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Perfect pitch study: Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors?

131 points by mzs 5y ago

psychometry 5y ago
>They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have: Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum. Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article. I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes. I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative pitch and chord theory. I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20. There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect. > I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20. But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that one random note and getting it to within some tolerance. > I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered—I had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on organ.)
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with other instruments. There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing. A great piece of open source software for anybody that is even remotely serious about this: http://piano-tuner.org/ http://piano-tuner.org/
  - poetaster 5y ago
    The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on sax.
  - psychometry 5y ago
    > That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else. Counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier True musical genius and child prodigy but also a skilled performer and composer. History also tells of impressive feats by composers like Mozart and Rachmaninoff.
kqr 5y ago
What fascinates me about this topic is that both "absolute pitch" and "absolute colour recognition" is essentially cultural. We are born with perfect pitch but lose it when we don't use it. How our culture uses and names colour determines which we can perceive absolutely. The point is they're more similar than they seem.
- itronitron 5y ago
  There are also individual differences in how people perceive color (not just how they label them), even among those who are not color blind.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  > We are born with perfect pitch I know there are some studies on this but it's far from conclusive enough to state this without any further qualifiers. I suppose you are indirectly referring to the study referenced in this article? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford
srcreigh 5y ago
The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training. Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to determine exact rgb values of a color. What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is something deeper there.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  > Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training. That's about timbre, not pitch.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    What is known as timbre is technically the degree to which certain harmonics are present or not. The most interesting case of this is the missing fundamental, which we apparently re-create in our heads to hear it even when it isn't really present! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental This really threw my for a loop while building my mp3->midi convertor.
    - Grustaf 5y ago
      I know what timbre is, that's my point. The difference between a violin and a piano is not about frequency.
      - ogma 5y ago
        And their point is that timbre is determined by the intensity of the overtones, which are frequencies.
  - srcreigh 5y ago
    That's my point. I believe red vs blue is more like violin vs voice than A440 vs Exyz.
jacquesm 5y ago
I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any random note. So identification without some kind of extra mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to develop that skill because it would be very useful. There are some interesting websites for this: https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
- a9h74j 5y ago
  Rick Beato on YT tells stories of musicians realizing that they are losing their perfect pitch. Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
  - leoc 5y ago
    Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 . Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
  - slaymaker1907 5y ago
    It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing). They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I. Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of work in transcription because unless the piece is doing something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest of it can usually be inferred.
zwieback 5y ago
One of the papers quoted by this paper is something I always wondered about: how can anyone have absolute pitch when you can detune your intrument slightly, e.g. if the Oboe gives the A and everyone tunes to that there's no guarantee that it's 440. Not everyone picks 440 for A anyway so really absolute pitch has a basic cultural reference. Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds with some exposure.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Or they find it extremely annoying. I once played a piece with notes that were hanging just below or above their 'true' pitch and then slowly home in on it and the listener could not stand it and asked for it to be switched off. If you want to test yourself against it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM Enjoy :)
- SeanLuke 5y ago
  I have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is basically rounding the frequency to the nearest pitch in your resolution. As a pianist, my resolution is more or less half of a semitone, so I can tell that a note is off, but it doesn't get really annoying until it's so off that it's close to rounding to the next note. This resolution differs from person to person, mostly based on how they use it. I had a piano tuner visit my house yesterday as it so happens and his resolution was to about 10 cents. It was amazing.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I had some fun with my piano tuner to 'check' his tuning using a stroboscope for each individual string (not a choir) after he was done and it was quite amazing to see how accurate he was. And what blows me away is how fast an experienced tuner can work, what would take me hours - and with tremendous fatigue in hearing afterwards - takes him 1/2 hour and with much better results.
  - zwieback 5y ago
    Do you think that over time you could "re-tune" yourself to different pitches, e.g. if you listened to a ton of music that's detuned by half a semitone that eventually you'd think that that's the new normal? Or maybe it's something that gets hardwired at a young age and then you're stuck with it?
jacobolus 5y ago
We can’t identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in isolation is just as difficult. (Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs. color identification, because the physical mechanisms and resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.
  - jacobolus 5y ago
    You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone. It’s when you start trying to distinguish the same type of sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless trained, ideally from a young age).
