5 ms·

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 com

• 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.
      • khazhoux 5y ago
        Heh. You'll enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fuXCBJLKc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fuXCBJLKc
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      It is possible, but it requires some native talent and a painful amount of practice. https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-be-possible-some-adults https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-... https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch-in-30-days-at-24-years-old-7e2e78b8c26b https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch...
      • benzible 5y ago
        Rick Beato disagrees, although he puts the limit at 6 yo, not 3... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM
    • CogniDizz 5y ago
      There is also the valproic acid study where the window of the critical period appeared to be reopened in a two week study of 24 adult individuals. Valproic acid is used as an anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer, thought to enhance brain plasticity, and (unfortunately) can cause big problems in livers. When there is greater understanding of the pathways affected there could be safer options for re-entering the critical period after the window has closed. (edit: age of critical window discussed in the study here - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.00102/full https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...)
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• jimhefferon 5y ago
  > perfect relative pitch is completely learnable Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    I've put some links in a comment below to help with pitch and interval training.
  • klodolph 5y ago
    Practice transcribing music. There are also simple ear training applications you can get for your phone. Relative pitch is a fairly simple concept, so there's a proliferation of apps that teach it, at least to a basic level. It's also common to have a library of songs in your head that start off with each interval. Everything from "Für Elise" for the minor second, to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for an octave.
  • sharkjacobs 5y ago
    I used to have a music teacher who taught me to practice by associating the openings of common songs with each interval I've forgotten most of them now but the Jaws theme "duh-duh-duh-duh" is a minor 2nd, Twinkle Twinkle little star is a perfect 5th, and "my bon-" of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th
  • Bud 5y ago
    The same way it's taught if you go to music school. Practice. Have music played to you, and write it down. Start with very short pitch sequences; this will require you, of course, to learn to recognize intervals accurately. Then move on to longer and more complex sequences. Lather, rinse, repeat.
  • pvarangot 5y ago
    If a beginners point of view is useful, let me tell you I'm using Ear Trainer on iOS and was using Complete Ear Training on Android, I've only been doing it for like six or eight months with a break in-between. I went from nothing to being able to recognize m2, M2, m3, M3, P4 and P5 upwards and I'm working on m3/M3 downwards and harmonically now, usually with 85%/90% accuracy. I can also tell major from minor 7th chords apart with like 70% accuracy and tell the major and minor scale and their pentatonics apart upwards and downwards with above 80%. All this with different root notes, same root note is way easier. If you are interested in transcribing I would recommend a teacher. My girlfriend can arrange live on piano and has insanely good absolute pitch and she helped me on moments of extreme confusion and frustration that I wouldn't have gotten out of on my own. Also I have a tuner app on iOS that plays a reference pitch and also tells you what interval you sang, it's called TonalEnergy Tuner. I didn't need to sing until I got into learning downwards intervals, and I think I would never would be able to learn those without being able to sing do re mi in tune. Singing for some reason really helps you "imagine" and remember tunes. On the same amount of time I am now very seldom but sometimes able to transcribe very simple synth lead melodies to my synthesizer, as I was also learning basic sound design in parallel to this. One year ago I didn't even know you could learn absolute pitch as an adult, I'm 37. I'm completely mind blown by the fact I learnt what I learnt so far and sometimes I just don't believe it happened and am scared it will just like completely go away or something because it's like a very alien thing for me to be able to do. I don't even know what my objective is but it's probably being able to musicalize things in my mind and being able to jam with friends.
• cameronh90 5y ago
  So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted, even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too long. This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
  • gavinray 5y ago
    Time-stretching algorithms like Elastique/ZTX make up for the change in time by compensating and keeping a neutral pitch AFAIK, in most audio/visual software tools used by professionals, this is baked in and so you'd have to purposefully pitch-shift it up and make it noticeable for this to happen. IE, when I mess around in REAPER, and my song is set to 110BPM, listening to/dragging in a 170BPM loop keeps the exact same pitch (nearly, it's quite amazing) as the original it's just stretch/compressed to fit into 110BPM.
    • cameronh90 5y ago
      While true, it is somewhat tangential to what I'm talking about. The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.
  • CheezeIt 5y ago
    Huh, I just tested out tThe Simpsons and yeah, I got the key dead on.
    • jcheng 5y ago
      Wow!! I just tried it too and nailed it--I certainly wasn’t expecting that!
  • shannifin 5y ago
    This supports the article's assessment that "it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum." Long term memory for the key or opening note of a particular song seems to be a more widespread skill than naming the pitch class of a pitch without such context. From wikipedia: "People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_related_to_musical_context https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re... See also: "The Levitin Effect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI
• tbihl 5y ago
  > because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time. Not just highly skilled ones. I just checked, and I still have my A-flat 2 reference note that I've been carrying around since 2013, having not used it for at least 5 years and barely doing any singing/piano these days.
