30 ms·

Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

171 points by monort 8y ago

danimal88 8y ago
I thought there was a pill you could take to get perfect pitch (assuming absolute and perfect pitch are the same). https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...
akurilin 8y ago
TLDR, what did they use to do the training, and is it available to the general public?
- uxp100 8y ago
  It was an unreleased progressive training program, with sections of immediate feedback, and sections with only feedback after a certain amount of questions. The secret sauce is kinda a glissando between sections to try and throw off your pitch memory. there are people working on recreating this in a web page. There are also people who argue this is not Perfect pitch, but just well trained relative pitch. It did fade after no training for 3 months IIRC. There was a a different study that showed Depakote possibly aiding learning perfect pitch as an adult. Don't go find some Depakote and cram music theory, Depakote could kill you.
SeanLuke 8y ago
More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem to do better. It's a very frustrating and difficult to explain phenomenon. I hate to use the oft-used but inaccurate color analogy, but it might be valid in this context. Imagine that everyone around you is fully color-blind, but not yourself. People are amazed that you can tell something is blue just by looking at it. You've had this ability your whole life. But then one day you look at something and report that it's blue, and someone uses their color-analyzer and tells you that it's not blue, it's in fact yellow. And they're right! But it still looks BLUE to you. Something has broken, and you can't explain it to others easily because they can only see gray.
- Qwertystop 8y ago
  I'd guess this is related to the general tendency towards hearing loss with age? There's presumably an intermediate period between "not hearing things as well as you used to" and "your hearing is so reduced that you can tell" (I know at least one person currently in that gap, though it might just be that he's stubborn about it). Having absolute pitch would then make it easier to realize when your hearing's going, because you're used to it being more precise?
- zwieback 8y ago
  Supposedly the ability to guess how long a minute is also goes that way as you get older, e.g. older participants think a minutes is over after 62s or more. So if your internal clock slows down a B would sound like a C.
  - notatcomputer68 8y ago
    Wow that's a fascinating possible explanation
    - klipt 8y ago
      Unlikely true though, you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform.
      - retsibsi 8y ago
        > you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform. I'm out of my depth here, but wouldn't that process still require some kind of 'clock' (albeit not necessarily the one used for conscious time perception) in order to resolve the signal into absolute, rather than relative, frequencies?
        dTal 8y ago
        Nope - the transform is analog. You have a tube, and the sound propagates down the tube; higher frequencies get absorbed first, while lower frequencies make it further. The tube is lined with little hairs that just sense amplitude; each hair thus measures the amplitude of the signal convolved by the frequency response of that spot in the tube (actually pulling a pure tone out of that is a remarkable feat of signal processing as there is huge overlap). So no clock is required - an absolute frequency turns into an absolute pattern of nerve stimulus.
rustcharm 8y ago
I found the entire PDF on ResearchGate. I've played the piano for 50 years (I'm 55), and I do a lot of ear-training practice with software (Ear Master, etc) to keep myself sharp. I still don't have perfect pitch. Without hearing a reference note, I won't get it. In some ways, it's good. I keep my Bosendorfer tuned to A=443 and occasionally someone comes over whose used to the American A=440 and it bothers them. It doesn't bother me.
- melq 8y ago
  440 is actually an international standard, not American. >In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).* * https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/ https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theo...
  - rustcharm 8y ago
    When I shopped for my piano, in Vienna, it was tuned to 443 which was the custom there. It was crated up at the factory and shipped to California where it's been holding its tune. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_pitches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_... A lot of continental Europe uses A=443 today
anthonyserious 8y ago
In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was "memorize A" (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps). Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfect 4th, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th, and so on. There's a whole list at https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-chart-generator.html https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-....
- splonk 8y ago
  I had a choir teacher who told us a story about cheating that assignment by learning the pitch of the hum of the fluorescent lights in their classroom.
  - jejones3141 8y ago
    Yes! 60 Hz is pretty darned close to Bb.
- flyinghamster 8y ago
  "Precise" dial tone (in North America) is a linear mix of 350 and 440 Hz, so that can be used as a reference. France usually uses pure 440 Hz, and many countries use 425 Hz. Of course, with cell phones, a lot of people don't even have a clue what dial tone is. :)
raincom 8y ago
It is like learning a language: just as kids can acquire a new language, they can also acquire absolute pitch. So, send your kids for early musical training, if they like music, in order to acquire absolute pitch.
pixelperfect 8y ago
I've heard anecdotal reports that absolute pitch training kind of works as an adult, but not as well. If you practice enough you can start to identify notes correctly, but if you don't keep up with training, the ability goes away.
zwieback 8y ago
My pitch recognition isn't bad but not particularly good either. When I play my mandolin, though, I can pick up small pitch differences on certain frets because I'm so used to associating finger position with frequency. Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tomcam 8y ago
  This could also be simply be physics, because up there on the fingerboard there is no way to get good tuning.
bitwize 8y ago
The way I do it is I keep a memory of a song with a known reference frequency in my head. Usually it's the Super Mario Bros. theme, whose root is middle C. I know how the other notes on the scale sound relative to middle C. Sharps and flats are trickier, but if they sound unusual I can go half a step up or down and see if they match some other note. Usually I can identify a tone within half a step or so. Or at least I could, using this method, when I was a kid. Haven't tried it much lately.
- default-kramer 8y ago
  I have a similar method. It's certainly not perfect, but 99% of the time I'll be within two semitones, 80% within 1 semitone, and 50% of the time I'll be exactly right (percentages are approximate). Smoke On The Water gives me a G, Call Me The Breeze gives me an A, and so on. These are songs I've heard so many times they are just burned into my head.
tunesmith 8y ago
Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It's occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other. Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - if I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn't be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it's useful for is recognizing what key it's in. If I hadn't been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later. I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn't important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it's all relative.
