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Perceptions of musical octaves are learned, not wired in the brain

140 points by gpvos 6y ago

dr_dshiv 6y ago
I was skeptical of his prior dissonance study. I feel there is a bit of accommodation by the participants to maximize the surprise of the researcher. Getting goods for singing funny. The paradigm I would have liked to see is where two tones are held constant and the participant moves a third tone to the location that sounds the best or the worst. It is remarkable work. But I don't believe it. Octaves are just too basic a phenomena to be viewed as a cultural invention.
- andi999 6y ago
  Also if the result would have been:Tsimane can hear octaves as everybody else, then there would be no publication. So there are rewards not to question ones own study too carefully.
- bambax 6y ago
  So many things we consider part of our inner core are learned. This result doesn't seem that surprising, although it does call for further study. The fact that those people don't rate consonant chords as more pleasant than dissonant ones is also interesting.
- jmiskovic 6y ago
  Octave harmony in instruments and singing are established physical phenomenon. Higher harmonics of two voices line up and resulting frequency spectrum is more clustered and concentrated. I think the study disproves that all brains consider this to be preferable, and instead ascribes it to cultural/learned phenomenon. I agree it's not compelling theory, but hard to argue against if they can get more proof.
- enriquto 6y ago
  > Octaves are just too basic a phenomena to be viewed as a cultural invention. Octaves are consonant or dissonant depending on the timbre of the sound. For sounds produced by harmonic instruments, like a vibrating string or air vibrating inside a long tube, the sound is a superposition of waves whose frequencies are integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. Then, playing two sounds an octave apart will match exactly all these frequencies and it will sound nice. But there are other instruments (not privileged in the western music tradition) whose timbre is not composed of integer multiples of a fundamental frequency; and in these instruments octaves sound very dissonant. You can argue that the octave is a "basic phenomenon" inasmuch a vibrating string is basic. Yet, from the point of view of a person who uses a synthesizer, the octave has nothing special with respect to other intervals.
  - frodetb 6y ago
    A drum is a good example, though we don't often think of it as a melodic instrument. The resonant modes of a drum don't look anything like someting as nice as those of strings, with their integer multiple frequencies. Makes you wonder, what music might have been like if our ear was more "drum-based" than "string-based" (however that might work).
    - enriquto 6y ago
      Music already "is" something different! not all music is western. One of the most strikingly different kinds of music (besides synthesized stuff) is gamelan music, which is performed on a set of non-harmonic bells, which sound consonantly at non-integer intervals.
      - frodetb 6y ago
        Thanks! I've been listening to gamelan music for the past couple of hours now, and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. From my limited exposure, I get the impression that the music leans on repetition of sound patterns to give the listener something to hold onto musically, creating more of an atmosphere of sound than a melody you might hum along to. Is that fair to say? Perhaps I just need more exposure before things "click". I might compare this non-harmonic genre with the artist Sevish, whose work I've enjoyed a great deal. He too tries to step out of the realm of 12-tone equal temperament. Some of his work is quite reminiscent in structure to this gamelan music (e.g. Desert Island Rain). However, he also manages to build melodies and something you could probably call chord progressions (though I wouldn't know), in a new and very foreign musical world (his entire album Harmony Hacker is amazing). Besides the music being amazing, getting used to this new landscape is enjoyable in and of itself. My point about the drums, though, was more aimed at what scales, chord progressions and melodies might be developed by a species who had as harmonic basis the drum's spectrum of resonant frequencies. We, by comparison, have the integer multiple of some base frequency, the canonical "harmonic sequence", whereas for them it would be quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membrane#Animations_of_several_vibration_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr...
- isolli 6y ago
  I agree with most skeptical commenters. I once read about a study of singing in traditional cultures. Men and women would sing the same melody, except one octave apart due to differences in physiology. Reportedly, they did not perceive their singing to be separated by any interval; they perceived that they were singing in unison.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
    ... a result that almost reinforces the findings in the paper reported in the article: octave (equivalence) perception is learned/culturally influenced rather than being hard-wired.
    - isolli 6y ago
      I don't disagree, but rather it looks like their hypothesis is difficult to falsify.
- throwaway4666 6y ago
  You'd be surprised at the number of "basic phenomena" that turned out to have cultural origins. Look up the language of the Piraha people, who famously does not contain any concept related to numbers or counting (because they have no use for it and introducing it would disrupt the trades they have), among many other things. Also, cursorily reading a study that contradicts one's preconceptions and going like "nah, my gut feeling doesn't agree with it" is so quintessentially Hacker News ;-)
  - twirlock 6y ago
    Similarly to the existence of waves and simple ratios, actually no, numbers do not have cultural origins.
    - throwaway4666 6y ago
      Funny how you seem unable to conceive of a people that doesn't have a concept of numbers ;-)
      - twirlock 6y ago
        I can conceive perfectly well "of a people" who don't have a concept of all kinds of things. It doesn't mean those things don't exist. Winkyface.
FeepingCreature 6y ago
This study does not show what the title claims. Alternate title: Tsimané people do not perceive melodic harmonies. This is also the case for some non-Tsimané people (google Amusia). There could just be a genetic basis here. For comparison, you'd need a Tsimané child raised in Western culture, or reverse.
- vixen99 6y ago
  For interesting possibilities regarding aural perception and genes see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia
- gpvos 6y ago
  They could reproduce the intervals without problem, they just transposed them by something else than a multiple of octaves. You make an interesting point in the last sentence though.
  - FeepingCreature 6y ago
    My horse in this race is that I know somebody who was raised on western music and has the same problem. I don't know if it's amusia per se or some related pathology, but I definitely think it's not just acculturation. We spent several hours arguing whether music theory was a valid field of study or complete bunk until we noticed he didn't perceive melodic harmony at all. It was fun, if exhausting. That person also nailed an amusia test, which makes me suspect there's a separate condition.
klysm 6y ago
I find this hard to believe from a mathematical point of view - octaves are as far as you can get from arbitrary which is I guess what gives the headline it’s shock value.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  What is the reason for there being eight notes (or seven? I don't really understand it) in an octave?
  - smilespray 6y ago
    That's far more arbitrary, and there are plenty of other scales that don't conform to this.
    - chrisseaton 6y ago
      I don't understand - so they are arbitrary? And so arbitrary that people don't even agree on it?
