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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 cer

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.
    - gerbilly 5y ago
      > rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch This seems like hair splitting to me. You even refute yourself by including the word _rarely_.
      - dekhn 5y ago
        human physiology is not self-consistent, nor is the language I use to communicate those facts./
    - dylan604 5y ago
      > and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes And a musician probably couldn't tell the difference between = vs == or & vs &&. If you don't recognize that someone that spends all of their time doing something will be better at that something compared to someone else, then there's just a large disconnect. Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of a concept.
      - chatbot2 5y ago
        As someone who studied music throughout school and played for quite some time, there is clearly be something innate about perfect pitch. I think a good allegory is people who can multiply giant numbers in their heads easily (previously referred to as "idiot savants" though that term sounds ridiculous now). While the rest of us can certainly practice and improve our multiplication skills, we'll always be missing some connection that allows them to do so effortlessly. The link below is a study which shows that the distribution of pitch recognition among the general populace is bimodal (you have to scroll down a bit). This matches with my experience that, irrespective of practice, people either have it or they don't. https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795 https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
      - mannykannot 5y ago
        You do not have to experience the difference between = vs == or & vs && in order to learn it - in fact, that would be a difficult way to go about it. This is an issue in the interminable debate over Frank Jackson's "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment, where anti-materialists seem to think that if you cannot learn what it is like to learn what seeing colors is like from a science book, then materialism must be false. Presumably they would hold the same position over learning perfect pitch. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
- gerbilly 5y ago
  Prove it. This is just argument by assertion.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    He's not in your pay.
    - gerbilly 5y ago
      Yeah, and I don't have to take his word for it either.
  - tralarpa 5y ago
    Maybe 3, maybe 6, maybe 9. Different sources give different numbers. But "there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring [Absolute Pitch]" (from the Valproate paper).
- empeyot 5y ago
  "In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child passes about six years old [...]. (Although [...] there are exceptions of sort [...])" in Prof. Anders Ericsson's book "Peak" in which he presents results from his research area of expert performance. He also quotes a published study in which childs aged 2 to 6 consistently were taught perfect pitch: "A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the 'chord identification method'"
  - MandieD 5y ago
    I wonder how much overlap there is with the ability to easily gain native-level proficiency in a language. We’re raising our child bilingual, partially because no one should learn German from me (started in college, speak well enough to get through life, but everyone knows I’m a native English speaker), but I’d be ok with our child learning English from my husband, as he speaks well enough that Americans think he’s British. His mother, who also learned in high school and university, taught him for a maternity leave year at age 4, then left it to the school system, which didn’t expose him to English again until he was 10. His younger sister does not speak English nearly as well as he does. I’m quite sure that early exposure is why he doesn’t have a German-sounding accent when speaking English.
  - hirvi74 5y ago
    You can apparently get Perfect Pitch from the medication Valporate, according to some study years back. Though, I do not recall how effective it was. It was significant enough to be detected though.
    - ThomPete 5y ago
      I would challenge that claim. Also a quick google search on meditation and perfect shows mostly claims and speculation nothing conclusive.
      - hirvi74 5y ago
        I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ For whatever it's worth, I heard about this like a decade ago, and nothing more has come from it, so perhaps you are correct in that the connection is speculative (the study only had 24 participants and more research needs to be conducted with large samples), but it's an interesting study none the less.
- swalls 5y ago
  Absolute pitch may not be possible to learn as an adult, but what they're describing is having good pitch memory, which is different from absolute/perfect pitch, and is definitely something you can develop with a bit of practice.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    pitch interval training is different yes, I can do that to a certain extent but absolute pitch is very different.
- kristiandupont 5y ago
  There is some indication that valproic acid makes it possible for adults, though (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/)
mr_toad 5y ago
> Who says we can identify colours well? We don’t really. We have three receptors that respond to different wavelengths (plus black and white) and our brains stitch together a composite image. Animals can have fewer or more receptors, and see more or fewer colours. Just like a person who is red-green colourblind, and sees them as the ‘same’, some animals and even rare people can see different colours where we see only one. We are all effectively colourblind to some extent.