- psychometry 8y ago
  Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily distracting when music doesn't match its normal key due to transposition or tuning issues, I can move past it without too much effort, although I am continually aware of the discrepancy. It's like the visual illusion where the ballerina can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise depending on your perspective. The biggest benefit is being able to identify the key without having to do the initial hunt for the tonic by testing notes. This is very useful in an accompaniment situation.
  - jancsika 8y ago
    > Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong. The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still. We must also add the complication that most televisions and places where people look at scenes the colors tend to gradually ramp down in frequency as the lights get tired.
mistersquid 8y ago
(Disclosure/Disclaimer: I don't have perfect pitch nor do I aspire to acquire it. I am, however, fascinated that some people do have perfect pitch.) Rick Beato provides a lot of (too much) context before explaining "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch". [0] (Timecode link to Beato's point.) Beato's video was featured on MetaFilter a couple of months ago. [1] [0] https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364 https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364 [1] https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Perfect-Pitch https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Pe...
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  Not sure why this was downvoted. It's an interesting video from a smart musician with a ton of training and experience. He might be wrong, but he's not wildly wrong. Despite this and the one study of valproate that indicated adults could start to learn perfect pitch while using the drug, the preponderance of evidence is still that learning perfect pitch as an adult doesn't really happen all that often (if ever). Think of all of the musicians who do ear training for years and never develop perfect pitch (but develop very good relative pitch). That's a tremendous amount of evidence that developing perfect pitch as an adult is vanishingly rare. I'm not sure why a couple of tiny studies with somewhat inconclusive results would be considered enough to ignore thousands of musician's experience. I'd love it if perfect pitch could be acquired as an adult, but I've mostly accepted that pretty good relative pitch is the best I'll ever have, and a couple of small studies don't really convince me otherwise. It's interesting how "amazing new cancer cure" studies are brutally beaten down with "this is a small study, don't get your hopes up too high yet" here, but this tiny study has everybody convinced perfect pitch is totally do-able for everyone.
monktastic1 8y ago
One strange phenomenon I've noticed (while trying to teach myself perfect pitch) is that, when trying to reproduce (say) middle C, if I'm off, I'm only ever off by multiples of a half-step. That is to say, I'm singing exactly a B or C# (or on a bad day, Bb or D). My ear is sharp enough to detect if I were, say, a quarter step off. This ability seems to fall somewhere in between relative and absolute pitch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one it is true for.
auganov 8y ago
How would you ever know if you "have" perfect pitch without training? I don't even know what a C or B is[0]. Are there any tests online that don't require prior knowledge? [0] I do realize they denote some frequencies
- tbirrell 8y ago
  Musical notes are a base-7 system denoted with the letters A-F repeating. Given that it is not a numerical system, different A's or B's (ect) are marked with numbers rather then continuing like hex. i.e. A3, E5 (etc) with lower tones being lower numbers. To answer your question, you won't. Perfect pitch usually develops in people who have had musical training since very young childhood. Just like you can't really remember learning your native language, they can't remember learning this skill. But like everyone, they did learn it at some point.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Notes are Base 12. A scale may be base 7.
    - tbirrell 8y ago
      The other way around. There are 7 notes and the accidentals give us a 12-tone chromatic scale.
      - gmjoe 8y ago
        Is this a cultural thing? I was always taught there are 12 notes, while any standard scale contains only 7 of them. (The chromatic scale obviously being the exception which contains all 12.) Accidentals are just for notation -- obviously B-flat and A-sharp are the same "note", just as F-sharp-sharp and G are. Our entire turning of equal temperament is based on 12 equal intervals, not 7. So I'd argue parent commenter is correct -- notes are base 12, not base 7.
        8y ago
aklein 8y ago
It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.
- aczerepinski 8y ago
  Great catch, this is probably a huge detail.
- splonk 8y ago
  There's definitely some research that suggests that tonal languages have some relation to ability to distinguish absolute pitch. http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/MP-2004-21_339-356.pdf http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/MP-2004-21_339-356.pdf > The findings from these three experiments are in accordance with the hypothesis that speakers of tone language employ absolute pitch as a feature of speech and that they refer to precise and stable absolute pitch templates in enunciating words. > The present study does not address the question of whether absolute pitch, when acquired as a feature of speech, later generalizes to music.
randcraw 8y ago
This is one of those occasions when the research team definitely needs to test on more than the local population of subjects. Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it's likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests. I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.
- yorwba 8y ago
  You're probably right about the subjects: "Ten adults were recruited at City University of Hong Kong and completed the training." So they'd likely be native Cantonese speakers. But tonal languages use relative rather than absolute pitch (because different people have different vocal ranges), and all participants in the study improved their performance over time. So speaking a tonal language or being a musician (also the case for the subjects in the study) can give an advantage, but I'd be surprised if deliberate training of pitch perception had absolutely no effect for people without such an advantage.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, somehow, as we all can do it. Tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Everyone can learn Cantonese regardless whether they have AP or not. If you claim tonal languages train you for AP that's citation needed, I don't think that's true (we would expect tonal language speakers to be more likely to have AP, a trend we haven't observed).
  - monort 8y ago
    Here is one paper about that: Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training. http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf
thinkpad20 8y ago