      - ben_w 6y ago
        An octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency, which isn’t arbitrary; however the number of notes within an octave (and, I think, their exact tuning) is arbitrary.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - sideshowb 6y ago
        The harmonic series (of which the first three intervals are octaves, fifths, fourths in pythagorean tuning) is not arbitrary. How you construct a more useful set of notes from the harmonic series is arbitrary. The 1.5^12 ~= 2^7 coincidence I note above allows you to construct a scale using octaves and fifths. You can just as easily do it with other similar coincidences, use fifths and fourths instead, etc etc. Check the smoothness/roughness functions in my blog link - the reason you think e.g. a 3rd sounds as 'right' as a 7th is likely purely cultural. Other cultures have other scales. One of the Indian ragas has over 100 notes. (I'm aware OP claims it's ALL learned, including the octave, but even if true I don't think that means it's all cultural).
raverbashing 6y ago
I'm a bit skeptical of this The concept of Octaves (as a lot of concepts in music) comes from physics. Because one of the most basic instruments you can have is a string under tension. Pluck the string: note Pluck the same string pinched in the middle: same note one octave higher Not to mention Note + Note(octave higher) will have the harmonics overlapping, so it will sound better since there won't be any beating.
- apendleton 6y ago
  > so it will sound better since there won't be any beating Unless presence or absence of beating is itself either a thing we learn to detect, or a thing we learn to associate with better-ness or worse-ness, rather than both being innate?
- bambax 6y ago
  Yeah, but the idea of half == same is very specific to music. In no other domain do we do this.
  - smilespray 6y ago
    Half != same, and harmonics exist in plenty of other domains.
  - garretraziel 6y ago
    Yeah, I think that this is what people aren't getting in this thread. Octave clearly has a special connection to its base tone, but it's a little bit arbitrary that we consider these two to be THE SAME tones (that you can often replace one with the other). I believe that this is what is learned.
  - dahauns 6y ago
    While not semantically the "same" - you'd be surprised where this principle shows up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance
- jmiskovic 6y ago
frodetb 6y ago
Quite a bold title. My understanding (while limited) is that the human ear senses sound by means of tiny hairs in the inner ear that vibrate in resonance with incoming sound waves. I've always believed that the reason certain intervals are more harmonious to us than others was because there would be some overlap in hairs that resonated for the different harmonious pitches. The same way guitar strings will resonate with other strings that are tuned an octave, or perfect fifth, or fourth higher, these ear-hairs ought to behave by the same physical laws and principles. As such, I'm a bit skeptical of the method and conclusion of this research. It seems like physics to me, not psychology. Ability to reproduce pitches and intervals does not strike me as entirely related to what they were trying to find out. How about instead playing different soundbites, of consonant and dissonant pitches, and asking for their opinion in some way? Maybe even allowing the participant to find a relationship by some sliding instrument themself? That would seem more aimed at studying the Tsimané's ability at "perceiving octaves." Maybe my interpretation of the header and conclusion is wrong. Perhaps the idea is that _some training_ is needed in order to perceive octaves, the same way _some training_ is needed in order to learn how to walk. That I might be able to wrap my head around.
kqr 6y ago
I'm not too surprised by this. I've had awful relative pitch all my life, and just recently started ear training. I've also for fun read a bit about how absolute pitch develops in young children.[1] Bit by bit, I'm realising how much of what's taken for granted by practitioners of Western music is in fact learned. As a concrete example: ever since I was a child, I've heard people speak of major and minor triads as sounding happy or sad. That seems like something that's just obvious to a lot of people. It's never been obvious to me, and it lead me to think I was (at least partially) tone deaf; if I can't even hear something that is (evidently) that obvious to so many people, how can I ever get better at truly listening to music? Now that I've started ear training, I'm beginning to mentally associate particular sounds with these chord qualities[2] to the point of actually being able to identify them better than a flipped coin would. (Which is a huge milestone for me!) But it's taken a lot of practise. And I still don't hear them as "happy" and "sad". If I try to listen for "happy" and "sad" chords, I go back to mischaracterising these chord qualities just as much as before. I've simply never learned that association, for whatever reason. ---- It goes on and on: I played a lot of piano (from sheet music) when I was young, and practised the C major scale up and down and up and down, resulting in the interval from the tonic to the major second being etched into my brain very strongly. And I suspect this is what has made it surprisingly hard for me to internally hear a half-step from the tonic. To my brain (before I started ear training), the minimal possible step from the tonic was to the major second. There just weren't any sounds my brain could produce in between. Learned. With plenty of ear training, I'm now in addition learning to be able to reproduce a minor second too. Even more speculatively, I've noticed there are some specific half-step intervals I hear as whole steps. These are from E to F, and from B to C. These are half steps, but they are outliers in how often I attempt to classify them as whole steps. I suspect this is because of said C major scale practise: somewhere in the back of my mind, I might associate these tones (in the absolute pitch sense) with steps of the C major scale and therefore think of them as whole steps. I don't have absolute pitch in any useful sense, but it wouldn't surprise me if my brain, somewhere in a back compartment somewhere, has retained the sound of these tones and associated them with adjacent steps in the scale I practised so much. ---- Circling back to octaves: Yes, there are physical bases for considering octaves as a special case of some sort, namely that if you strip out the base resonance frequency of one tone on a string or wind instrument, what you're left with are its overtones, which also makes up its octave's frequencies. But the fact that this relationship is something that makes these tones sound "the same" might very well be learned. The fact that this level of consonance is even desirable might very well be learned. I can picture cultures in which that level of consonance is considered uninteresting, hollow, and weak. Why would one deliberately care to seek something like that? ---- [1]: By listening a lot to music that extensively and unpredictably uses the 12 tones of Western music in A440 equal temperament tuning, children can learn to recognise these specific 12 tones in that tuning – but it won't help with any other frequencies! [2]: I now hear major triads as a combination of hollow and triumphant, and minor triads as fuller and more epic. Some parts of it make sense, others do not.
byteface 6y ago
I feel looking for musical scores in peoples brains is a great place to start decoding. We clearly load data into a conscious signal somehow like CAN-bus but it must also be stored maybe on actin filaments in the dendritic spines as loops we load in? Also mentally we can change the music and add any number of instruments over the top change the tune and deviate the course of the melody, add vocal harmonies from crowds of people and violins etc. so where does that part happen?, in the signal?. can it be 'heard'? . and is the music 'composer' happening in the same part of the brain as the language generating part or is it just similar capabilities in a different part of the brain?. Decoding must be possible. I feel if they had like millions of brains all wired up to computers that were using AI to find match patterns . i.e. audio patterns from songs in brains data. they could brute force it? Is getting people to sing stuff and making assumptions weak science?
