7 ms·

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 th

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.
        gugagore 8y ago
        If I may emphasize your point, the frequency reference doesn't come from a neurological time-keeping mechanism. Instead it comes from physical resonance. So it is definitely still a "clock". It's like having many pendulum clocks in your ear. However it is unlikely that whatever you use to count by seconds has to do with the little pendulums (pendula) in your ear.
      - gugagore 8y ago
        It does require a kind of clock, in my opinion. I responded to a sibling comment with my thoughts.
    - 8y ago
- oblio 8y ago
  Is there some sort of online test to figure out if you’re tone deaf. Every time people talk about B, C, etc. and then reproduce the sound with another instrument, I have no idea what it’s supposed to be...
  - beat 8y ago
    It's unlikely that you're tone deaf. It's quite rare. Truly tone deaf people can't really hear music, because they can't hear the relative relationships of pitches properly. It's the relative pitches, not the absolute pitches, that create the ebb and flow of music. I've been playing music for thirty-odd years, and I couldn't name pitches by ear most of the time, certainly not without thinking about it. I often hand-tune guitars (relatively!) if I'm playing by myself, and after a few days of that, it's not unusual to be more than a half-step out of whack. I don't notice, because it's in tune with itself.
    - AlecSchueler 8y ago
      It's entirely possible he could be tone deaf. Congenital amusia (tone deafness) affects about 4% of the population.
      - retsibsi 8y ago
        Definitely possible, but I suspect there are also quite a lot of people like me, who have a fairly poor ear for intervals (let alone absolute pitch) and are baffled by a lot of the things that seem 'obvious' to others, but wouldn't meet the criteria for amusia.
    - maaark 8y ago
      There's a lesser form of tone-deafness (perhaps that's not the right word for it) where you can't tell with certainly or consistency the direction or extent of a change in pitch. You can still hear and appreciate music, but you can't whistle or hum along to a tune.
      - gugagore 8y ago
jejones3141 8y ago
Me too; I guess it's nice not to be alone. I thought I was shifting into Baroque A=415 mode. Alas even this mutant absolute pitch is still troublesome in one way: sometimes some folks I played and sang with said "OK, the music is written in X, but we want to do it in Y." I couldn't do it without learning it as written and then playing or singing it in Y without looking at the music.
Eli_P 8y ago
Since birth I've been susceptible to otitis, and one day I was having a bad one, with eardrum penetration in right ear, as I was at the edge of teenage. I always have been listening to some music, and happened to notice that tone in the sore right ear is 1/2 tone up. But when I plugged left headphone into healthy left ear, music somehow had synchronized and I heard no difference then. I was terrified with thought that it would keep pitch shifted forever, but thank god it's okay now. I wonder what biologists say, but I guess than final pitch/hue we perceive is a result of altogether three factors: liquid pressure inside ear (physics), unconditional neural reflexes (developed as genetically encoded), and chronobiology (there are structures inside our brain that play the same role as clock impulse generator in electronic devices[1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus
- mrob 8y ago
  Interestingly, people taking diisopropyltryptamine consistently report strong audio perception distortion: https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal04.shtml https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal04.... "Most psychedelic drugs affect, primarily, the visual sense, but here is one that shows its effects primarily in the auditory system. And it screws it up in a most unlinear manner, in that there in not just a simple decrease in pitch which would be as if someone had his thumb against the LP record and made everything come out at a 3/4 speed text, or a 1/2 speed text. Actual [p]roportionality is lost, so there is complete harmonic distortion."
dfan 8y ago
My pitch started to drift in middle age too. Like you, I do better or worse based on timbre; piano is great (it's my instrument, which must help), stringed instruments are pretty good in general, wind instruments are not so great, organs are the worst. Playing for ten years in a Balinese gamelan that was not remotely tuned to a Western scale probably didn't help. Absolute pitch is still a really useful skill to have, in my opinion, and I don't understand it when people say it's just a parlor trick or actually diminishes your ability to appreciate music; being able to spell doesn't diminish my appreciation of language. It is occasionally slightly distressing to realize in retrospect that I've been off by a half step, like thinking you're walking north and then looking at a map and realizing you've been walking west.
- aczerepinski 8y ago
  Same. My instruments piano and trumpet are never-miss (though I hear the trumpet in Bb), and organs are more difficult for me too. I think organ overtones might be off pitch or something? just a wild guess.
  - acjohnson55 8y ago
    Piano overtones are normally off-pitch (in a sense), and guitar too, to a lesser extent. I would imagine organ overtones to be highly dependent on the design of the specific instrument, but I'm guessing they are largely more harmonic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
  - mrob 8y ago
    Organs don't have inharmonic overtones, but organ tuning changes with air pressure/temperature/humidity, and organs are a big hassle to tune, so in practice organs rarely play at A=440Hz.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Depends on which stops are pulled on the organ. If it's just octaves (8', 4', 2', 16'...), then it will be quite pure, depending on what kind of stops are playing (flutes and principals are purer than reeds, for instance). If you add a mutation (2-2/3', 1-3/5', a mixture of multiple mutations...), then you'll have both the impurity of the mutations themselves, as well as their own overtones. Or, you could have a string stop pulled, which is purposefully slightly out-of-tune to produce a "string" sound when paired with an in-tune stop. A typical "pipe organ" sound on a digital keyboard will often have mixtures and other mutations. I've found that settings with names like "church organ" tend to be purer, perhaps only some flutes and principals.
