5 ms·

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 inst

by 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.
- dfan 8y ago
  Mostly I feel like the timbre of an organ note is very consistent from pitch to pitch, whereas, say, an A on a piano sounds buzzy to me while a Bb sounds more smooth and a B natural is kind of liquid. (Of course the timbre probably isn't really changing much but that's how my brain perceives it.)
  - gugagore 8y ago
    I just read a comment above that discussed this timbre sensitivity. In any octave the A sounds buzzy? What about on any piano? Do all 88 keys produce a kind of unique timbre signature for you?
    - dfan 8y ago
      A just has a kind of a buzzy feel to it. It's not something I can really quantify or prove, just a sort of synaesthetic sense. I would say that I feel it the strongest in the two octaves below middle C. It is basically true for any piano. I don't have a mapping for all 88 notes on a piano, and it's not like you could hand me a timbre and I could identify the corresponding pitch. The whole thing is shifty enough that I assume something else is actually going on and this is just the way that my conscious brain makes sense of it. But it is part of the way that I perceive pitch.
kskbng 8y ago
Piano has very distinct timbre for each note - there are many people that think they have perfect pitch but only really just learned the timbre for each note on piano and wouldn't be able to identify pitches of puretones for instance. However for those of us that drift, I think it's likely that we recognized notes by both timbre and pitch, but although now that our pitch recognition has started drifting, we can still identify by timbre. Absolute pitch is often described as a disadvantage for aural skills as it's often used as a crutch in place of properly identifying intervals and function. I know that when I went through aural skills, I would identify the notes before identifying the interval and draw a conclusion on the interval based on what notes they are rather than hearing them for what they are. Which makes it very difficult for me to pick out vocal harmonies, I'm terrible at picking out vocal pitch and as a result I have to deconstruct notes in my head to figure out intervals when people sing in harmony. Using your language metaphor, it would be like if you immediately knew what a word in Russian meant in English but didn't actually understand Russian. You'd be linking together words to infer meaning but grammar might not make any sense and you wouldn't be able to speak Russian. (Bad analogy, but hey, that's how analogies are right? :P) Definitely sympathize on the drift though. It's annoying when I assume I still recognize notes properly but then realize I'm off.
- gugagore 8y ago
  I'm interested in this idea that a piano has a distinct timbre per note. Surely the most distinct thing between two notes is their pitch. But you're saying people pick up on the harmonic signature more readily? I can here the difference in timbre across different sections of the piano, but I really cannot imagine distinguishing the timbre of two consecutive notes within the same "section" (by section I mean that the strings are arranged equivalently except for length and tension). I'd also think that those people would be very sensitive to the make of piano.
  - mrob 8y ago
    Additionally, piano timbre changes depending on how hard you press the keys.
Hoasi 8y ago
> 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. True, it is just like saying: being able to name colors diminishes your ability to appreciate colors. That would be a ridiculous statement. However, having absolute pitch does make some music more predictable, I think it affected my taste in music.

by dfan 8y ago

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.
dfan 8y ago
Mostly I feel like the timbre of an organ note is very consistent from pitch to pitch, whereas, say, an A on a piano sounds buzzy to me while a Bb sounds more smooth and a B natural is kind of liquid. (Of course the timbre probably isn't really changing much but that's how my brain perceives it.)
- gugagore 8y ago
  I just read a comment above that discussed this timbre sensitivity. In any octave the A sounds buzzy? What about on any piano? Do all 88 keys produce a kind of unique timbre signature for you?
  - dfan 8y ago
    A just has a kind of a buzzy feel to it. It's not something I can really quantify or prove, just a sort of synaesthetic sense. I would say that I feel it the strongest in the two octaves below middle C. It is basically true for any piano. I don't have a mapping for all 88 notes on a piano, and it's not like you could hand me a timbre and I could identify the corresponding pitch. The whole thing is shifty enough that I assume something else is actually going on and this is just the way that my conscious brain makes sense of it. But it is part of the way that I perceive pitch.

kskbng 8y ago

Piano has very distinct timbre for each note - there are many people that think they have perfect pitch but only really just learned the timbre for each note on piano and wouldn't be able to identify pitches of puretones for instance. However for those of us that drift, I think it's likely that we recognized notes by both timbre and pitch, but although now that our pitch recognition has started drifting, we can still identify by timbre. Absolute pitch is often described as a disadvantage for aural skills as it's often used as a crutch in place of properly identifying intervals and function. I know that when I went through aural skills, I would identify the notes before identifying the interval and draw a conclusion on the interval based on what notes they are rather than hearing them for what they are. Which makes it very difficult for me to pick out vocal harmonies, I'm terrible at picking out vocal pitch and as a result I have to deconstruct notes in my head to figure out intervals when people sing in harmony. Using your language metaphor, it would be like if you immediately knew what a word in Russian meant in English but didn't actually understand Russian. You'd be linking together words to infer meaning but grammar might not make any sense and you wouldn't be able to speak Russian. (Bad analogy, but hey, that's how analogies are right? :P) Definitely sympathize on the drift though. It's annoying when I assume I still recognize notes properly but then realize I'm off.

gugagore 8y ago
I'm interested in this idea that a piano has a distinct timbre per note. Surely the most distinct thing between two notes is their pitch. But you're saying people pick up on the harmonic signature more readily? I can here the difference in timbre across different sections of the piano, but I really cannot imagine distinguishing the timbre of two consecutive notes within the same "section" (by section I mean that the strings are arranged equivalently except for length and tension). I'd also think that those people would be very sensitive to the make of piano.
- mrob 8y ago
  Additionally, piano timbre changes depending on how hard you press the keys.

Hoasi 8y ago

> 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. True, it is just like saying: being able to name colors diminishes your ability to appreciate colors. That would be a ridiculous statement. However, having absolute pitch does make some music more predictable, I think it affected my taste in music.