marci 6y ago
It reminds me of how tuning can depend on the era. Sometimes even on the composer. When you're used to hearing something in a particular way, the slightest change can be jarring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQaSFgnVI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQaSFgnVI8
im3w1l-alt 6y ago
Music is definitely an acquired taste. My family was not very good at nor into music. I didn't understand the point of instrumental music until my mid teens. Before that I only listened for the lyrics. On a different note, people often think of the octave as the most fundamental interval, but the most fundamental is the very same tone twice. Even here people like a little dissonance. Two tones at nearly but not exactly the same pitch will produce a pleasantly shimmering chorus effect. Anyway music is subjective and there's is no sound that is better than everything else in all respects and contexts.
- schwartzworld 6y ago
  I have never heard "out of tune unison" described as an interval, except in a joke about viola players. Sure, there's a difference between 440 and 442 but that's not considered an interval in western music theory.
  - agency 6y ago
    > Sure, there's a difference between 440 and 442 but that's not considered an interval in western music theory. Well that's just your 2 cents... I mean, 7.85 cents.
- gpvos 6y ago
  I don't play accordion but I understand they have multiple reeds for the same note, which are usually tuned slightly off, relative to each other.
  - mrob 6y ago
    It's also standard in pipe organs, where it's called "celeste". See: http://www.organstops.org/c/Celeste.html http://www.organstops.org/c/Celeste.html
irrational 6y ago
I hope that’s true because I still don’t have a clue what an octave is (or a melody or harmony or any other music related word).
- nabla9 6y ago
  Perfect octave is doubling the frequency. For better and much deeper explanation: 3Blue1Brown: Music And Measure Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw
- parenthesis 6y ago
  Notes separated by octaves are like higher and lower versions of the same note. If a deep-voiced person and a high-voiced person sing the same tune together (without either straining), then they are singing one (or more) octaves apart. Assuming they are singing in tune with each other, otherwise it will sound more like Chick Corea demonstrates here: https://youtu.be/yfoxdFHG7Cw?t=371 https://youtu.be/yfoxdFHG7Cw?t=371
  - taejo 6y ago
    > Notes separated by octaves are like higher and lower versions of the same note. I don't know if this is an in-born ability or a cultural one, but I can say that I (for one) don't have any perceptual sense of "sameness" in an octave. To me, two keys with the same letter-name on a piano make two different notes, just like any other interval (though I'm not saying that the different intervals don't sound different). This may be a form of amusia, but I enjoy music, sing to myself, recognize melodies, and find the dissonant Happy Birthday in your link unpleasant (all of which contrasts strongly with the forms of amusia I've read about); on the other hand a lot of the things that people say about music don't mean much to me, except that in some cases I have a mathematical understanding which I can't really connect to a perception.
hbarka 6y ago
The Tsimane man could probably identify the distinction between octaves of bird calls in his habitat. The experimenter would be in the opposite chair hearing only a handful of notes.
fidla 6y ago
As a music teacher and music therapist, I have observed this behavior for three decades. It's especially true with people that have zero musical background.
- Asooka 6y ago
  If you don't mind me asking, what is a "music therapist"? You help people to play music, or you help people using music?
deleted 6y ago
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jcims 6y ago
Seems like most of the disagreement in the comments here are due to people having different notions of the word octave. This should be no surprise as there are numerous interpretations of the word according to Merriam-Webster: 1: an 8-day period of observances beginning with a festival day 2a: a stanza of eight lines : OTTAVA RIMA b: the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet 3a: a musical interval embracing eight diatonic degrees b: a tone or note at this interval c: the harmonic combination of two tones an octave apart d: the whole series of notes, tones, or digitals comprised within this interval and forming the unit of the modern scale e: an organ stop giving tones an octave above those corresponding to the keys 4: the interval between two frequencies (as in an electromagnetic spectrum) having a ratio of 2 to 1 5: a group of eight So maybe everyone's right.
epx 6y ago
Perhaps it depends on the environmental noise you are exposed. In nature, most noise is percussion-like, non-rational harmonics, so octaves don't make much sens. OTOH listening to electric motors and combustion engines since the day you are born, makes you 'like' octaves, fifths and thirds, since these rotational machines generate these intervals while doing noise.
- Jarwain 6y ago
  This wouldn't explain the prevalence of the usage of these musical patterns before electric motors and combustion engines were created
Asooka 6y ago
I never understood octaves. Two sounds of different pitch that are supposed to sound "the same" somehow? Obviously if you shift a melody by multiplying every note by 2 will keep it sounding the same melodically, even though it's immediately obvious it's higher pitched. Beyond that, I have never been able to perceive the "sameness" between equivalent notes on different octaves. When I was younger and played adventure games, sometimes there would be a puzzle involving listening to a short melody and playing it back on some instrument. Literally the only way I could solve those was by analysing the original melody with a spectrometer, then analysing the instrument, and figuring what sequence of keys to press that way.
- tylerrobinson 6y ago
  I read this yesterday and it really stayed with me, enough to find this comment again. Do two notes an octave apart not sound harmonious in a particular identifiable way to you? From another view, it may help to think about it like this: Tones have a certain relationship with each other, and we split that into octaves in Western music to keep track of them. Just like the number 9 precedes 10, and 19 precedes 20, 10 and 20 are "the same number" in base 10 since that's where the pattern repeates. We could count in another number system, but the underlying physical truth of the numbers would be the same.
dzdt 6y ago
It was a surprise to me to learn that octaves have a physical. mathematical basis. I discovered this as a teen reading about how to make music on a computer, where the relationship of notes to frequency was explained. To my ear moving up an octave had always sounded like an arbitrary increase in pitch.
- deleted 6y ago
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lukeschlather 6y ago
I'm a little frustrated with the lack of discussion of frequencies in this article, which seems like a key bit of background to understanding this work. An "octave" is two sounds where one of them has exactly double the frequency of the other. I think it makes sense that octaves aren't hardwired, however it is fundamentally a mathematical property of frequencies. I'm not sure how I feel about the thesis; can children tell if something is twice the size of another or do you need the concept of "two?" I think like other people I initially found this a little unlikely because octaves are innate physical and mathematical properties, but there are tons of physical/mathematical properties that require a lot of study to understand intuitively.