I think it's overly simplistic to group people into those who have perfect pitch and those who don't. Of course, I don't know if the article makes this claim, but I think a lot of people tend to view perfect pitch as a binary ability -- either you have it or you don't. But speaking personally, I have "sort of" perfect pitch (imperfect pitch? semi-perfect pitch?), by which I mean that I can sing and/or recognize the pitch of certain notes from memory, but not any arbitrary note, not under all circumstances, and not instantaneously. If I'm not right on the money, I'm usually at least within a semitone or two. I can do it reliably enough that I'm convinced it's not just a fluke when I get it right, but on the other hand it's not at all "perfect." Moreover, the recognition happens too slowly to be practical in real time; usually it involves audiating part of a song that I know has certain notes, and using them as reference pitches. Perhaps if I dedicated more time to it I could get it more accurate or faster, and maybe even develop proper perfect pitch. All that being said, while having true perfect pitch would probably open up new ways to appreciate and understand the music I'm listening to, I think that relative pitch is a far more useful skill -- nigh essential for many genres.
- aclimatt 8y ago
  For what it's worth, I have the exact same skill as you down to all of the details. I can remember many songs in their original key, sing them / whistle them within a few cents usually, identify the key of many notes most of the time, but by no means 100% of the time perfectly. It's probably something that could indeed be trained to be more "perfect", but as someone who does have "pretty good" absolute pitch, I still consider it a parlor trick. It's fun now and again, but it doesn't really help much with my music. Perhaps that's because I don't transcribe Bach concertos. On the other hand, I completely agree that relative pitch has to be on point. I don't see how it's possible to be an effective musician without it. Being able to intuitively know intervals, certainly if you're a singer, is indispensable.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  That strongly matches my personal experience. I think it's probably more likely that absolute and relative pitch are different capabilities, with most people innately biased one way or the other. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive. And I'm pretty certain some people have low capability in both. I find the obsession with perfect pitch to be pretty overwrought. Much like I often find some people to be overly obsessed with synesthesia as a mystical source of artistic creativity.
0x70dd 8y ago
My understanding is that you can train people to recognize few/certain tones, but if you have a perfect pitch you are able to do it for every tone, which is something that cannot be learned.
- monktastic1 8y ago
  There are only 12 pitch classes. Why would recognizing two be possible but 12 impossible?
ryneandal 8y ago
Of course it's possible. Acquiring the breaths is the hard part.
qwerty456127 8y ago
Can somebody recommend an app for pitch recognition training for people who have the capacity to distinguish small differences in sound frequency but zero knowledge of music theory? E.g. an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify as I have no idea of how do musical notes and their varieties sound and am to be taught these from scratch. Of course I can find some examples and listen to them but that would take a fair amount of repetitions to memorize and I'd like the app to help with this too.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  "an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify" I don't think any ear training app works that way. Any app that is based on good pedagogical practice would be training relative pitch recognition, not note naming. An app like that would only be usable by people who already have perfect pitch. Relative pitch, which is the skill most musicians cultivate, is based on recognizing the difference between pitches as well as the sound of combinations of pitches (i.e. recognizing major/minor chords), and only much later do note names come into play. Someone with a very refined sense of relative pitch can name notes, if they have a reference pitch in their head that they can compare to (and some people take that one step further by making the top or bottom of their vocal range their "reference note", or they "memorize" the first note of some piece of music they know well, so they can figure out other pitches based on where it is relative to a known note, but that can drift). Anyway, I've tried a bunch of ear training apps and I really like Perfect Ear. It is, by far, the best ear training app I've found, and it covers tons of ground. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.musiciankit&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...)
fipple 8y ago
I’m a pretty good musician and have never had the slightest ability to discern absolute pitch. I’d like it but not enough to work at it :)
hanoz 8y ago
Can't you just derive any pitch if you know the default pitch of your own voice?
Bud 8y ago
Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying temperaments. This discussion doesn't seem to be acknowledging how many pitch standards there are that are still in common use, and even in increasingly-common use due to the original-instruments movement.
- sizzzzlerz 8y ago
  That's interesting. Do you know why pitch varied so much at those periods and why have we settled on A=440 being considered orchestral pitch these days? I'd think having to sing at these different pitches must be difficult since you can't tune your voice like a instrument can.
  - SwellJoe 8y ago
    There's a pretty good/brief Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch (see specifically "Pitch Inflation" In short, it was competition for the performance to seem more "bright" and exciting. It's arbitrary, but for performers to reach higher pitches was viewed as more challenging (and it is, for singers). The wiki article is cited, so you can read up in as much depth as you like. But, it mostly boils down to, "That's just what people liked during important periods of musical development. And, then we stopped because technology advanced to the point where we could very accurately determine pitch and for the past 50+ years the majority of recorded and performed music has been A=440, or very close to it."
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  It's my understanding that perfect pitch can be tuned, and also trained to deal with microtonal harmonies, etc. I don't think it is a straight jacket. Jacob Collier, I think(?), has perfect pitch, but going outside of western harmony is his schtick. I think it's more like learning new words as an adult rather than a cage. But, maybe I'm wrong? I've heard anecdotally of people with perfect pitch complaining about some music being "out of tune", but I somehow doubt musicians are saying that, since as you note, music comes in all sorts of tunings (and the more interesting the music is, the more likely it is to go in weird directions, in terms of tuning, scales, etc.).
baccheion 8y ago
There are supplements/nootropics that make such a thing possible.
- opportune 8y ago
  lol, the entire nootropic industry is just one step above pseudoscience. Nobody I know who has started taking nootropics has seen any measurable benefit from them aside from side effects, assuming we are excluding normal stimulants from "nootropics" and mostly referring to *racetams. Additionally, most studies on nootropics that show promising results focus on things like NGF rather than actual changes in intelligence, and only test one potential nootropic at a time, while most people who take them do complex stacks / take much higher doses, which makes me question their safety regarding long-term use Given that, to my knowledge, there isn't any evidence that increasing neurotropic growth factor will cause significant neuron growth/regeneration in regular adults, it seems the only nootropics that actually work are stimulants and semi-stimulants, which at the end of the day just make you more alert and focused It's one of those "life hacks" that gives such marginal, if any, benefits that it's not even a productive use of your time to think about them/order them/etc. when you could do more productive life hacks with your time instead