paul7986 8y ago
So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)? It is a weird phenomenon and I think songwriting is too .. like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?
- williamdclt 8y ago
  > So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)? At the simplest there's 2 components in enjoying somebody sing: - They have a pretty-ish voice that they master. Absolute pitch doesn't help for that, just like it doesn't help for any other instrument. - They sing on tune. Absolute pitch doesn't help either, anybody can tune themselves on a background music. Even if a capella, everybody without an absolute pitch won't know if you don't start on the right note > like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from? Pattern matching, which the brain is extremely good at
  - LanceH 8y ago
    Relative is far more important than absolute pitch. As long as the notes are precise distances apart, you'll get the harmonies you need. Some people with absolute pitch are irritated to no end that tons of music isn't tuned to their idea of absolute pitch. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch which describes how orchestras have tuned to different pitches historically.
    - williamdclt 8y ago
      Yes, that is what I meant :)
beat 8y ago
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...). The other is a bandmate of mine, a woman in her late 20s/early 30s when i saw hers fail. She's genetically predisposed - both her father and her brother have perfect pitch; plus her father is a professional musician, she has a degree in music performance, and has had a violin in her hand since she was old enough to hold one. One day, we were recording, with her overdubbing parts onto some previously recorded work. She complained that a B flat played at the start of a guitar riff was out of tune. I said "No, that's a B". She insisted it was a B flat. I told her I had also played the part on keyboards, and it's a B. She panicked. It was extremely difficult for her to play for the rest of the session. Her playing relies so heavily on her perfect pitch that she's always had, that when she can't trust it, anxiety takes over.
- eigenstuff 8y ago
  Late 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's really gonna fault me if I'm off by a half step when I figure out what note a door is squeaking in lol
  - tomcam 8y ago
    That sounds like a tiny horror story to me. Losing my hearing would be much more difficult to me than losing my site. My sympathies are definitely with you
  - muglug 8y ago
    Yup, singing at 415 fucked up my pitch for a while. Still, it's a good excuse for human lapses. And at least it's not singing at 430, which is uniformly terrible for everyone.
  - 8y ago
toolslive 8y ago
Earlier studies show that people with 'absolute pitch' can be 'detuned' quite easily. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-be-possible-some-adults https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-... Like any measuring tool, you need to calibrate it from time to time.
- mwcampbell 8y ago
  Wouldn't routinely listening to music be enough to calibrate it? Maybe my memory is unusually good, but I think I remember the key(s) of all the songs that I listen to frequently. So I think I'd notice if my perception of the key of a song changes.
andrewbinstock 8y ago
Sviatoslav Richter describes his great frustration with this phenomenon in his notebooks. His sense of loss is palpable.
SwellJoe 8y ago
"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 is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes. I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary). So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain. I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".
- retsibsi 8y ago
  > I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. > So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. Being able to name a note as an A or a B or whatever must be learned, because those labels are arbitrary -- but isn't that just a matter of translation? It seems that the fundamental ability (perceiving and identifying absolute frequencies) could still be innate.
  - SwellJoe 8y ago
    That may be so. But, it seems to be more common among the children of musicians and children who have heavy exposure to music early in life. But, then again, that could also be indicative of genetics...maybe people who love music enough to expose their kids to a lot of it at a young age have more of whatever this ability is, just not enough to be absolute pitch. I guess it could be that there are people who have the fundamental ability, without ever learning the labels to apply to them. Like the fact that humans took a while to name a bunch of the colors, and even now there are cultures where blue and green are not distinct colors. Maybe there are people with absolute pitch who just never learned the names of the notes they're hearing. Heck, maybe those folks are some of the ones who are "learning" absolute pitch as adults in these trials.
flyinghamster 8y ago
I've noticed another odd thing. I'm blessed/cursed with absolute pitch, and once in a while I have enough trouble with wax buildup that I have to break out the ear drops and squeeze bulb. When I flush out the ear with trouble, that ear's pitch sense goes awry; dial tone sounds a half-step flat, for instance. Once that ear dries out, it's back to normal.
pcurve 8y ago
loved your analogy ;)
khazhou 8y ago
I had a nasty sinus infection a few years ago that took weeks to clear up. My ears were stuffed up and it made hearing difficult for a while. After it cleared up, my left ear was tuned about a quarter-tone sharp, and only above a certain frequency (about middle C). It was the damndest thing.