hootbootscoot 6y ago
mmmm I'm skeptical of a singular study in which a certain tribe of people are asked to modulate a sound to an octave within their singing range disproving octave equivalence being hardwired. Wanna know why? Our aural circuits have frequency binning, much like an FFT, and they "ring" at certain frequencies, and an octave is either 1/2 or 2x a given frequency/"note". Closer examination of this system under stimulus is what I would consider a gold standard in this field of research. The form of research undertaken in this study suggests many things, and the researchers have chosen a particular conclusion and it's not necessarily indicated by even their own data. https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/Analysis-of-sound-by-the-auditory-nervous-system https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/Analysis-of-sound-by-... Given the current propensity for thinking that frequency detection is pre-cortex (lower level than speech decoding) and available rather early on in the evolutionary chain, I'm going to be interested in physical studies, not social science.
andrewla 6y ago
> The acoustic structure of octaves is always the same: The frequency of a note in one octave is half the frequency of the same note in the octave above This is not a great definition; our understanding of frequencies came well after we were using the concept. The idea of a "string of half the length with the same tension" is much more natural, and is the easiest mechanical analogy. The discovery of this is very natural because you get sympathetic vibrations -- you can feel the other string moving when you get consonance across octaves. It shows up (along with fifths) in most other instruments -- blowing twice as hard in a flute or halving the tube size, or compressing the embouchure in brass instruments. While I don't think it's intrinsic in the human brain, it is intrinsic in most musical instruments, and it's kind of intrinsic in the way sound works, so it would be very surprising if it didn't feature in the music made by a culture, and thus work its way into the appreciation of music in general. The tests described here are interesting but might just point to the fact that there is less instrumental music (produced or listened to) in this culture than in others.
dahauns 6y ago
>The researchers acknowledged in the study that the results might reflect differences in how people sing, and not in how people perceive pitch. But they argued that the totality of collected data, including some more direct measures of octave perception, put the weight of evidence on the side of a perceptual explanation. [..] Moreover, if the Tsimané’s performance in the tests has more to do with singing ability than their perceptual experience, then it would mean that all people have absolute pitch Since I only have access to the abstract: How did they argue this in detail? Because that is something that immediately sprung at me. In the process of learning to sing, reproduction of relative intervals is far easier (and much earlier) learned than correct absolute positioning °) which actually takes some effort to train. And the reasoning in the second paragraph eludes me completely. If I haven't completely misunderstood something, this has nothing to do with absolute pitch, and everything with tonal memory, which - again - won't work if it isn't trained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory °) EDIT: Apology, the choice of words is actually incorrect. It's still relative, but with reference to the notes heard before, in contrast to the reproduction of intervals where you have your own previous sung note as (control) reference. Simply put: it's much harder to learn to hit the first note (and thus the general pitch) of the sequence correctly than the intervals in the sequence.
seph-reed 6y ago
I made a website that describes natural harmonic (just) tuning systems: http://just-tunings.info/learn http://just-tunings.info/learn I do need to add a section on cultural consonance/dissonance but.. Octaves are not cultural. Resonance is not just an aspect of music or even animals, but literally everything in nature that makes sound. Dropping a rock in water will create sound, and frequencies that resonate with each-other will stick around longer than those that fight, teaching us that these sounds belong together. An octave is the simplest possible relationship between two frequencies, and it can be heard in almost every natural sound imaginable. We learn they belong together from almost every sound we hear. As an aside, western tonality uses the twelfth root of 2 because if you just start hammering randomly on those tones, they'll get along extremely well regardless of whatever the biggest bassist vibration is. The big bassy frequency being the one that every other frequency needs to get along with (harder than it sounds). It's sort of a fudgy form of relativity that allows things to vibe together mostly, but not perfectly.
tathougies 6y ago
Musical octaves are wired into physics. If a note is at frequency X Hz, then the note one octave above it is 2X Hz. Of course due to the harmonics of the string, a string vibrating at X is also vibrating at 2X, so when you play a note at X Hz, then you are also hearing the note one octave above at the same time. So... it doesn't need to be learned... When you hear a middle A, you're also hearing the A above for sure. And when you hear the A above by itself, you're hearing one part of the A below. Of course, understanding that what you're hearing is a called an octave is almost certainly learned. But in my experience, any one who is not tone deaf will naturally lower or raise their voice by an octave if you ask them to sing a song 'lower'.
tunesmith 6y ago
I wonder if this is more a problem with the article than the study. I haven't read the study. It feels oddly described. Like, are they saying that when a Tsimané sings a song (solo, without instruments) on Tuesday, and then later sings the song on Friday, it's guaranteed to always start on the same pitch, without hearing some sort of reference note from an instrument? If so, that's basically perfect pitch. We all have comfortable vocal ranges, and I know generally where to start the Star Spangled Banner to hit both the high notes and the low notes, but since I have relative pitch and not perfect pitch, my starting point is still always going to vary within a minor third or so. Incidentally, I noticed in my college ear training courses that I (I have excellent relative pitch) would routinely score higher than the folks with perfect pitch. There's something about perfect pitch that can be really distracting to musicians for certain exercises, as it's not quite as flexible as relative pitch. So maybe that's related to the Tsimané. Also, there are aspects of different notes that very much are noticeable in physical reality and don't need to be culturally learned. In an old singing group of mine, we would have fun with a game where we would stand really close to each other, face to face, and sing unison, and then one of us would start to go slightly sharp or flat while the other would try to stay steady. There's an ugly "beating" sensation when this happens that goes away when you come back to unison. It's not just theory, you hear/feel it. That's present to a lesser extent with octaves, and then fifths, through the harmonic sequence. Those subtleties are of course covered up when you're using separate instruments or timbres, but using different timbres doesn't disprove the underlying presence.
- codezero 6y ago
  Sounds like you were generating a beat frequency, pretty neat :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)
Grue3 6y ago
Did they try to sing along to the original notes? Perfect pitch needs to be practiced, but it should be immediately apparent when you sing out of tune if you're even slightly musically inclined.