  - baccheion 8y ago
    SEMAX + selank + alpha-GPC 5 days/week alternating every 4 weeks with p21/cerebrolysin. Also add a multivitamin, D + K, and chelated/TRAACS magnesium supplement. Nootropics, if they have an effect, tend to improve aspects of cognition. For example, focus, creativity, mental energy, verbal fluidity, ability to multitask (ie, listen to music while reading), etc. Not all benefits are perceivable without monitoring via sites like Cambridge Sciences.
    - opportune 8y ago
      I'm interested in large double blind studies regarding increases in IQ or alertness, as well as studies into the long term effects of taking these mostly untested drugs/supplements. A bunch of guys on the internet taking Lumosity tests doesn't replace a study
sizzzzlerz 8y ago
From the evolutionary perspective, what advantage does having perfect pitch "built-in" give a person or society? Being able to identify the pitch of some game you might be hunting wouldn't seem to make you a better hunter thus being able to survive hard times so you're able to pass your genes along better than one without it.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  It's closely related to language skills, which also have nothing to do with hunting, but have a lot to do with being an attractive mate and having leadership abilities. So...it is not a survival skill, rather it is a mating skill.
SwellJoe 8y ago
"In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. Within the training period, 14% of the participants were able to name twelve pitches at 90% accuracy or above, a performance level comparable with typical AP possessors." This sounds like good relative pitch, with a memorized reference tone. Absolute pitch doesn't fade in 12 to 40 hours. Many musicians have relative pitch abilities that look, to observers, like absolute pitch, because they've memorized a reference tone sometime in the recent past and can find any other note relative to that reference (some folks also use their own voice as a reference tone, because they know the top and/or bottom of their range, or how a specific note feels when they sing it). I only have the summary to go by, but this sounds quite different from absolute pitch and quite similar to relative pitch. We've always known people can acquire very good relative pitch recognition skills as an adult. That isn't new or groundbreaking (though if they have a training regimen that works fast enough for a study like this, that would be great news, since ear training for very good relative pitch recognition is a months or years long process for most people).
- organsnyder 8y ago
  I used to be able to pretend I had absolute pitch, back when I played in a college orchestra that rehearsed four days per week—I had that A (for tuning) memorized very well. Now that I'm over a decade removed from that, it's not quite as reliable as it used to be.
tomcam 8y ago
Anecdata: my piano teacher was one of a class in the 1920s who were all explicitly trained into absolute pitch during kindergarten . Every person in the class learned it and retained it until at least late middle age. Some were better than others: my teacher’s sister, for example, could give you the pitch of anything from knocking a piece of wood to the sound of a car exhaust.
mikorym 8y ago
Musician here with terrible pitch guessing ability (but semi-decent composition skillz and good harmony sense). I have always found absolute (or "perfect" pitch) to be misinterpreted in popular culture. I have not actually met a musician with perfect pitch. However, perhaps my definition is too narrow. Would a person with perfect pitch be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 432 Hz A? Would they be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 438 Hz A? If the definition is to be able to tell that a note is only slightly off within some pre-decided tuning system, then I know many people that can do this. The question to me is whether absolute pitch is as it says in the name, "absolute", or is it always limited by some measure of uncertainty? Is there a physical limitation? (Is it 1 Hz, or is it 5 Hz?) Hope someone can explain this. Edit: In the paper, they seem to stick to a pre-decided tuning system. Probably the standard one that we have now (equal spacing based on 13th root of 2 with 440 Hz A).
- coliveira 8y ago
  If you have very well developed perfect pitch, you can sense the difference just in the same way that you can feel that two strings are out of tune by a few Hz. That's why some people with perfect pitch like Mozart get annoyed by out of tune instruments.
vnorilo 8y ago
I've studied cello from age 5 to conservatory degree; the pitches of the open strings are burned in my memory. I can also often tell which key an orchestra plays by timbral cues. However, I do not have "real" perfect pitch, although the topic study might find that I do. True perfect pitch is like the anecdotes in the thread: discomfort with "wrong" transpositions or tunings, learning melodies by real rather than relative pitch, internal references that can go out of tune with age. All these are completely alien to me.
- coliveira 8y ago
  I understand your point, but who knows if these things aren't really the same? My opinion is that having the notes "burned" in your memory is a lesser degree of the same phenomenon. People that are considered to have "real" perfect pitch just developed these abilities beyond what normal musicians like you did. And doing this at a very young age really helps a lot, in the same way that leaning new languages in infancy is a painless activity and quite difficult at adult age.
  - vnorilo 8y ago
    Yeah - I guess the early acquisition might be what influences the way these kids develop different cognitive strategies for music early on. It's obvious when teaching kids: the median student seems to operate on the first order derivative of the pitch curve, while the perfect pitch kids operate with the absolute values. A gross simplification. Interestingly, many of them require a different strategy for transposing melodies: go note by note, while median learners apply melodic intervals incrementally. Similar differences can be seen in solfege and dictation.
GolDDranks 8y ago
This is interesting to me, not because of the musical implications but because of the neurobiological ones – and especially with regards of learning accents / pronunciation of second languages. There has been a lot of studies that have tried to teach recognizing the audible difference of R and L to Japanese English learners. I don't know of a single study has been able to produce robust results. (There's a primary and secondary acoustic cues to the difference; some Japanese have had success recognizing the difference using secondary acoustic cues, but recognizing the primary cue which is the most robust one and which the natives use preferentially escapes treatment.) However, the testing protocols and time are limited, and we have increasingly knowledge about adult neuroplasticity. Results like this keep me hopeful that it's just that we don't know the good way to do that yet and we might see some results in the future.
HelenePhisher 8y ago
If you want to learn how to recognize tones I highly recommend the method of Alain Benbassat: http://www.miles.be http://www.miles.be You'll notice a rapid understanding of tones and keys. There are (even free) apps for Android and iOS as well.