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of course that only works for the range that I can whistle.
    - slaymaker1907 5y ago
      Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes. However, this is much more difficult if not nearly impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre changes can even differ between two semitones depending on the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st position.
Hoasi 5y ago
Some people can identify music notes as well as colour. One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another. Early training works wonder for music. Colours are everywhere, and most people can see, whereas most people don't train to recognize individual notes. That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians. Most people can agree that the sky is blue. However, a trained painter may be able to see much more nuance.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  > One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another. Sure, but most people can reliably and predictably name some dozen colours. > That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians. If people in general had had perfect pitch, music might have looked different from today. Absolute pitch would probably have been an important feature. The reason it isn't important is precisely because most people can't perceive it.
- mywittyname 5y ago
  There is a training aspect to identifying color as well. People from cultures without the name for a color group have difficulty identifying a color as distinct without a name for such group. Heck, even people from the same cultures will disagree on the classification of the same color experienced in the same situation. Remember the dress controversy a while back? People couldn't agree whether or not it was black & blue or white & gold.
Grustaf 5y ago
Without having read the link, one obvious answer is that colour vision helps us tell what plants are ripe, but detecting absolute frequencies probably has little survival value.
- toast0 5y ago
  A shared understanding of what colors are what helps us communicate as well. Of course, some of that is reinforcing, but I would never tell people I'm at the house where the windchime rings about a middle C; but I would tell them I've got a white fence and a red door.
dhosek 5y ago
I had the “misfortune” of having a friend in high school who was preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, that time), he was sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago's “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” by playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then repeating the process. My take away from this was that this was something that either you could or couldn’t do and there was no in-between. Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7 days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for rehearsals.¹ By the end of the process, I was transcribing straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head. So, it is a learnable experience. But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case with a CI. ——— 1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music at rehearsal.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment of music.
  - smegger001 5y ago
    i wonder how long until they can match average default human hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the peripheral auditory system. If we were to exceed human hearing would people then get implants without a medical need?
kazinator 5y ago
We do not identify colors well. The eye is receptive to three colors, that's it. We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics). We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put them side by side, you generally find that they are totally different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all directions. When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch, but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves. Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also, regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man, woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered. Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a" versus a slightly lower "a".
- utexaspunk 5y ago
  >We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics). Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    I don't think polarity has anything to do with this. The idea is that we can't distinguish at all between two independent light waves, one at ~600nm (red) and one at ~540nm (green), vs a single light wave at ~580nm (yellow).
- twelvechairs 5y ago
  Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as long as they fall on the cones similarly. Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not. Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4 is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are constructed culturally. The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different purposes.
pessimizer 5y ago
Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities, each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other, filtering out effects due to changing light sources and qualities. That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at filtering out common timbres. I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer). Your characterization is not in line with how things actually work. > I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position. I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    > Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer). But isn't the result a curve that can be expressed as the simple superposition of waves? That simply can't be done for vision. (edit: without breaking time by encoding scanlines - which is just serializing it.) > I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano. I'd take it. I'd imagine it'd be as easy to train somebody to recognize 12 pitches from a particular piano in a particular room as it would to train someone on sine waves. But my point was it'd be easier to train them on either than on pitch in general, from many different instruments with different timbres.
akomtu 5y ago
I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer. It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Harmonics and base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed string have a completely different shape, the first is going to decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes of vibration.
  - nyanpasu64 5y ago
    "Base wave form" (ignoring transients and such) doesn't matter for humans, and how a wave is perceived by humans is determined by the set of harmonics it contains.
    - poetaster 5y ago
      And modulating the string on a cello to harmonize with a reed is extraordinarily rich in harmonics.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Fair enough, the waveform is the relative strength of the harmonics. But it's a convenient short-cut to 'the whole of the relative strength of each harmonic as compared to the fundamental, as well as which harmonics are present'. A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