140 points by gpvos 6y ago

I was skeptical of his prior dissonance study. I feel there is a bit of accommodation by the participants to maximize the surprise of the researcher. Getting goods for singing funny. The paradigm I would have liked to see is where two tones are held constant and the participant moves a third tone to the location that sounds the best or the worst. It is remarkable work. But I don't believe it. Octaves are just too basic a phenomena to be viewed as a cultural invention.

andi999 6y ago
Also if the result would have been:Tsimane can hear octaves as everybody else, then there would be no publication. So there are rewards not to question ones own study too carefully.
bambax 6y ago
So many things we consider part of our inner core are learned. This result doesn't seem that surprising, although it does call for further study. The fact that those people don't rate consonant chords as more pleasant than dissonant ones is also interesting.
jmiskovic 6y ago
Octave harmony in instruments and singing are established physical phenomenon. Higher harmonics of two voices line up and resulting frequency spectrum is more clustered and concentrated. I think the study disproves that all brains consider this to be preferable, and instead ascribes it to cultural/learned phenomenon. I agree it's not compelling theory, but hard to argue against if they can get more proof.
enriquto 6y ago
> Octaves are just too basic a phenomena to be viewed as a cultural invention. Octaves are consonant or dissonant depending on the timbre of the sound. For sounds produced by harmonic instruments, like a vibrating string or air vibrating inside a long tube, the sound is a superposition of waves whose frequencies are integer multiples of a fundamental frequency. Then, playing two sounds an octave apart will match exactly all these frequencies and it will sound nice. But there are other instruments (not privileged in the western music tradition) whose timbre is not composed of integer multiples of a fundamental frequency; and in these instruments octaves sound very dissonant. You can argue that the octave is a "basic phenomenon" inasmuch a vibrating string is basic. Yet, from the point of view of a person who uses a synthesizer, the octave has nothing special with respect to other intervals.
- frodetb 6y ago
  A drum is a good example, though we don't often think of it as a melodic instrument. The resonant modes of a drum don't look anything like someting as nice as those of strings, with their integer multiple frequencies. Makes you wonder, what music might have been like if our ear was more "drum-based" than "string-based" (however that might work).
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Music already "is" something different! not all music is western. One of the most strikingly different kinds of music (besides synthesized stuff) is gamelan music, which is performed on a set of non-harmonic bells, which sound consonantly at non-integer intervals.
    - frodetb 6y ago
      Thanks! I've been listening to gamelan music for the past couple of hours now, and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. From my limited exposure, I get the impression that the music leans on repetition of sound patterns to give the listener something to hold onto musically, creating more of an atmosphere of sound than a melody you might hum along to. Is that fair to say? Perhaps I just need more exposure before things "click". I might compare this non-harmonic genre with the artist Sevish, whose work I've enjoyed a great deal. He too tries to step out of the realm of 12-tone equal temperament. Some of his work is quite reminiscent in structure to this gamelan music (e.g. Desert Island Rain). However, he also manages to build melodies and something you could probably call chord progressions (though I wouldn't know), in a new and very foreign musical world (his entire album Harmony Hacker is amazing). Besides the music being amazing, getting used to this new landscape is enjoyable in and of itself. My point about the drums, though, was more aimed at what scales, chord progressions and melodies might be developed by a species who had as harmonic basis the drum's spectrum of resonant frequencies. We, by comparison, have the integer multiple of some base frequency, the canonical "harmonic sequence", whereas for them it would be quite different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membrane#Animations_of_several_vibration_modes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibrations_of_a_circular_membr...
isolli 6y ago
I agree with most skeptical commenters. I once read about a study of singing in traditional cultures. Men and women would sing the same melody, except one octave apart due to differences in physiology. Reportedly, they did not perceive their singing to be separated by any interval; they perceived that they were singing in unison.
- PaulDavisThe1st 6y ago
  ... a result that almost reinforces the findings in the paper reported in the article: octave (equivalence) perception is learned/culturally influenced rather than being hard-wired.
  - isolli 6y ago
    I don't disagree, but rather it looks like their hypothesis is difficult to falsify.
throwaway4666 6y ago
You'd be surprised at the number of "basic phenomena" that turned out to have cultural origins. Look up the language of the Piraha people, who famously does not contain any concept related to numbers or counting (because they have no use for it and introducing it would disrupt the trades they have), among many other things. Also, cursorily reading a study that contradicts one's preconceptions and going like "nah, my gut feeling doesn't agree with it" is so quintessentially Hacker News ;-)
- twirlock 6y ago
  Similarly to the existence of waves and simple ratios, actually no, numbers do not have cultural origins.
  - throwaway4666 6y ago
    Funny how you seem unable to conceive of a people that doesn't have a concept of numbers ;-)
    - twirlock 6y ago
      I can conceive perfectly well "of a people" who don't have a concept of all kinds of things. It doesn't mean those things don't exist. Winkyface.

FeepingCreature 6y ago

This study does not show what the title claims. Alternate title: Tsimané people do not perceive melodic harmonies. This is also the case for some non-Tsimané people (google Amusia). There could just be a genetic basis here. For comparison, you'd need a Tsimané child raised in Western culture, or reverse.

vixen99 6y ago
For interesting possibilities regarding aural perception and genes see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia
gpvos 6y ago
They could reproduce the intervals without problem, they just transposed them by something else than a multiple of octaves. You make an interesting point in the last sentence though.
- FeepingCreature 6y ago
  My horse in this race is that I know somebody who was raised on western music and has the same problem. I don't know if it's amusia per se or some related pathology, but I definitely think it's not just acculturation. We spent several hours arguing whether music theory was a valid field of study or complete bunk until we noticed he didn't perceive melodic harmony at all. It was fun, if exhausting. That person also nailed an amusia test, which makes me suspect there's a separate condition.

klysm 6y ago

I find this hard to believe from a mathematical point of view - octaves are as far as you can get from arbitrary which is I guess what gives the headline it’s shock value.