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.
      - gugagore 8y ago
        If I may emphasize your point, the frequency reference doesn't come from a neurological time-keeping mechanism. Instead it comes from physical resonance. So it is definitely still a "clock". It's like having many pendulum clocks in your ear. However it is unlikely that whatever you use to count by seconds has to do with the little pendulums (pendula) in your ear.
    - gugagore 8y ago
      It does require a kind of clock, in my opinion. I responded to a sibling comment with my thoughts.
  - 8y ago
oblio 8y ago
Is there some sort of online test to figure out if you’re tone deaf. Every time people talk about B, C, etc. and then reproduce the sound with another instrument, I have no idea what it’s supposed to be...
- beat 8y ago
  It's unlikely that you're tone deaf. It's quite rare. Truly tone deaf people can't really hear music, because they can't hear the relative relationships of pitches properly. It's the relative pitches, not the absolute pitches, that create the ebb and flow of music. I've been playing music for thirty-odd years, and I couldn't name pitches by ear most of the time, certainly not without thinking about it. I often hand-tune guitars (relatively!) if I'm playing by myself, and after a few days of that, it's not unusual to be more than a half-step out of whack. I don't notice, because it's in tune with itself.
  - AlecSchueler 8y ago
    It's entirely possible he could be tone deaf. Congenital amusia (tone deafness) affects about 4% of the population.
    - retsibsi 8y ago
      Definitely possible, but I suspect there are also quite a lot of people like me, who have a fairly poor ear for intervals (let alone absolute pitch) and are baffled by a lot of the things that seem 'obvious' to others, but wouldn't meet the criteria for amusia.
  - maaark 8y ago
    There's a lesser form of tone-deafness (perhaps that's not the right word for it) where you can't tell with certainly or consistency the direction or extent of a change in pitch. You can still hear and appreciate music, but you can't whistle or hum along to a tune.
    - gugagore 8y ago

jejones3141 8y ago

Me too; I guess it's nice not to be alone. I thought I was shifting into Baroque A=415 mode. Alas even this mutant absolute pitch is still troublesome in one way: sometimes some folks I played and sang with said "OK, the music is written in X, but we want to do it in Y." I couldn't do it without learning it as written and then playing or singing it in Y without looking at the music.