gerbilly 5y ago
Who says we can identify colours well? Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly opened my eyes, pun intended. As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the skill unfold. Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as distinct as different people's voices. The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...) I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another level. I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even imagine until one begins to acquire them. I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I can sort of see what that must be like.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  you can learn relative pitch not absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is only possible before 3 years old or something like that.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    you keep replying with this like it is absolute. why do you feel so strongly about this "fact"?
    - dekhn 5y ago
      This is, in fact, current mainstream scientific position. There is a lot of distinction in abilities between absolute and relative. What I personally experienced is there are some individuals who can identify specific notes down to the unit frequency (I played a 439Hz tone, the person said "Uh you're a hertz short" and I fixed the bug in my program). That level of ability is generally believed to be not learnable after the brain loses a certain amount of plasticicity. Continuing from my own experience, people who do not have absolute pitch at that level can improve their skills in pitch detection including: identifying intervals, identifying octave, identifying common notes in an octave, and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes can improve their pitch detection somewhat. Whta is rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch gaining perfect absolute pitch after growing up, regardless of the amount of training.
mkr-hn 5y ago
The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other drawbacks. Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
swayvil 5y ago
As for the "Why". Speaking as a guy who meditates. We usually don't actually perceive stuff. Sights, sounds, thoughts, smells. What we perceive is a reaction to the actual perception. Or a reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Down that chain a bit. Ending, more or less, with an idea. Those reactions are like a fog between you and the actual perception. When we concentrate, or meditate, or otherwise get a clearer, closer look at the perception, we see it in an uncommon way. We see the "truer" form. And much that was hidden becomes evident. This is the main power of the artist, musician, athlete, scientist.
- akomtu 5y ago
  There's no shortage of casually meditating "gurus" here who confuse their opinion with wisdom. It would be more honest to preface such "revelations" with a humble "such and such book says that..."
  - swayvil 5y ago
    You seem to be accusing me of either arrogance or plagiarism.
The_rationalist 5y ago
There is a drug that allow perfect pitch to be learned past early childhood https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
jancsika 5y ago
> Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening expertise of most people. Isn't naming CSS colors also beyond the visual expertise of most people? Granted there are more CSS colors than there are keys on a piano. Still-- give me a color scheme with 80 distinct colors and I'll give you poor scores of test subjects.
watwut 5y ago
Significant proportion of population is color blind to some extend. The rest sux about identifying colors too, just somewhat less.
poetaster 5y ago
No one has mentioned microtonak music. The breadth of perception on the continuum becomes more similar between sight and sound when you discriminate more. Think the carnatic system. Or Harry Partch. Or the oud. Modal music in microtunings gets very colourful.
twirlock 5y ago
Perfect absolute pitch would not be convenient for certain types of creativity, e.g. improv. It's not conducive to an understanding of modality.
pjdorrell 5y ago
Some observations: * The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our ears is absolute. * Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to calculate relative pitch. * Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical" skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the musical quality of music. Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as an "amazing" skill. But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should be amazed by is relative pitch perception. My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical function. It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a deep rumbling sound.
TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
We're terrible at identifying colours, because colour is context dependent. Which makes it easy to create colour illusions like these: http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled conditions. No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers, commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such - minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.
TaupeRanger 5y ago
The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think you'd see very similar performance. Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
yesenadam 5y ago
Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite seeing them all your life. Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just know what the interval is. Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by, you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc. Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to hear.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  >musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome different limitations. Every instrument only has so many notes it can play. There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the neck on each string. Simple and not an actual musical exercise. It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest beginners before they even have much musical material under their belt to even practice or rehearse. If you are not already playing every note of your instrument every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have been missing. They've been missing you.
- mannykannot 5y ago
  Here's an interesting quote on the utility of perfect pitch outside of music: "Absolute pitch is too fine a form of categorisation," she said. "If that is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear. If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we couldn't understand that 'happy birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man or a woman, is the same word." https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford (an article originally linked to by jacquesm.) Also, perfect pitch is apparently much more common among native speakers of tonal languages.
layer8 5y ago
On the other hand, we can’t see color intervals and chords.
ltbarcly3 5y ago