171 points by monort 8y ago

I thought there was a pill you could take to get perfect pitch (assuming absolute and perfect pitch are the same). https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...

akurilin 8y ago

TLDR, what did they use to do the training, and is it available to the general public?

uxp100 8y ago
It was an unreleased progressive training program, with sections of immediate feedback, and sections with only feedback after a certain amount of questions. The secret sauce is kinda a glissando between sections to try and throw off your pitch memory. there are people working on recreating this in a web page. There are also people who argue this is not Perfect pitch, but just well trained relative pitch. It did fade after no training for 3 months IIRC. There was a a different study that showed Depakote possibly aiding learning perfect pitch as an adult. Don't go find some Depakote and cram music theory, Depakote could kill you.

SeanLuke 8y ago

More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem to do better. It's a very frustrating and difficult to explain phenomenon. I hate to use the oft-used but inaccurate color analogy, but it might be valid in this context. Imagine that everyone around you is fully color-blind, but not yourself. People are amazed that you can tell something is blue just by looking at it. You've had this ability your whole life. But then one day you look at something and report that it's blue, and someone uses their color-analyzer and tells you that it's not blue, it's in fact yellow. And they're right! But it still looks BLUE to you. Something has broken, and you can't explain it to others easily because they can only see gray.

Qwertystop 8y ago
I'd guess this is related to the general tendency towards hearing loss with age? There's presumably an intermediate period between "not hearing things as well as you used to" and "your hearing is so reduced that you can tell" (I know at least one person currently in that gap, though it might just be that he's stubborn about it). Having absolute pitch would then make it easier to realize when your hearing's going, because you're used to it being more precise?
zwieback 8y ago
Supposedly the ability to guess how long a minute is also goes that way as you get older, e.g. older participants think a minutes is over after 62s or more. So if your internal clock slows down a B would sound like a C.
- notatcomputer68 8y ago
  Wow that's a fascinating possible explanation
  - klipt 8y ago
    Unlikely true though, you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform.
    - retsibsi 8y ago
      > you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform. I'm out of my depth here, but wouldn't that process still require some kind of 'clock' (albeit not necessarily the one used for conscious time perception) in order to resolve the signal into absolute, rather than relative, frequencies?
      - dTal 8y ago
        Nope - the transform is analog. You have a tube, and the sound propagates down the tube; higher frequencies get absorbed first, while lower frequencies make it further. The tube is lined with little hairs that just sense amplitude; each hair thus measures the amplitude of the signal convolved by the frequency response of that spot in the tube (actually pulling a pure tone out of that is a remarkable feat of signal processing as there is huge overlap). So no clock is required - an absolute frequency turns into an absolute pattern of nerve stimulus.

rustcharm 8y ago

I found the entire PDF on ResearchGate. I've played the piano for 50 years (I'm 55), and I do a lot of ear-training practice with software (Ear Master, etc) to keep myself sharp. I still don't have perfect pitch. Without hearing a reference note, I won't get it. In some ways, it's good. I keep my Bosendorfer tuned to A=443 and occasionally someone comes over whose used to the American A=440 and it bothers them. It doesn't bother me.

melq 8y ago
440 is actually an international standard, not American. >In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).* * https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theory/ https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theo...
- rustcharm 8y ago
  When I shopped for my piano, in Vienna, it was tuned to 443 which was the custom there. It was crated up at the factory and shipped to California where it's been holding its tune. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_pitches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_... A lot of continental Europe uses A=443 today

anthonyserious 8y ago

In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was "memorize A" (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps). Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfect 4th, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th, and so on. There's a whole list at https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-chart-generator.html https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-....

splonk 8y ago
I had a choir teacher who told us a story about cheating that assignment by learning the pitch of the hum of the fluorescent lights in their classroom.
- jejones3141 8y ago
  Yes! 60 Hz is pretty darned close to Bb.
flyinghamster 8y ago
"Precise" dial tone (in North America) is a linear mix of 350 and 440 Hz, so that can be used as a reference. France usually uses pure 440 Hz, and many countries use 425 Hz. Of course, with cell phones, a lot of people don't even have a clue what dial tone is. :)

raincom 8y ago

It is like learning a language: just as kids can acquire a new language, they can also acquire absolute pitch. So, send your kids for early musical training, if they like music, in order to acquire absolute pitch.

pixelperfect 8y ago

I've heard anecdotal reports that absolute pitch training kind of works as an adult, but not as well. If you practice enough you can start to identify notes correctly, but if you don't keep up with training, the ability goes away.

zwieback 8y ago

My pitch recognition isn't bad but not particularly good either. When I play my mandolin, though, I can pick up small pitch differences on certain frets because I'm so used to associating finger position with frequency. Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.

deleted 8y ago
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tomcam 8y ago
This could also be simply be physics, because up there on the fingerboard there is no way to get good tuning.

bitwize 8y ago

The way I do it is I keep a memory of a song with a known reference frequency in my head. Usually it's the Super Mario Bros. theme, whose root is middle C. I know how the other notes on the scale sound relative to middle C. Sharps and flats are trickier, but if they sound unusual I can go half a step up or down and see if they match some other note. Usually I can identify a tone within half a step or so. Or at least I could, using this method, when I was a kid. Haven't tried it much lately.

default-kramer 8y ago
I have a similar method. It's certainly not perfect, but 99% of the time I'll be within two semitones, 80% within 1 semitone, and 50% of the time I'll be exactly right (percentages are approximate). Smoke On The Water gives me a G, Call Me The Breeze gives me an A, and so on. These are songs I've heard so many times they are just burned into my head.

tunesmith 8y ago

Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It's occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other. Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - if I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn't be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it's useful for is recognizing what key it's in. If I hadn't been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later. I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn't important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it's all relative.

