related: Ayako Sakakibara et al.: A longitudinal study of the
| process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of
| training with the 'chord identification method'
|
| https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948
|
| Abstract TL;DR: Results suggest that, at a minimum, children
| younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through
| intentional training.
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