  • tstrimple 5y ago
    How do you know? I don't mean this in a challenging way. Just that I'm completely ignorant to how one would even test these things.
    • strogonoff 5y ago
      To test whether your memory of a pitch is correct, you can just sing a note then listen to a reference sound in close succession. Absolute pitch ability is not required to tell whether pitches match.
    • jimmaswell 5y ago
      Can't you just listen to a song you know well in your head, and be aware what the notes are?
      • alfonsodev 5y ago
        the reference note needs to be listened in your ear to check wether the note you are imagining matches the reality, if it does then you can confidently (if you have trained it) find the intervals.
    • tbihl 5y ago
      It was the first note in a vocal concert, no accompaniment, no cueing, and I remember that it's A flat. I just googled A flat 2 and sang what I was thinking of. When the recording started, it matched my pitch.
• bitwize 5y ago
  I've been told I have fantastic relative pitch (but not perfect pitch) and it's exactly as you describe. For me, it's the theme to Super Mario Bros. I know what that sounds like in my head, and I know also that it's in C major. Taking the root of that will get me within epsilon of middle C, just from my head (I can also take the E or G from the first six notes), and then I can reckon whatever note I'm listening to on the C scale. I suspect most instances of "perfect" pitch are this skill, honed to a much greater degree.
  • nefitty 5y ago
    Oh wow. This is an amazing life hack. I can hear the SMB song perfectly in my head, and now other sounds in my environment are clearly falling on one side or the other of that C. This is going to help a lot with my writing!
  • khazhoux 5y ago
    Nice one. Somehow I've never chosen a C reference. That's a good one. I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me" for D, E.
  • Akronymus 5y ago
    > I know what that sounds like in my head as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune? For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice approximating it.
    • taylodl 5y ago
      Really? That's fascinating to me because the music in my head is the actual music as if I were playing it off a CD. In fact I've learned many songs "by ear" just using the music in my head.
      • Akronymus 5y ago
        I must've overlooked your reply before, so apologies for answering so late. The only thing "in my head" is my voice. So no images, smell, touch, music, and such. For context, I think I have aphantasia [1], altough not tested in a clinical setting (MRI or something like that) Of course I am willing to answer any questions you have, hopefully in a timely manner this time. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
• noduerme 5y ago
  Fascinating remark. I don't have perfect (abs) pitch and never heard of the relative variety. But I grew up playing piano, mostly on my own time, which means I'm extremely comfortable playing anything I hear in C, and just slightly slower at repeating things in A#. My brain has to transpose. But now I play pedal steel slide, and I have a trick to picking up any song quickly. I find the root chord of a song and intentionally forget what it was... so I'm not playing in F or A. I remap my brain at the start of that song to remember that tone as C. And then I can find everything without thinking about it. If I think "where's the 7th of C#" I'd have to do a few steps in my head. But once I've got the hands synced with an artificial idea of "C" I know exactly where my options are. So in a way it really may be better than perfect pitch, because I can remap a song's scale to a keyboard in my head and then strum one or two times between songs and "remap" the "C". I realize that makes me uh... hahah not Mozart. But it works to let me forget what I'm playing and just play.
  • hashhar 5y ago
    This sounds very similar to how DAW (digital audio workstation) software has features to "transpose" pitch. You essentially just move one of the notes to where you want it to be and all other notes get transposed relative to it.
  • BeniBoy 5y ago
    Same experience here with a pedal steel. That's why I am now pushing my bandmates to adopt the Nashville Notation System which only deals in relative position of chords in the scale[1]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System
    • noduerme 5y ago
      Hah! I love that there's another PSG player on HN who gets this right away... that's awesome. I never heard of this system specifically... I feel like a singer holding up 3, 4 or 5 fingers has been the way I've been cued lots of times to changes in a song I barely knew, without me even thinking that was a system. I bet they didn't either. Separately, I know zero music theory... but PSG really was what let my brain get comfortable with a 3rd of a 4th being a 6th that was two frets down from the 5th of the root... I think probably engaging your knees and ankles in reaching for the physical positions in time builds almost like a muscle memory of the musical relationships... like the kind of control you get driving a manual car... but only if you already have the tones you're looking for in your head, and you know where you're going. PSG is the most mindbending realtime puzzle to play... so it makes sense that players need tricks to know where to go from a certain position (especially if you find yourself stuck in one when you jump into a song)
• skulk 5y ago
  I know a vocalist who has perfect relative pitch who can pretend she has perfect absolute pitch because she knows the lowest note she can (quietly) sing, giving her a solid reference point.