psychometry 8y ago
Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily distracting when music doesn't match its normal key due to transposition or tuning issues, I can move past it without too much effort, although I am continually aware of the discrepancy. It's like the visual illusion where the ballerina can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise depending on your perspective. The biggest benefit is being able to identify the key without having to do the initial hunt for the tonic by testing notes. This is very useful in an accompaniment situation.
- jancsika 8y ago
  > Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong. The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still. We must also add the complication that most televisions and places where people look at scenes the colors tend to gradually ramp down in frequency as the lights get tired.

mistersquid 8y ago

(Disclosure/Disclaimer: I don't have perfect pitch nor do I aspire to acquire it. I am, however, fascinated that some people do have perfect pitch.) Rick Beato provides a lot of (too much) context before explaining "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch". [0] (Timecode link to Beato's point.) Beato's video was featured on MetaFilter a couple of months ago. [1] [0] https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364 https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364 [1] https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Perfect-Pitch https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Pe...

SwellJoe 8y ago
Not sure why this was downvoted. It's an interesting video from a smart musician with a ton of training and experience. He might be wrong, but he's not wildly wrong. Despite this and the one study of valproate that indicated adults could start to learn perfect pitch while using the drug, the preponderance of evidence is still that learning perfect pitch as an adult doesn't really happen all that often (if ever). Think of all of the musicians who do ear training for years and never develop perfect pitch (but develop very good relative pitch). That's a tremendous amount of evidence that developing perfect pitch as an adult is vanishingly rare. I'm not sure why a couple of tiny studies with somewhat inconclusive results would be considered enough to ignore thousands of musician's experience. I'd love it if perfect pitch could be acquired as an adult, but I've mostly accepted that pretty good relative pitch is the best I'll ever have, and a couple of small studies don't really convince me otherwise. It's interesting how "amazing new cancer cure" studies are brutally beaten down with "this is a small study, don't get your hopes up too high yet" here, but this tiny study has everybody convinced perfect pitch is totally do-able for everyone.

monktastic1 8y ago

One strange phenomenon I've noticed (while trying to teach myself perfect pitch) is that, when trying to reproduce (say) middle C, if I'm off, I'm only ever off by multiples of a half-step. That is to say, I'm singing exactly a B or C# (or on a bad day, Bb or D). My ear is sharp enough to detect if I were, say, a quarter step off. This ability seems to fall somewhere in between relative and absolute pitch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one it is true for.

auganov 8y ago

How would you ever know if you "have" perfect pitch without training? I don't even know what a C or B is[0]. Are there any tests online that don't require prior knowledge? [0] I do realize they denote some frequencies

tbirrell 8y ago
Musical notes are a base-7 system denoted with the letters A-F repeating. Given that it is not a numerical system, different A's or B's (ect) are marked with numbers rather then continuing like hex. i.e. A3, E5 (etc) with lower tones being lower numbers. To answer your question, you won't. Perfect pitch usually develops in people who have had musical training since very young childhood. Just like you can't really remember learning your native language, they can't remember learning this skill. But like everyone, they did learn it at some point.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Notes are Base 12. A scale may be base 7.
  - tbirrell 8y ago
    The other way around. There are 7 notes and the accidentals give us a 12-tone chromatic scale.
    - gmjoe 8y ago
      Is this a cultural thing? I was always taught there are 12 notes, while any standard scale contains only 7 of them. (The chromatic scale obviously being the exception which contains all 12.) Accidentals are just for notation -- obviously B-flat and A-sharp are the same "note", just as F-sharp-sharp and G are. Our entire turning of equal temperament is based on 12 equal intervals, not 7. So I'd argue parent commenter is correct -- notes are base 12, not base 7.
      - 8y ago

aklein 8y ago

It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.

aczerepinski 8y ago
Great catch, this is probably a huge detail.
splonk 8y ago
There's definitely some research that suggests that tonal languages have some relation to ability to distinguish absolute pitch. http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/MP-2004-21_339-356.pdf http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/MP-2004-21_339-356.pdf > The findings from these three experiments are in accordance with the hypothesis that speakers of tone language employ absolute pitch as a feature of speech and that they refer to precise and stable absolute pitch templates in enunciating words. > The present study does not address the question of whether absolute pitch, when acquired as a feature of speech, later generalizes to music.

randcraw 8y ago

This is one of those occasions when the research team definitely needs to test on more than the local population of subjects. Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it's likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests. I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.

yorwba 8y ago
You're probably right about the subjects: "Ten adults were recruited at City University of Hong Kong and completed the training." So they'd likely be native Cantonese speakers. But tonal languages use relative rather than absolute pitch (because different people have different vocal ranges), and all participants in the study improved their performance over time. So speaking a tonal language or being a musician (also the case for the subjects in the study) can give an advantage, but I'd be surprised if deliberate training of pitch perception had absolutely no effect for people without such an advantage.
gnulinux 8y ago
This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, somehow, as we all can do it. Tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Everyone can learn Cantonese regardless whether they have AP or not. If you claim tonal languages train you for AP that's citation needed, I don't think that's true (we would expect tonal language speakers to be more likely to have AP, a trend we haven't observed).
- monort 8y ago
  Here is one paper about that: Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training. http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf

thinkpad20 8y ago

I think it's overly simplistic to group people into those who have perfect pitch and those who don't. Of course, I don't know if the article makes this claim, but I think a lot of people tend to view perfect pitch as a binary ability -- either you have it or you don't. But speaking personally, I have "sort of" perfect pitch (imperfect pitch? semi-perfect pitch?), by which I mean that I can sing and/or recognize the pitch of certain notes from memory, but not any arbitrary note, not under all circumstances, and not instantaneously. If I'm not right on the money, I'm usually at least within a semitone or two. I can do it reliably enough that I'm convinced it's not just a fluke when I get it right, but on the other hand it's not at all "perfect." Moreover, the recognition happens too slowly to be practical in real time; usually it involves audiating part of a song that I know has certain notes, and using them as reference pitches. Perhaps if I dedicated more time to it I could get it more accurate or faster, and maybe even develop proper perfect pitch. All that being said, while having true perfect pitch would probably open up new ways to appreciate and understand the music I'm listening to, I think that relative pitch is a far more useful skill -- nigh essential for many genres.