Didn't read, but isn't it obvious? - We have several chemicals in our retina's that respond to specific frequencies of light according to some curve. They are calibrated. There is no such calibrated mechanism for how you detect sounds. - We actually suck at identifying colors. Every 5 year old has seen the 'shadow' optical illusion where two parts of a picture are exactly the same color and they look totally different.
adyer07 5y ago
The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me - it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate relative color, not absolute color. Learning to look at an apple and see warmer/cooler bits of red, for example. As the article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in between. There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson, mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.
laurieg 5y ago
I recently learnt to differentiate notes in a scale using an app[1]. Basically, you listen to a few chords for musical context and then you hear a note and have to choose which note it as. When I started I couldn't do it at all. After a few weeks I was able to tell which note I was hearing pretty reliably. I think the analogy to colours is absolutely correct. There's no calculation in my brain when I hear one these notes. I just hear it and think "That's a third". It feels exactly looking at a colour and thinking "That's red". The fact that the identification is not a conscious thought leads me to believe that learning notes by relating them songs and musical phrases you know is probably not the best way to do it. Note: this is not learning absolute pitch/perfect pitch. It's 'just' relative pitch, but having gone from not having that ability the change was quite large and quick. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fet.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fe...
flyingcircus3 5y ago
I've found that the only unteachable component of perfect pitch is the ability to internalize music in tune. If you can do this, you have perfect pitch. The ability to identify the note, or intervals, or the components of chords is all done through mnemonic devices.
mhh__ 5y ago
Memorising pitches as Colour (or concepts, to be less sycophantic to the title) can actually be a good way of "feeling" the notes of a scale. Perfect pitch is the one thing that really makes me jealous in music. Unless you have a lot of tuition, technique requires a certain amount of luck in terms of finding the right habits and obsessions, but I can work out how I would improve - pitch however is totally off the table unless you have from an early age.
fjfaase 5y ago
I know an artist who has worked on creating colour palettes (for a living, through commissions and art works) and creating light art works, who claims that most people are very poor at precieving colours because our brains so quickly adapt to changing lightning conditions. His conclusion is that there is no such thing as absolute colour perception.
sirwitti 5y ago
I studied musicology with a focus on perception of sound. As far as I understand it, we evolved to be able to perceive distinct colors because it's relevant to distinguish surfaces from another visually. For auditory sensations on the other hand rough pitch estimations sufficed but relations between pitches (think of hearing 2 pitches. you probably won't know the exact note or frequency but have learned to recognize patterns in the relations between them - e.g. musical intervals) which comes down to periodicities in the signal turned out to be a lot more relevant or helpful. As to why we needed to be able to relate pitches to one another: Without looking up literature on the topic I hypothezise that it might be a byproduct of the way we calculate a single perceived pitch out of a harmonic frequency spectrum. When hearing a note that is not a sinus wave in the frequency spectrum there are at least parts of the multiples of the base frequency. Since we do something like frequency analysis by detecting periodicities our brain tries to determine a single pitch for the signal, which it does by calculating the base frequency of harmonic spectrum (this works even of only part of the harmonics are availabe.). In order to do that the processing needs to treat the base frequency differently than the overtones. Since overtones roughly correlate with western musical intervals and we needed the processing to get extract them. We might have gotten relative pitch perception and part od what is music as a byproduct. Anecdata for this: Try determining the existence and intervals of notes when the higher note is an octave or an octave and a fifth above the first one (1st and 2nd overtone). Depending on the instrument this can be quite hard. Disclaimer: These are my interpretations / theories, but since I'm not working in this field, the literature might tell a different story.
chmod600 5y ago
A lot of optical illusions seem to play with relative color, so are we really so good at identifying absolute color?
lmilcin 5y ago
We can't identify colors accurately either. As various paradoxical pictures show. Color is something created inside our brain using context information (additional information about the scene). Gray can become black or white depending on what is around, and so other colors can change. Photography is my hobby and I have a small project with idea of making photos interesting solely by manipulating context to change meaning of color in the photo.
patrakov 5y ago
The summary says that the timbre plays an important role in recognizing the notes. I partially agree with this observation, but on the piano, there might be something else than the timbre. Some years ago, I played the "perfect pitch" flash game (http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.swf http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.sw... , still playable if you download the swf and then submit it to https://ruffle.rs/demo/ https://ruffle.rs/demo/ as a local file). Even though I am not a musician, I quickly learned to identify the notes on the medium difficulty level, and often guessed the first note in the session correctly. BUT, I did not only use the pitch to guess the note. In that particular game, the pre-recorded sounds of the piano notes show some non-even volume envelope, or some other way they change their sound over time, unique for each note. So I learned that a "meow-meow-meow" must be an E, and a note that acquires some rattle at the end must be a D. I even reported that as a bug - only to get an email that a piano does sound like that. Of course this knowledge is useless for pure tones, or short-enough notes that are not given a chance to "meow" or to rattle, or, in fact, for anything else than this game.
hkopp 5y ago
Ich you are interested in that kind of stuff, you may want to check out Rick Beato on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato I never expected that one could process music so effortlessly, until I saw some of his videos. E.g., in some of his videos, he listens to a melody once and can then immediately play it on guitar or piano. If you want to dip your toes, I recommend starting with videos of the "What makes this song great" series.