Eli_P 8y ago

Since birth I've been susceptible to otitis, and one day I was having a bad one, with eardrum penetration in right ear, as I was at the edge of teenage. I always have been listening to some music, and happened to notice that tone in the sore right ear is 1/2 tone up. But when I plugged left headphone into healthy left ear, music somehow had synchronized and I heard no difference then. I was terrified with thought that it would keep pitch shifted forever, but thank god it's okay now. I wonder what biologists say, but I guess than final pitch/hue we perceive is a result of altogether three factors: liquid pressure inside ear (physics), unconditional neural reflexes (developed as genetically encoded), and chronobiology (there are structures inside our brain that play the same role as clock impulse generator in electronic devices[1]). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suprachiasmatic_nucleus

mrob 8y ago
Interestingly, people taking diisopropyltryptamine consistently report strong audio perception distortion: https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal04.shtml https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal04.... "Most psychedelic drugs affect, primarily, the visual sense, but here is one that shows its effects primarily in the auditory system. And it screws it up in a most unlinear manner, in that there in not just a simple decrease in pitch which would be as if someone had his thumb against the LP record and made everything come out at a 3/4 speed text, or a 1/2 speed text. Actual [p]roportionality is lost, so there is complete harmonic distortion."

dfan 8y ago

My pitch started to drift in middle age too. Like you, I do better or worse based on timbre; piano is great (it's my instrument, which must help), stringed instruments are pretty good in general, wind instruments are not so great, organs are the worst. Playing for ten years in a Balinese gamelan that was not remotely tuned to a Western scale probably didn't help. Absolute pitch is still a really useful skill to have, in my opinion, and I don't understand it when people say it's just a parlor trick or actually diminishes your ability to appreciate music; being able to spell doesn't diminish my appreciation of language. It is occasionally slightly distressing to realize in retrospect that I've been off by a half step, like thinking you're walking north and then looking at a map and realizing you've been walking west.

aczerepinski 8y ago
Same. My instruments piano and trumpet are never-miss (though I hear the trumpet in Bb), and organs are more difficult for me too. I think organ overtones might be off pitch or something? just a wild guess.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  Piano overtones are normally off-pitch (in a sense), and guitar too, to a lesser extent. I would imagine organ overtones to be highly dependent on the design of the specific instrument, but I'm guessing they are largely more harmonic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
- mrob 8y ago
  Organs don't have inharmonic overtones, but organ tuning changes with air pressure/temperature/humidity, and organs are a big hassle to tune, so in practice organs rarely play at A=440Hz.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Depends on which stops are pulled on the organ. If it's just octaves (8', 4', 2', 16'...), then it will be quite pure, depending on what kind of stops are playing (flutes and principals are purer than reeds, for instance). If you add a mutation (2-2/3', 1-3/5', a mixture of multiple mutations...), then you'll have both the impurity of the mutations themselves, as well as their own overtones. Or, you could have a string stop pulled, which is purposefully slightly out-of-tune to produce a "string" sound when paired with an in-tune stop. A typical "pipe organ" sound on a digital keyboard will often have mixtures and other mutations. I've found that settings with names like "church organ" tend to be purer, perhaps only some flutes and principals.

paul7986 8y ago

So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)? It is a weird phenomenon and I think songwriting is too .. like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?