aclimatt 8y ago
For what it's worth, I have the exact same skill as you down to all of the details. I can remember many songs in their original key, sing them / whistle them within a few cents usually, identify the key of many notes most of the time, but by no means 100% of the time perfectly. It's probably something that could indeed be trained to be more "perfect", but as someone who does have "pretty good" absolute pitch, I still consider it a parlor trick. It's fun now and again, but it doesn't really help much with my music. Perhaps that's because I don't transcribe Bach concertos. On the other hand, I completely agree that relative pitch has to be on point. I don't see how it's possible to be an effective musician without it. Being able to intuitively know intervals, certainly if you're a singer, is indispensable.
acjohnson55 8y ago
That strongly matches my personal experience. I think it's probably more likely that absolute and relative pitch are different capabilities, with most people innately biased one way or the other. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive. And I'm pretty certain some people have low capability in both. I find the obsession with perfect pitch to be pretty overwrought. Much like I often find some people to be overly obsessed with synesthesia as a mystical source of artistic creativity.

0x70dd 8y ago

My understanding is that you can train people to recognize few/certain tones, but if you have a perfect pitch you are able to do it for every tone, which is something that cannot be learned.

monktastic1 8y ago
There are only 12 pitch classes. Why would recognizing two be possible but 12 impossible?

ryneandal 8y ago

Of course it's possible. Acquiring the breaths is the hard part.

qwerty456127 8y ago

Can somebody recommend an app for pitch recognition training for people who have the capacity to distinguish small differences in sound frequency but zero knowledge of music theory? E.g. an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify as I have no idea of how do musical notes and their varieties sound and am to be taught these from scratch. Of course I can find some examples and listen to them but that would take a fair amount of repetitions to memorize and I'd like the app to help with this too.

SwellJoe 8y ago
"an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify" I don't think any ear training app works that way. Any app that is based on good pedagogical practice would be training relative pitch recognition, not note naming. An app like that would only be usable by people who already have perfect pitch. Relative pitch, which is the skill most musicians cultivate, is based on recognizing the difference between pitches as well as the sound of combinations of pitches (i.e. recognizing major/minor chords), and only much later do note names come into play. Someone with a very refined sense of relative pitch can name notes, if they have a reference pitch in their head that they can compare to (and some people take that one step further by making the top or bottom of their vocal range their "reference note", or they "memorize" the first note of some piece of music they know well, so they can figure out other pitches based on where it is relative to a known note, but that can drift). Anyway, I've tried a bunch of ear training apps and I really like Perfect Ear. It is, by far, the best ear training app I've found, and it covers tons of ground. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.musiciankit&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...)

fipple 8y ago

I’m a pretty good musician and have never had the slightest ability to discern absolute pitch. I’d like it but not enough to work at it :)

hanoz 8y ago

Can't you just derive any pitch if you know the default pitch of your own voice?

Bud 8y ago

Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying temperaments. This discussion doesn't seem to be acknowledging how many pitch standards there are that are still in common use, and even in increasingly-common use due to the original-instruments movement.

sizzzzlerz 8y ago
That's interesting. Do you know why pitch varied so much at those periods and why have we settled on A=440 being considered orchestral pitch these days? I'd think having to sing at these different pitches must be difficult since you can't tune your voice like a instrument can.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  There's a pretty good/brief Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch (see specifically "Pitch Inflation" In short, it was competition for the performance to seem more "bright" and exciting. It's arbitrary, but for performers to reach higher pitches was viewed as more challenging (and it is, for singers). The wiki article is cited, so you can read up in as much depth as you like. But, it mostly boils down to, "That's just what people liked during important periods of musical development. And, then we stopped because technology advanced to the point where we could very accurately determine pitch and for the past 50+ years the majority of recorded and performed music has been A=440, or very close to it."
SwellJoe 8y ago
It's my understanding that perfect pitch can be tuned, and also trained to deal with microtonal harmonies, etc. I don't think it is a straight jacket. Jacob Collier, I think(?), has perfect pitch, but going outside of western harmony is his schtick. I think it's more like learning new words as an adult rather than a cage. But, maybe I'm wrong? I've heard anecdotally of people with perfect pitch complaining about some music being "out of tune", but I somehow doubt musicians are saying that, since as you note, music comes in all sorts of tunings (and the more interesting the music is, the more likely it is to go in weird directions, in terms of tuning, scales, etc.).

baccheion 8y ago

There are supplements/nootropics that make such a thing possible.

opportune 8y ago
lol, the entire nootropic industry is just one step above pseudoscience. Nobody I know who has started taking nootropics has seen any measurable benefit from them aside from side effects, assuming we are excluding normal stimulants from "nootropics" and mostly referring to *racetams. Additionally, most studies on nootropics that show promising results focus on things like NGF rather than actual changes in intelligence, and only test one potential nootropic at a time, while most people who take them do complex stacks / take much higher doses, which makes me question their safety regarding long-term use Given that, to my knowledge, there isn't any evidence that increasing neurotropic growth factor will cause significant neuron growth/regeneration in regular adults, it seems the only nootropics that actually work are stimulants and semi-stimulants, which at the end of the day just make you more alert and focused It's one of those "life hacks" that gives such marginal, if any, benefits that it's not even a productive use of your time to think about them/order them/etc. when you could do more productive life hacks with your time instead
- baccheion 8y ago
  SEMAX + selank + alpha-GPC 5 days/week alternating every 4 weeks with p21/cerebrolysin. Also add a multivitamin, D + K, and chelated/TRAACS magnesium supplement. Nootropics, if they have an effect, tend to improve aspects of cognition. For example, focus, creativity, mental energy, verbal fluidity, ability to multitask (ie, listen to music while reading), etc. Not all benefits are perceivable without monitoring via sites like Cambridge Sciences.
  - opportune 8y ago
    I'm interested in large double blind studies regarding increases in IQ or alertness, as well as studies into the long term effects of taking these mostly untested drugs/supplements. A bunch of guys on the internet taking Lumosity tests doesn't replace a study