131 points by mzs 5y ago

>They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have: Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum. Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article. I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes. I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative pitch and chord theory. I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20. There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords.

jacquesm 5y ago
You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect. > I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20. But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that one random note and getting it to within some tolerance. > I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else.
- dhosek 5y ago
  The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered—I had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on organ.)
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with other instruments. There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing. A great piece of open source software for anybody that is even remotely serious about this: http://piano-tuner.org/ http://piano-tuner.org/
- poetaster 5y ago
  The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on sax.
- psychometry 5y ago
  > That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else. Counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier True musical genius and child prodigy but also a skilled performer and composer. History also tells of impressive feats by composers like Mozart and Rachmaninoff.

kqr 5y ago

What fascinates me about this topic is that both "absolute pitch" and "absolute colour recognition" is essentially cultural. We are born with perfect pitch but lose it when we don't use it. How our culture uses and names colour determines which we can perceive absolutely. The point is they're more similar than they seem.

itronitron 5y ago
There are also individual differences in how people perceive color (not just how they label them), even among those who are not color blind.
jacquesm 5y ago
> We are born with perfect pitch I know there are some studies on this but it's far from conclusive enough to state this without any further qualifiers. I suppose you are indirectly referring to the study referenced in this article? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford

srcreigh 5y ago

The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training. Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to determine exact rgb values of a color. What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is something deeper there.

Grustaf 5y ago
> Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training. That's about timbre, not pitch.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  What is known as timbre is technically the degree to which certain harmonics are present or not. The most interesting case of this is the missing fundamental, which we apparently re-create in our heads to hear it even when it isn't really present! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental This really threw my for a loop while building my mp3->midi convertor.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    I know what timbre is, that's my point. The difference between a violin and a piano is not about frequency.
    - ogma 5y ago
      And their point is that timbre is determined by the intensity of the overtones, which are frequencies.
- srcreigh 5y ago
  That's my point. I believe red vs blue is more like violin vs voice than A440 vs Exyz.

jacquesm 5y ago

I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any random note. So identification without some kind of extra mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to develop that skill because it would be very useful. There are some interesting websites for this: https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval

a9h74j 5y ago
Rick Beato on YT tells stories of musicians realizing that they are losing their perfect pitch. Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
- leoc 5y ago
  Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 . Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
- slaymaker1907 5y ago
  It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing). They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I. Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of work in transcription because unless the piece is doing something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest of it can usually be inferred.

zwieback 5y ago

One of the papers quoted by this paper is something I always wondered about: how can anyone have absolute pitch when you can detune your intrument slightly, e.g. if the Oboe gives the A and everyone tunes to that there's no guarantee that it's 440. Not everyone picks 440 for A anyway so really absolute pitch has a basic cultural reference. Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds with some exposure.

jacquesm 5y ago
Or they find it extremely annoying. I once played a piece with notes that were hanging just below or above their 'true' pitch and then slowly home in on it and the listener could not stand it and asked for it to be switched off. If you want to test yourself against it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM Enjoy :)
SeanLuke 5y ago
I have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is basically rounding the frequency to the nearest pitch in your resolution. As a pianist, my resolution is more or less half of a semitone, so I can tell that a note is off, but it doesn't get really annoying until it's so off that it's close to rounding to the next note. This resolution differs from person to person, mostly based on how they use it. I had a piano tuner visit my house yesterday as it so happens and his resolution was to about 10 cents. It was amazing.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  I had some fun with my piano tuner to 'check' his tuning using a stroboscope for each individual string (not a choir) after he was done and it was quite amazing to see how accurate he was. And what blows me away is how fast an experienced tuner can work, what would take me hours - and with tremendous fatigue in hearing afterwards - takes him 1/2 hour and with much better results.
- zwieback 5y ago
  Do you think that over time you could "re-tune" yourself to different pitches, e.g. if you listened to a ton of music that's detuned by half a semitone that eventually you'd think that that's the new normal? Or maybe it's something that gets hardwired at a young age and then you're stuck with it?

jacobolus 5y ago

We can’t identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in isolation is just as difficult. (Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs. color identification, because the physical mechanisms and resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)

jacquesm 5y ago
Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.
- jacobolus 5y ago
  You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone. It’s when you start trying to distinguish the same type of sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless trained, ideally from a young age).
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of course that only works for the range that I can whistle.
  - slaymaker1907 5y ago
    Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes. However, this is much more difficult if not nearly impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre changes can even differ between two semitones depending on the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st position.