chrisseaton 6y ago
What is the reason for there being eight notes (or seven? I don't really understand it) in an octave?
- smilespray 6y ago
  That's far more arbitrary, and there are plenty of other scales that don't conform to this.
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    I don't understand - so they are arbitrary? And so arbitrary that people don't even agree on it?
    - ben_w 6y ago
      An octave is the interval between one musical pitch and another with double its frequency, which isn’t arbitrary; however the number of notes within an octave (and, I think, their exact tuning) is arbitrary.
      - deleted 6y ago
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    - sideshowb 6y ago
      The harmonic series (of which the first three intervals are octaves, fifths, fourths in pythagorean tuning) is not arbitrary. How you construct a more useful set of notes from the harmonic series is arbitrary. The 1.5^12 ~= 2^7 coincidence I note above allows you to construct a scale using octaves and fifths. You can just as easily do it with other similar coincidences, use fifths and fourths instead, etc etc. Check the smoothness/roughness functions in my blog link - the reason you think e.g. a 3rd sounds as 'right' as a 7th is likely purely cultural. Other cultures have other scales. One of the Indian ragas has over 100 notes. (I'm aware OP claims it's ALL learned, including the octave, but even if true I don't think that means it's all cultural).

raverbashing 6y ago

I'm a bit skeptical of this The concept of Octaves (as a lot of concepts in music) comes from physics. Because one of the most basic instruments you can have is a string under tension. Pluck the string: note Pluck the same string pinched in the middle: same note one octave higher Not to mention Note + Note(octave higher) will have the harmonics overlapping, so it will sound better since there won't be any beating.

apendleton 6y ago
> so it will sound better since there won't be any beating Unless presence or absence of beating is itself either a thing we learn to detect, or a thing we learn to associate with better-ness or worse-ness, rather than both being innate?
bambax 6y ago
Yeah, but the idea of half == same is very specific to music. In no other domain do we do this.
- smilespray 6y ago
  Half != same, and harmonics exist in plenty of other domains.
- garretraziel 6y ago
  Yeah, I think that this is what people aren't getting in this thread. Octave clearly has a special connection to its base tone, but it's a little bit arbitrary that we consider these two to be THE SAME tones (that you can often replace one with the other). I believe that this is what is learned.
- dahauns 6y ago
  While not semantically the "same" - you'd be surprised where this principle shows up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance
jmiskovic 6y ago

frodetb 6y ago

Quite a bold title. My understanding (while limited) is that the human ear senses sound by means of tiny hairs in the inner ear that vibrate in resonance with incoming sound waves. I've always believed that the reason certain intervals are more harmonious to us than others was because there would be some overlap in hairs that resonated for the different harmonious pitches. The same way guitar strings will resonate with other strings that are tuned an octave, or perfect fifth, or fourth higher, these ear-hairs ought to behave by the same physical laws and principles. As such, I'm a bit skeptical of the method and conclusion of this research. It seems like physics to me, not psychology. Ability to reproduce pitches and intervals does not strike me as entirely related to what they were trying to find out. How about instead playing different soundbites, of consonant and dissonant pitches, and asking for their opinion in some way? Maybe even allowing the participant to find a relationship by some sliding instrument themself? That would seem more aimed at studying the Tsimané's ability at "perceiving octaves." Maybe my interpretation of the header and conclusion is wrong. Perhaps the idea is that _some training_ is needed in order to perceive octaves, the same way _some training_ is needed in order to learn how to walk. That I might be able to wrap my head around.

kqr 6y ago

I'm not too surprised by this. I've had awful relative pitch all my life, and just recently started ear training. I've also for fun read a bit about how absolute pitch develops in young children.[1] Bit by bit, I'm realising how much of what's taken for granted by practitioners of Western music is in fact learned. As a concrete example: ever since I was a child, I've heard people speak of major and minor triads as sounding happy or sad. That seems like something that's just obvious to a lot of people. It's never been obvious to me, and it lead me to think I was (at least partially) tone deaf; if I can't even hear something that is (evidently) that obvious to so many people, how can I ever get better at truly listening to music? Now that I've started ear training, I'm beginning to mentally associate particular sounds with these chord qualities[2] to the point of actually being able to identify them better than a flipped coin would. (Which is a huge milestone for me!) But it's taken a lot of practise. And I still don't hear them as "happy" and "sad". If I try to listen for "happy" and "sad" chords, I go back to mischaracterising these chord qualities just as much as before. I've simply never learned that association, for whatever reason. ---- It goes on and on: I played a lot of piano (from sheet music) when I was young, and practised the C major scale up and down and up and down, resulting in the interval from the tonic to the major second being etched into my brain very strongly. And I suspect this is what has made it surprisingly hard for me to internally hear a half-step from the tonic. To my brain (before I started ear training), the minimal possible step from the tonic was to the major second. There just weren't any sounds my brain could produce in between. Learned. With plenty of ear training, I'm now in addition learning to be able to reproduce a minor second too. Even more speculatively, I've noticed there are some specific half-step intervals I hear as whole steps. These are from E to F, and from B to C. These are half steps, but they are outliers in how often I attempt to classify them as whole steps. I suspect this is because of said C major scale practise: somewhere in the back of my mind, I might associate these tones (in the absolute pitch sense) with steps of the C major scale and therefore think of them as whole steps. I don't have absolute pitch in any useful sense, but it wouldn't surprise me if my brain, somewhere in a back compartment somewhere, has retained the sound of these tones and associated them with adjacent steps in the scale I practised so much. ---- Circling back to octaves: Yes, there are physical bases for considering octaves as a special case of some sort, namely that if you strip out the base resonance frequency of one tone on a string or wind instrument, what you're left with are its overtones, which also makes up its octave's frequencies. But the fact that this relationship is something that makes these tones sound "the same" might very well be learned. The fact that this level of consonance is even desirable might very well be learned. I can picture cultures in which that level of consonance is considered uninteresting, hollow, and weak. Why would one deliberately care to seek something like that? ---- [1]: By listening a lot to music that extensively and unpredictably uses the 12 tones of Western music in A440 equal temperament tuning, children can learn to recognise these specific 12 tones in that tuning – but it won't help with any other frequencies! [2]: I now hear major triads as a combination of hollow and triumphant, and minor triads as fuller and more epic. Some parts of it make sense, others do not.