sizzzzlerz 8y ago

From the evolutionary perspective, what advantage does having perfect pitch "built-in" give a person or society? Being able to identify the pitch of some game you might be hunting wouldn't seem to make you a better hunter thus being able to survive hard times so you're able to pass your genes along better than one without it.

SwellJoe 8y ago
It's closely related to language skills, which also have nothing to do with hunting, but have a lot to do with being an attractive mate and having leadership abilities. So...it is not a survival skill, rather it is a mating skill.

SwellJoe 8y ago

"In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. Within the training period, 14% of the participants were able to name twelve pitches at 90% accuracy or above, a performance level comparable with typical AP possessors." This sounds like good relative pitch, with a memorized reference tone. Absolute pitch doesn't fade in 12 to 40 hours. Many musicians have relative pitch abilities that look, to observers, like absolute pitch, because they've memorized a reference tone sometime in the recent past and can find any other note relative to that reference (some folks also use their own voice as a reference tone, because they know the top and/or bottom of their range, or how a specific note feels when they sing it). I only have the summary to go by, but this sounds quite different from absolute pitch and quite similar to relative pitch. We've always known people can acquire very good relative pitch recognition skills as an adult. That isn't new or groundbreaking (though if they have a training regimen that works fast enough for a study like this, that would be great news, since ear training for very good relative pitch recognition is a months or years long process for most people).

organsnyder 8y ago
I used to be able to pretend I had absolute pitch, back when I played in a college orchestra that rehearsed four days per week—I had that A (for tuning) memorized very well. Now that I'm over a decade removed from that, it's not quite as reliable as it used to be.

tomcam 8y ago

Anecdata: my piano teacher was one of a class in the 1920s who were all explicitly trained into absolute pitch during kindergarten . Every person in the class learned it and retained it until at least late middle age. Some were better than others: my teacher’s sister, for example, could give you the pitch of anything from knocking a piece of wood to the sound of a car exhaust.

mikorym 8y ago

Musician here with terrible pitch guessing ability (but semi-decent composition skillz and good harmony sense). I have always found absolute (or "perfect" pitch) to be misinterpreted in popular culture. I have not actually met a musician with perfect pitch. However, perhaps my definition is too narrow. Would a person with perfect pitch be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 432 Hz A? Would they be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 438 Hz A? If the definition is to be able to tell that a note is only slightly off within some pre-decided tuning system, then I know many people that can do this. The question to me is whether absolute pitch is as it says in the name, "absolute", or is it always limited by some measure of uncertainty? Is there a physical limitation? (Is it 1 Hz, or is it 5 Hz?) Hope someone can explain this. Edit: In the paper, they seem to stick to a pre-decided tuning system. Probably the standard one that we have now (equal spacing based on 13th root of 2 with 440 Hz A).

coliveira 8y ago
If you have very well developed perfect pitch, you can sense the difference just in the same way that you can feel that two strings are out of tune by a few Hz. That's why some people with perfect pitch like Mozart get annoyed by out of tune instruments.

vnorilo 8y ago

I've studied cello from age 5 to conservatory degree; the pitches of the open strings are burned in my memory. I can also often tell which key an orchestra plays by timbral cues. However, I do not have "real" perfect pitch, although the topic study might find that I do. True perfect pitch is like the anecdotes in the thread: discomfort with "wrong" transpositions or tunings, learning melodies by real rather than relative pitch, internal references that can go out of tune with age. All these are completely alien to me.

coliveira 8y ago
I understand your point, but who knows if these things aren't really the same? My opinion is that having the notes "burned" in your memory is a lesser degree of the same phenomenon. People that are considered to have "real" perfect pitch just developed these abilities beyond what normal musicians like you did. And doing this at a very young age really helps a lot, in the same way that leaning new languages in infancy is a painless activity and quite difficult at adult age.
- vnorilo 8y ago
  Yeah - I guess the early acquisition might be what influences the way these kids develop different cognitive strategies for music early on. It's obvious when teaching kids: the median student seems to operate on the first order derivative of the pitch curve, while the perfect pitch kids operate with the absolute values. A gross simplification. Interestingly, many of them require a different strategy for transposing melodies: go note by note, while median learners apply melodic intervals incrementally. Similar differences can be seen in solfege and dictation.

GolDDranks 8y ago

This is interesting to me, not because of the musical implications but because of the neurobiological ones – and especially with regards of learning accents / pronunciation of second languages. There has been a lot of studies that have tried to teach recognizing the audible difference of R and L to Japanese English learners. I don't know of a single study has been able to produce robust results. (There's a primary and secondary acoustic cues to the difference; some Japanese have had success recognizing the difference using secondary acoustic cues, but recognizing the primary cue which is the most robust one and which the natives use preferentially escapes treatment.) However, the testing protocols and time are limited, and we have increasingly knowledge about adult neuroplasticity. Results like this keep me hopeful that it's just that we don't know the good way to do that yet and we might see some results in the future.

HelenePhisher 8y ago

If you want to learn how to recognize tones I highly recommend the method of Alain Benbassat: http://www.miles.be http://www.miles.be You'll notice a rapid understanding of tones and keys. There are (even free) apps for Android and iOS as well.