Hoasi 5y ago

Some people can identify music notes as well as colour. One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another. Early training works wonder for music. Colours are everywhere, and most people can see, whereas most people don't train to recognize individual notes. That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians. Most people can agree that the sky is blue. However, a trained painter may be able to see much more nuance.

Grustaf 5y ago
> One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another. Sure, but most people can reliably and predictably name some dozen colours. > That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians. If people in general had had perfect pitch, music might have looked different from today. Absolute pitch would probably have been an important feature. The reason it isn't important is precisely because most people can't perceive it.
mywittyname 5y ago
There is a training aspect to identifying color as well. People from cultures without the name for a color group have difficulty identifying a color as distinct without a name for such group. Heck, even people from the same cultures will disagree on the classification of the same color experienced in the same situation. Remember the dress controversy a while back? People couldn't agree whether or not it was black & blue or white & gold.

Grustaf 5y ago

Without having read the link, one obvious answer is that colour vision helps us tell what plants are ripe, but detecting absolute frequencies probably has little survival value.

toast0 5y ago
A shared understanding of what colors are what helps us communicate as well. Of course, some of that is reinforcing, but I would never tell people I'm at the house where the windchime rings about a middle C; but I would tell them I've got a white fence and a red door.

dhosek 5y ago

I had the “misfortune” of having a friend in high school who was preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, that time), he was sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago's “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” by playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then repeating the process. My take away from this was that this was something that either you could or couldn’t do and there was no in-between. Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7 days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for rehearsals.¹ By the end of the process, I was transcribing straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head. So, it is a learnable experience. But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case with a CI. ——— 1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music at rehearsal.

jacquesm 5y ago
What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment of music.
- smegger001 5y ago
  i wonder how long until they can match average default human hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the peripheral auditory system. If we were to exceed human hearing would people then get implants without a medical need?

kazinator 5y ago

We do not identify colors well. The eye is receptive to three colors, that's it. We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics). We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put them side by side, you generally find that they are totally different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all directions. When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch, but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves. Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also, regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man, woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered. Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a" versus a slightly lower "a".

utexaspunk 5y ago
>We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics). Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  I don't think polarity has anything to do with this. The idea is that we can't distinguish at all between two independent light waves, one at ~600nm (red) and one at ~540nm (green), vs a single light wave at ~580nm (yellow).
twelvechairs 5y ago
Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as long as they fall on the cones similarly. Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not. Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4 is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are constructed culturally. The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different purposes.

pessimizer 5y ago

Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities, each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other, filtering out effects due to changing light sources and qualities. That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at filtering out common timbres. I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.

jacquesm 5y ago
Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer). Your characterization is not in line with how things actually work. > I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position. I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  > Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer). But isn't the result a curve that can be expressed as the simple superposition of waves? That simply can't be done for vision. (edit: without breaking time by encoding scanlines - which is just serializing it.) > I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano. I'd take it. I'd imagine it'd be as easy to train somebody to recognize 12 pitches from a particular piano in a particular room as it would to train someone on sine waves. But my point was it'd be easier to train them on either than on pitch in general, from many different instruments with different timbres.

akomtu 5y ago

I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer. It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.

jacquesm 5y ago
Harmonics and base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed string have a completely different shape, the first is going to decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes of vibration.
- nyanpasu64 5y ago
  "Base wave form" (ignoring transients and such) doesn't matter for humans, and how a wave is perceived by humans is determined by the set of harmonics it contains.
  - poetaster 5y ago
    And modulating the string on a cello to harmonize with a reed is extraordinarily rich in harmonics.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Fair enough, the waveform is the relative strength of the harmonics. But it's a convenient short-cut to 'the whole of the relative strength of each harmonic as compared to the fundamental, as well as which harmonics are present'. A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a pure sinewave, square wave and so on.

gerbilly 5y ago

Who says we can identify colours well? Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly opened my eyes, pun intended. As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the skill unfold. Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as distinct as different people's voices. The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...) I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another level. I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even imagine until one begins to acquire them. I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I can sort of see what that must be like.