byteface 6y ago

I feel looking for musical scores in peoples brains is a great place to start decoding. We clearly load data into a conscious signal somehow like CAN-bus but it must also be stored maybe on actin filaments in the dendritic spines as loops we load in? Also mentally we can change the music and add any number of instruments over the top change the tune and deviate the course of the melody, add vocal harmonies from crowds of people and violins etc. so where does that part happen?, in the signal?. can it be 'heard'? . and is the music 'composer' happening in the same part of the brain as the language generating part or is it just similar capabilities in a different part of the brain?. Decoding must be possible. I feel if they had like millions of brains all wired up to computers that were using AI to find match patterns . i.e. audio patterns from songs in brains data. they could brute force it? Is getting people to sing stuff and making assumptions weak science?

marci 6y ago

It reminds me of how tuning can depend on the era. Sometimes even on the composer. When you're used to hearing something in a particular way, the slightest change can be jarring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQaSFgnVI8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyQaSFgnVI8

im3w1l-alt 6y ago

Music is definitely an acquired taste. My family was not very good at nor into music. I didn't understand the point of instrumental music until my mid teens. Before that I only listened for the lyrics. On a different note, people often think of the octave as the most fundamental interval, but the most fundamental is the very same tone twice. Even here people like a little dissonance. Two tones at nearly but not exactly the same pitch will produce a pleasantly shimmering chorus effect. Anyway music is subjective and there's is no sound that is better than everything else in all respects and contexts.

schwartzworld 6y ago
I have never heard "out of tune unison" described as an interval, except in a joke about viola players. Sure, there's a difference between 440 and 442 but that's not considered an interval in western music theory.
- agency 6y ago
  > Sure, there's a difference between 440 and 442 but that's not considered an interval in western music theory. Well that's just your 2 cents... I mean, 7.85 cents.
gpvos 6y ago
I don't play accordion but I understand they have multiple reeds for the same note, which are usually tuned slightly off, relative to each other.
- mrob 6y ago
  It's also standard in pipe organs, where it's called "celeste". See: http://www.organstops.org/c/Celeste.html http://www.organstops.org/c/Celeste.html

irrational 6y ago

I hope that’s true because I still don’t have a clue what an octave is (or a melody or harmony or any other music related word).

nabla9 6y ago
Perfect octave is doubling the frequency. For better and much deeper explanation: 3Blue1Brown: Music And Measure Theory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cyW5z-M2yzw
parenthesis 6y ago
Notes separated by octaves are like higher and lower versions of the same note. If a deep-voiced person and a high-voiced person sing the same tune together (without either straining), then they are singing one (or more) octaves apart. Assuming they are singing in tune with each other, otherwise it will sound more like Chick Corea demonstrates here: https://youtu.be/yfoxdFHG7Cw?t=371 https://youtu.be/yfoxdFHG7Cw?t=371
- taejo 6y ago
  > Notes separated by octaves are like higher and lower versions of the same note. I don't know if this is an in-born ability or a cultural one, but I can say that I (for one) don't have any perceptual sense of "sameness" in an octave. To me, two keys with the same letter-name on a piano make two different notes, just like any other interval (though I'm not saying that the different intervals don't sound different). This may be a form of amusia, but I enjoy music, sing to myself, recognize melodies, and find the dissonant Happy Birthday in your link unpleasant (all of which contrasts strongly with the forms of amusia I've read about); on the other hand a lot of the things that people say about music don't mean much to me, except that in some cases I have a mathematical understanding which I can't really connect to a perception.

hbarka 6y ago

The Tsimane man could probably identify the distinction between octaves of bird calls in his habitat. The experimenter would be in the opposite chair hearing only a handful of notes.

fidla 6y ago

As a music teacher and music therapist, I have observed this behavior for three decades. It's especially true with people that have zero musical background.

Asooka 6y ago
If you don't mind me asking, what is a "music therapist"? You help people to play music, or you help people using music?

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jcims 6y ago

Seems like most of the disagreement in the comments here are due to people having different notions of the word octave. This should be no surprise as there are numerous interpretations of the word according to Merriam-Webster: 1: an 8-day period of observances beginning with a festival day 2a: a stanza of eight lines : OTTAVA RIMA b: the first eight lines of an Italian sonnet 3a: a musical interval embracing eight diatonic degrees b: a tone or note at this interval c: the harmonic combination of two tones an octave apart d: the whole series of notes, tones, or digitals comprised within this interval and forming the unit of the modern scale e: an organ stop giving tones an octave above those corresponding to the keys 4: the interval between two frequencies (as in an electromagnetic spectrum) having a ratio of 2 to 1 5: a group of eight So maybe everyone's right.

epx 6y ago

Perhaps it depends on the environmental noise you are exposed. In nature, most noise is percussion-like, non-rational harmonics, so octaves don't make much sens. OTOH listening to electric motors and combustion engines since the day you are born, makes you 'like' octaves, fifths and thirds, since these rotational machines generate these intervals while doing noise.

Jarwain 6y ago
This wouldn't explain the prevalence of the usage of these musical patterns before electric motors and combustion engines were created

Asooka 6y ago

I never understood octaves. Two sounds of different pitch that are supposed to sound "the same" somehow? Obviously if you shift a melody by multiplying every note by 2 will keep it sounding the same melodically, even though it's immediately obvious it's higher pitched. Beyond that, I have never been able to perceive the "sameness" between equivalent notes on different octaves. When I was younger and played adventure games, sometimes there would be a puzzle involving listening to a short melody and playing it back on some instrument. Literally the only way I could solve those was by analysing the original melody with a spectrometer, then analysing the instrument, and figuring what sequence of keys to press that way.

tylerrobinson 6y ago
I read this yesterday and it really stayed with me, enough to find this comment again. Do two notes an octave apart not sound harmonious in a particular identifiable way to you? From another view, it may help to think about it like this: Tones have a certain relationship with each other, and we split that into octaves in Western music to keep track of them. Just like the number 9 precedes 10, and 19 precedes 20, 10 and 20 are "the same number" in base 10 since that's where the pattern repeates. We could count in another number system, but the underlying physical truth of the numbers would be the same.

dzdt 6y ago

It was a surprise to me to learn that octaves have a physical. mathematical basis. I discovered this as a teen reading about how to make music on a computer, where the relationship of notes to frequency was explained. To my ear moving up an octave had always sounded like an arbitrary increase in pitch.

