4 ms·

We don't know the mechanism, but we have hints. Surprisingly enough, relative pitch is the one most unique to humans. Birds have perfect pitch, and can fail t

We don't know the mechanism, but we have hints. Surprisingly enough, relative pitch is the one most unique to humans. Birds have perfect pitch, and can fail to recognize a song if it's pitch-shifted by even a small amount. And we know what the signals are that come off of the cochlea (and we can even emulate them with a cochlear implant). So what's different is something in the way the brain processes the sounds, and to my knowledge, out of the millions of highly trained musicians there are in this world, none of them has developed perfect pitch outside of childhood.

caditinpiscinam 6y ago
> Birds have perfect pitch, and can fail to recognize a song if it's pitch-shifted by even a small amount I have a pet parrot who seems to always sing in the same key. Now I feel bad for whistling off-key to him all these years! Assuming that perfect pitch is an immutable skill after a certain point, I wonder whether the age of acquisition still matters. Do people who learn the skill earlier have more fine-grained perception?