ThomPete 5y ago
you can learn relative pitch not absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is only possible before 3 years old or something like that.
- dylan604 5y ago
  you keep replying with this like it is absolute. why do you feel so strongly about this "fact"?
  - dekhn 5y ago
    This is, in fact, current mainstream scientific position. There is a lot of distinction in abilities between absolute and relative. What I personally experienced is there are some individuals who can identify specific notes down to the unit frequency (I played a 439Hz tone, the person said "Uh you're a hertz short" and I fixed the bug in my program). That level of ability is generally believed to be not learnable after the brain loses a certain amount of plasticicity. Continuing from my own experience, people who do not have absolute pitch at that level can improve their skills in pitch detection including: identifying intervals, identifying octave, identifying common notes in an octave, and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes can improve their pitch detection somewhat. Whta is rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch gaining perfect absolute pitch after growing up, regardless of the amount of training.

mkr-hn 5y ago

The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other drawbacks. Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4

swayvil 5y ago

As for the "Why". Speaking as a guy who meditates. We usually don't actually perceive stuff. Sights, sounds, thoughts, smells. What we perceive is a reaction to the actual perception. Or a reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Down that chain a bit. Ending, more or less, with an idea. Those reactions are like a fog between you and the actual perception. When we concentrate, or meditate, or otherwise get a clearer, closer look at the perception, we see it in an uncommon way. We see the "truer" form. And much that was hidden becomes evident. This is the main power of the artist, musician, athlete, scientist.

akomtu 5y ago
There's no shortage of casually meditating "gurus" here who confuse their opinion with wisdom. It would be more honest to preface such "revelations" with a humble "such and such book says that..."
- swayvil 5y ago
  You seem to be accusing me of either arrogance or plagiarism.

The_rationalist 5y ago

There is a drug that allow perfect pitch to be learned past early childhood https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...

jancsika 5y ago

> Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening expertise of most people. Isn't naming CSS colors also beyond the visual expertise of most people? Granted there are more CSS colors than there are keys on a piano. Still-- give me a color scheme with 80 distinct colors and I'll give you poor scores of test subjects.

watwut 5y ago

Significant proportion of population is color blind to some extend. The rest sux about identifying colors too, just somewhat less.

poetaster 5y ago

No one has mentioned microtonak music. The breadth of perception on the continuum becomes more similar between sight and sound when you discriminate more. Think the carnatic system. Or Harry Partch. Or the oud. Modal music in microtunings gets very colourful.

twirlock 5y ago

Perfect absolute pitch would not be convenient for certain types of creativity, e.g. improv. It's not conducive to an understanding of modality.

pjdorrell 5y ago

Some observations: * The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our ears is absolute. * Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to calculate relative pitch. * Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical" skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the musical quality of music. Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as an "amazing" skill. But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should be amazed by is relative pitch perception. My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical function. It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a deep rumbling sound.

TheOtherHobbes 5y ago

We're terrible at identifying colours, because colour is context dependent. Which makes it easy to create colour illusions like these: http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled conditions. No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers, commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such - minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.

TaupeRanger 5y ago

The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think you'd see very similar performance. Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.

yesenadam 5y ago

Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite seeing them all your life. Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just know what the interval is. Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by, you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc. Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to hear.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
>musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome different limitations. Every instrument only has so many notes it can play. There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the neck on each string. Simple and not an actual musical exercise. It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest beginners before they even have much musical material under their belt to even practice or rehearse. If you are not already playing every note of your instrument every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have been missing. They've been missing you.
mannykannot 5y ago
Here's an interesting quote on the utility of perfect pitch outside of music: "Absolute pitch is too fine a form of categorisation," she said. "If that is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear. If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we couldn't understand that 'happy birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man or a woman, is the same word." https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford (an article originally linked to by jacquesm.) Also, perfect pitch is apparently much more common among native speakers of tonal languages.

layer8 5y ago

On the other hand, we can’t see color intervals and chords.

ltbarcly3 5y ago

Didn't read, but isn't it obvious? - We have several chemicals in our retina's that respond to specific frequencies of light according to some curve. They are calibrated. There is no such calibrated mechanism for how you detect sounds. - We actually suck at identifying colors. Every 5 year old has seen the 'shadow' optical illusion where two parts of a picture are exactly the same color and they look totally different.

adyer07 5y ago

The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me - it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate relative color, not absolute color. Learning to look at an apple and see warmer/cooler bits of red, for example. As the article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in between. There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson, mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.

laurieg 5y ago

I recently learnt to differentiate notes in a scale using an app[1]. Basically, you listen to a few chords for musical context and then you hear a note and have to choose which note it as. When I started I couldn't do it at all. After a few weeks I was able to tell which note I was hearing pretty reliably. I think the analogy to colours is absolutely correct. There's no calculation in my brain when I hear one these notes. I just hear it and think "That's a third". It feels exactly looking at a colour and thinking "That's red". The fact that the identification is not a conscious thought leads me to believe that learning notes by relating them songs and musical phrases you know is probably not the best way to do it. Note: this is not learning absolute pitch/perfect pitch. It's 'just' relative pitch, but having gone from not having that ability the change was quite large and quick. [1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fet.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fe...