williamdclt 8y ago
> So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)? At the simplest there's 2 components in enjoying somebody sing: - They have a pretty-ish voice that they master. Absolute pitch doesn't help for that, just like it doesn't help for any other instrument. - They sing on tune. Absolute pitch doesn't help either, anybody can tune themselves on a background music. Even if a capella, everybody without an absolute pitch won't know if you don't start on the right note > like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from? Pattern matching, which the brain is extremely good at
- LanceH 8y ago
  Relative is far more important than absolute pitch. As long as the notes are precise distances apart, you'll get the harmonies you need. Some people with absolute pitch are irritated to no end that tons of music isn't tuned to their idea of absolute pitch. Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch which describes how orchestras have tuned to different pitches historically.
  - williamdclt 8y ago
    Yes, that is what I meant :)

beat 8y ago

I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...). The other is a bandmate of mine, a woman in her late 20s/early 30s when i saw hers fail. She's genetically predisposed - both her father and her brother have perfect pitch; plus her father is a professional musician, she has a degree in music performance, and has had a violin in her hand since she was old enough to hold one. One day, we were recording, with her overdubbing parts onto some previously recorded work. She complained that a B flat played at the start of a guitar riff was out of tune. I said "No, that's a B". She insisted it was a B flat. I told her I had also played the part on keyboards, and it's a B. She panicked. It was extremely difficult for her to play for the rest of the session. Her playing relies so heavily on her perfect pitch that she's always had, that when she can't trust it, anxiety takes over.

eigenstuff 8y ago
Late 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's really gonna fault me if I'm off by a half step when I figure out what note a door is squeaking in lol
- tomcam 8y ago
  That sounds like a tiny horror story to me. Losing my hearing would be much more difficult to me than losing my site. My sympathies are definitely with you
- muglug 8y ago
  Yup, singing at 415 fucked up my pitch for a while. Still, it's a good excuse for human lapses. And at least it's not singing at 430, which is uniformly terrible for everyone.
- 8y ago

toolslive 8y ago

Earlier studies show that people with 'absolute pitch' can be 'detuned' quite easily. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-be-possible-some-adults https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-... Like any measuring tool, you need to calibrate it from time to time.

mwcampbell 8y ago
Wouldn't routinely listening to music be enough to calibrate it? Maybe my memory is unusually good, but I think I remember the key(s) of all the songs that I listen to frequently. So I think I'd notice if my perception of the key of a song changes.

andrewbinstock 8y ago

Sviatoslav Richter describes his great frustration with this phenomenon in his notebooks. His sense of loss is palpable.

SwellJoe 8y ago

"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 is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes. I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary). So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain. I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".

retsibsi 8y ago
> I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. > So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. Being able to name a note as an A or a B or whatever must be learned, because those labels are arbitrary -- but isn't that just a matter of translation? It seems that the fundamental ability (perceiving and identifying absolute frequencies) could still be innate.
- SwellJoe 8y ago
  That may be so. But, it seems to be more common among the children of musicians and children who have heavy exposure to music early in life. But, then again, that could also be indicative of genetics...maybe people who love music enough to expose their kids to a lot of it at a young age have more of whatever this ability is, just not enough to be absolute pitch. I guess it could be that there are people who have the fundamental ability, without ever learning the labels to apply to them. Like the fact that humans took a while to name a bunch of the colors, and even now there are cultures where blue and green are not distinct colors. Maybe there are people with absolute pitch who just never learned the names of the notes they're hearing. Heck, maybe those folks are some of the ones who are "learning" absolute pitch as adults in these trials.

flyinghamster 8y ago

I've noticed another odd thing. I'm blessed/cursed with absolute pitch, and once in a while I have enough trouble with wax buildup that I have to break out the ear drops and squeeze bulb. When I flush out the ear with trouble, that ear's pitch sense goes awry; dial tone sounds a half-step flat, for instance. Once that ear dries out, it's back to normal.

pcurve 8y ago

loved your analogy ;)

khazhou 8y ago

I had a nasty sinus infection a few years ago that took weeks to clear up. My ears were stuffed up and it made hearing difficult for a while. After it cleared up, my left ear was tuned about a quarter-tone sharp, and only above a certain frequency (about middle C). It was the damndest thing.