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.
  - gerbilly 5y ago
    > rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch This seems like hair splitting to me. You even refute yourself by including the word _rarely_.
    - dekhn 5y ago
      human physiology is not self-consistent, nor is the language I use to communicate those facts./
  - dylan604 5y ago
    > and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes And a musician probably couldn't tell the difference between = vs == or & vs &&. If you don't recognize that someone that spends all of their time doing something will be better at that something compared to someone else, then there's just a large disconnect. Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of a concept.
    - chatbot2 5y ago
      As someone who studied music throughout school and played for quite some time, there is clearly be something innate about perfect pitch. I think a good allegory is people who can multiply giant numbers in their heads easily (previously referred to as "idiot savants" though that term sounds ridiculous now). While the rest of us can certainly practice and improve our multiplication skills, we'll always be missing some connection that allows them to do so effortlessly. The link below is a study which shows that the distribution of pitch recognition among the general populace is bimodal (you have to scroll down a bit). This matches with my experience that, irrespective of practice, people either have it or they don't. https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795 https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
    - mannykannot 5y ago
      You do not have to experience the difference between = vs == or & vs && in order to learn it - in fact, that would be a difficult way to go about it. This is an issue in the interminable debate over Frank Jackson's "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment, where anti-materialists seem to think that if you cannot learn what it is like to learn what seeing colors is like from a science book, then materialism must be false. Presumably they would hold the same position over learning perfect pitch. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
gerbilly 5y ago
Prove it. This is just argument by assertion.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  He's not in your pay.
  - gerbilly 5y ago
    Yeah, and I don't have to take his word for it either.
- tralarpa 5y ago
  Maybe 3, maybe 6, maybe 9. Different sources give different numbers. But "there are no known cases of an adult successfully acquiring [Absolute Pitch]" (from the Valproate paper).
empeyot 5y ago
"In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child passes about six years old [...]. (Although [...] there are exceptions of sort [...])" in Prof. Anders Ericsson's book "Peak" in which he presents results from his research area of expert performance. He also quotes a published study in which childs aged 2 to 6 consistently were taught perfect pitch: "A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the 'chord identification method'"
- MandieD 5y ago
  I wonder how much overlap there is with the ability to easily gain native-level proficiency in a language. We’re raising our child bilingual, partially because no one should learn German from me (started in college, speak well enough to get through life, but everyone knows I’m a native English speaker), but I’d be ok with our child learning English from my husband, as he speaks well enough that Americans think he’s British. His mother, who also learned in high school and university, taught him for a maternity leave year at age 4, then left it to the school system, which didn’t expose him to English again until he was 10. His younger sister does not speak English nearly as well as he does. I’m quite sure that early exposure is why he doesn’t have a German-sounding accent when speaking English.
- hirvi74 5y ago
  You can apparently get Perfect Pitch from the medication Valporate, according to some study years back. Though, I do not recall how effective it was. It was significant enough to be detected though.
  - ThomPete 5y ago
    I would challenge that claim. Also a quick google search on meditation and perfect shows mostly claims and speculation nothing conclusive.
    - hirvi74 5y ago
      I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ For whatever it's worth, I heard about this like a decade ago, and nothing more has come from it, so perhaps you are correct in that the connection is speculative (the study only had 24 participants and more research needs to be conducted with large samples), but it's an interesting study none the less.
swalls 5y ago
Absolute pitch may not be possible to learn as an adult, but what they're describing is having good pitch memory, which is different from absolute/perfect pitch, and is definitely something you can develop with a bit of practice.
- ThomPete 5y ago
  pitch interval training is different yes, I can do that to a certain extent but absolute pitch is very different.
kristiandupont 5y ago
There is some indication that valproic acid makes it possible for adults, though (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/)

mr_toad 5y ago

> Who says we can identify colours well? We don’t really. We have three receptors that respond to different wavelengths (plus black and white) and our brains stitch together a composite image. Animals can have fewer or more receptors, and see more or fewer colours. Just like a person who is red-green colourblind, and sees them as the ‘same’, some animals and even rare people can see different colours where we see only one. We are all effectively colourblind to some extent.