flyingcircus3 5y ago

I've found that the only unteachable component of perfect pitch is the ability to internalize music in tune. If you can do this, you have perfect pitch. The ability to identify the note, or intervals, or the components of chords is all done through mnemonic devices.

mhh__ 5y ago

Memorising pitches as Colour (or concepts, to be less sycophantic to the title) can actually be a good way of "feeling" the notes of a scale. Perfect pitch is the one thing that really makes me jealous in music. Unless you have a lot of tuition, technique requires a certain amount of luck in terms of finding the right habits and obsessions, but I can work out how I would improve - pitch however is totally off the table unless you have from an early age.

fjfaase 5y ago

I know an artist who has worked on creating colour palettes (for a living, through commissions and art works) and creating light art works, who claims that most people are very poor at precieving colours because our brains so quickly adapt to changing lightning conditions. His conclusion is that there is no such thing as absolute colour perception.

sirwitti 5y ago

I studied musicology with a focus on perception of sound. As far as I understand it, we evolved to be able to perceive distinct colors because it's relevant to distinguish surfaces from another visually. For auditory sensations on the other hand rough pitch estimations sufficed but relations between pitches (think of hearing 2 pitches. you probably won't know the exact note or frequency but have learned to recognize patterns in the relations between them - e.g. musical intervals) which comes down to periodicities in the signal turned out to be a lot more relevant or helpful. As to why we needed to be able to relate pitches to one another: Without looking up literature on the topic I hypothezise that it might be a byproduct of the way we calculate a single perceived pitch out of a harmonic frequency spectrum. When hearing a note that is not a sinus wave in the frequency spectrum there are at least parts of the multiples of the base frequency. Since we do something like frequency analysis by detecting periodicities our brain tries to determine a single pitch for the signal, which it does by calculating the base frequency of harmonic spectrum (this works even of only part of the harmonics are availabe.). In order to do that the processing needs to treat the base frequency differently than the overtones. Since overtones roughly correlate with western musical intervals and we needed the processing to get extract them. We might have gotten relative pitch perception and part od what is music as a byproduct. Anecdata for this: Try determining the existence and intervals of notes when the higher note is an octave or an octave and a fifth above the first one (1st and 2nd overtone). Depending on the instrument this can be quite hard. Disclaimer: These are my interpretations / theories, but since I'm not working in this field, the literature might tell a different story.

chmod600 5y ago

A lot of optical illusions seem to play with relative color, so are we really so good at identifying absolute color?

lmilcin 5y ago

We can't identify colors accurately either. As various paradoxical pictures show. Color is something created inside our brain using context information (additional information about the scene). Gray can become black or white depending on what is around, and so other colors can change. Photography is my hobby and I have a small project with idea of making photos interesting solely by manipulating context to change meaning of color in the photo.

patrakov 5y ago

The summary says that the timbre plays an important role in recognizing the notes. I partially agree with this observation, but on the piano, there might be something else than the timbre. Some years ago, I played the "perfect pitch" flash game (http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.swf http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.sw... , still playable if you download the swf and then submit it to https://ruffle.rs/demo/ https://ruffle.rs/demo/ as a local file). Even though I am not a musician, I quickly learned to identify the notes on the medium difficulty level, and often guessed the first note in the session correctly. BUT, I did not only use the pitch to guess the note. In that particular game, the pre-recorded sounds of the piano notes show some non-even volume envelope, or some other way they change their sound over time, unique for each note. So I learned that a "meow-meow-meow" must be an E, and a note that acquires some rattle at the end must be a D. I even reported that as a bug - only to get an email that a piano does sound like that. Of course this knowledge is useless for pure tones, or short-enough notes that are not given a chance to "meow" or to rattle, or, in fact, for anything else than this game.

hkopp 5y ago

Ich you are interested in that kind of stuff, you may want to check out Rick Beato on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato I never expected that one could process music so effortlessly, until I saw some of his videos. E.g., in some of his videos, he listens to a melody once and can then immediately play it on guitar or piano. If you want to dip your toes, I recommend starting with videos of the "What makes this song great" series.