7 ms·

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 indi

by 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?
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function of the various components of the cochlear channel getting stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear win already.
- jbarham 5y ago
  I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Oh that's great to hear. I'm slowly losing my hearing and to know that there are solutions that work even with music now is super good. Do you happen to know how many channels your implant has and whether it has any particular tricks up its sleeve? Maybe make & model?
    - jbarham 5y ago
      I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing the number of channels doesn't have a significant difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real smarts are in the external processor, which is custom programmed or "mapped" for each recipient. I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and the batteries last longer. Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally a last resort since implanting them will usually remove any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies. Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf. Hope that helps.
DennisP 5y ago
Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without anything to compare it with?
lhorie 5y ago
> I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.
slaymaker1907 5y ago
What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch. While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones. In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as people get older and because it works better in ensembles since A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard. Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment). Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments since it feels wrong.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch after the age of 3.
  - The_rationalist 5y ago
    There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
  - vdqtp3 5y ago
    Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3 other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?
    - dsego 5y ago
      Probably Rick Beato.
      - 5y ago
dylan604 5y ago
I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it, and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes. Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
asimpletune 5y ago
That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always people who didn't really put any time into music that would talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100% accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff all the time. Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it. In general, I would say that people who don't really do music are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please. And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the character of the sound.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is that he has fun making music (which he does). There is a similar thing about music theory where people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all that much about a particular piece of theory until they need it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the theory behind it.
jeffwass 5y ago
Thanks for this information, I’ve been recently going through some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what they are able to pick out. Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ? Also which implant model do you feel is best for music listenability? My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She’s still getting used to the new way of listening post-implantation.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ackbar03 5y ago
I'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty badass
davidjade 5y ago
I can relate to this as something I never thought possible either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr) I've made progress that almost feels magical. I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some prior music education as a child) but never had a solid grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out of thin air at all. For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them. Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms. It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks. It absolutely can be a learned skill. Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book covers they are anything but that. https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-training-book-1a/p/00-3112/ https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-train... There are 5 books in the series.
seg_lol 5y ago
I had an experience where for a couple weeks I could playback symphonic music in my head and be able to control the loudness of individual sections, repeat passages, etc. with the same fidelity as a lived experience. I knew it was meme-erex but it sounded live. It was a transformative experience and it gave me a small glimpse of what it would be like to have another order of magnitude of brain capability. The brain can be a wonderful place. How much of you seeing your friend transcribe music with such ease, enabled you to achieve the same thing? I was thinking the other day about people being "first" at something and how once that happens, hundreds of others follow, almost as if they needed permission by the person being first. When know something is possible, that often removes the biggest barrier for doing a thing.

by dhosek 5y ago

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?
- jacquesm 5y ago
  That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function of the various components of the cochlear channel getting stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear win already.
jbarham 5y ago
I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Oh that's great to hear. I'm slowly losing my hearing and to know that there are solutions that work even with music now is super good. Do you happen to know how many channels your implant has and whether it has any particular tricks up its sleeve? Maybe make & model?
  - jbarham 5y ago
    I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing the number of channels doesn't have a significant difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real smarts are in the external processor, which is custom programmed or "mapped" for each recipient. I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and the batteries last longer. Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally a last resort since implanting them will usually remove any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies. Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf. Hope that helps.

DennisP 5y ago

Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without anything to compare it with?

lhorie 5y ago

> I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.

slaymaker1907 5y ago

What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch. While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones. In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as people get older and because it works better in ensembles since A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard. Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment). Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments since it feels wrong.

ThomPete 5y ago
i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch after the age of 3.
- The_rationalist 5y ago
  There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
- vdqtp3 5y ago
  Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3 other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?
  - dsego 5y ago
    Probably Rick Beato.
    - 5y ago

dylan604 5y ago

I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it, and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes. Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.

asimpletune 5y ago

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always people who didn't really put any time into music that would talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100% accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff all the time. Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it. In general, I would say that people who don't really do music are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please. And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the character of the sound.

jacquesm 5y ago
This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is that he has fun making music (which he does). There is a similar thing about music theory where people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all that much about a particular piece of theory until they need it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the theory behind it.

jeffwass 5y ago

Thanks for this information, I’ve been recently going through some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what they are able to pick out. Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ? Also which implant model do you feel is best for music listenability? My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She’s still getting used to the new way of listening post-implantation.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ackbar03 5y ago

I'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty badass

davidjade 5y ago

I can relate to this as something I never thought possible either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr) I've made progress that almost feels magical. I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some prior music education as a child) but never had a solid grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out of thin air at all. For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them. Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms. It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks. It absolutely can be a learned skill. Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book covers they are anything but that. https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-training-book-1a/p/00-3112/ https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-train... There are 5 books in the series.

seg_lol 5y ago

I had an experience where for a couple weeks I could playback symphonic music in my head and be able to control the loudness of individual sections, repeat passages, etc. with the same fidelity as a lived experience. I knew it was meme-erex but it sounded live. It was a transformative experience and it gave me a small glimpse of what it would be like to have another order of magnitude of brain capability. The brain can be a wonderful place. How much of you seeing your friend transcribe music with such ease, enabled you to achieve the same thing? I was thinking the other day about people being "first" at something and how once that happens, hundreds of others follow, almost as if they needed permission by the person being first. When know something is possible, that often removes the biggest barrier for doing a thing.