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lukeschlather 6y ago

I'm a little frustrated with the lack of discussion of frequencies in this article, which seems like a key bit of background to understanding this work. An "octave" is two sounds where one of them has exactly double the frequency of the other. I think it makes sense that octaves aren't hardwired, however it is fundamentally a mathematical property of frequencies. I'm not sure how I feel about the thesis; can children tell if something is twice the size of another or do you need the concept of "two?" I think like other people I initially found this a little unlikely because octaves are innate physical and mathematical properties, but there are tons of physical/mathematical properties that require a lot of study to understand intuitively.

hootbootscoot 6y ago

mmmm I'm skeptical of a singular study in which a certain tribe of people are asked to modulate a sound to an octave within their singing range disproving octave equivalence being hardwired. Wanna know why? Our aural circuits have frequency binning, much like an FFT, and they "ring" at certain frequencies, and an octave is either 1/2 or 2x a given frequency/"note". Closer examination of this system under stimulus is what I would consider a gold standard in this field of research. The form of research undertaken in this study suggests many things, and the researchers have chosen a particular conclusion and it's not necessarily indicated by even their own data. https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/Analysis-of-sound-by-the-auditory-nervous-system https://www.britannica.com/science/ear/Analysis-of-sound-by-... Given the current propensity for thinking that frequency detection is pre-cortex (lower level than speech decoding) and available rather early on in the evolutionary chain, I'm going to be interested in physical studies, not social science.

andrewla 6y ago

> The acoustic structure of octaves is always the same: The frequency of a note in one octave is half the frequency of the same note in the octave above This is not a great definition; our understanding of frequencies came well after we were using the concept. The idea of a "string of half the length with the same tension" is much more natural, and is the easiest mechanical analogy. The discovery of this is very natural because you get sympathetic vibrations -- you can feel the other string moving when you get consonance across octaves. It shows up (along with fifths) in most other instruments -- blowing twice as hard in a flute or halving the tube size, or compressing the embouchure in brass instruments. While I don't think it's intrinsic in the human brain, it is intrinsic in most musical instruments, and it's kind of intrinsic in the way sound works, so it would be very surprising if it didn't feature in the music made by a culture, and thus work its way into the appreciation of music in general. The tests described here are interesting but might just point to the fact that there is less instrumental music (produced or listened to) in this culture than in others.

dahauns 6y ago

>The researchers acknowledged in the study that the results might reflect differences in how people sing, and not in how people perceive pitch. But they argued that the totality of collected data, including some more direct measures of octave perception, put the weight of evidence on the side of a perceptual explanation. [..] Moreover, if the Tsimané’s performance in the tests has more to do with singing ability than their perceptual experience, then it would mean that all people have absolute pitch Since I only have access to the abstract: How did they argue this in detail? Because that is something that immediately sprung at me. In the process of learning to sing, reproduction of relative intervals is far easier (and much earlier) learned than correct absolute positioning °) which actually takes some effort to train. And the reasoning in the second paragraph eludes me completely. If I haven't completely misunderstood something, this has nothing to do with absolute pitch, and everything with tonal memory, which - again - won't work if it isn't trained: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory °) EDIT: Apology, the choice of words is actually incorrect. It's still relative, but with reference to the notes heard before, in contrast to the reproduction of intervals where you have your own previous sung note as (control) reference. Simply put: it's much harder to learn to hit the first note (and thus the general pitch) of the sequence correctly than the intervals in the sequence.

seph-reed 6y ago

I made a website that describes natural harmonic (just) tuning systems: http://just-tunings.info/learn http://just-tunings.info/learn I do need to add a section on cultural consonance/dissonance but.. Octaves are not cultural. Resonance is not just an aspect of music or even animals, but literally everything in nature that makes sound. Dropping a rock in water will create sound, and frequencies that resonate with each-other will stick around longer than those that fight, teaching us that these sounds belong together. An octave is the simplest possible relationship between two frequencies, and it can be heard in almost every natural sound imaginable. We learn they belong together from almost every sound we hear. As an aside, western tonality uses the twelfth root of 2 because if you just start hammering randomly on those tones, they'll get along extremely well regardless of whatever the biggest bassist vibration is. The big bassy frequency being the one that every other frequency needs to get along with (harder than it sounds). It's sort of a fudgy form of relativity that allows things to vibe together mostly, but not perfectly.

tathougies 6y ago

Musical octaves are wired into physics. If a note is at frequency X Hz, then the note one octave above it is 2X Hz. Of course due to the harmonics of the string, a string vibrating at X is also vibrating at 2X, so when you play a note at X Hz, then you are also hearing the note one octave above at the same time. So... it doesn't need to be learned... When you hear a middle A, you're also hearing the A above for sure. And when you hear the A above by itself, you're hearing one part of the A below. Of course, understanding that what you're hearing is a called an octave is almost certainly learned. But in my experience, any one who is not tone deaf will naturally lower or raise their voice by an octave if you ask them to sing a song 'lower'.

tunesmith 6y ago

I wonder if this is more a problem with the article than the study. I haven't read the study. It feels oddly described. Like, are they saying that when a Tsimané sings a song (solo, without instruments) on Tuesday, and then later sings the song on Friday, it's guaranteed to always start on the same pitch, without hearing some sort of reference note from an instrument? If so, that's basically perfect pitch. We all have comfortable vocal ranges, and I know generally where to start the Star Spangled Banner to hit both the high notes and the low notes, but since I have relative pitch and not perfect pitch, my starting point is still always going to vary within a minor third or so. Incidentally, I noticed in my college ear training courses that I (I have excellent relative pitch) would routinely score higher than the folks with perfect pitch. There's something about perfect pitch that can be really distracting to musicians for certain exercises, as it's not quite as flexible as relative pitch. So maybe that's related to the Tsimané. Also, there are aspects of different notes that very much are noticeable in physical reality and don't need to be culturally learned. In an old singing group of mine, we would have fun with a game where we would stand really close to each other, face to face, and sing unison, and then one of us would start to go slightly sharp or flat while the other would try to stay steady. There's an ugly "beating" sensation when this happens that goes away when you come back to unison. It's not just theory, you hear/feel it. That's present to a lesser extent with octaves, and then fifths, through the harmonic sequence. Those subtleties are of course covered up when you're using separate instruments or timbres, but using different timbres doesn't disprove the underlying presence.

codezero 6y ago
Sounds like you were generating a beat frequency, pretty neat :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)

Grue3 6y ago

Did they try to sing along to the original notes? Perfect pitch needs to be practiced, but it should be immediately apparent when you sing out of tune if you're even slightly musically inclined.