19 ms·

Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

• flerovium 3y ago
  I want to read more IRB reports for studies "Children successfully trained..."
• pachico 3y ago
  Aged 2-6? Am I the only one thinking "leave them kids alone!"?
  • hansoolo 3y ago
    No, you aren't alone. It sounds so weird and elitist...
  • aoeusnth1 3y ago
    Kids 2-6 learn all kinds of things. Why not music?
• raincole 3y ago
  While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
  • TheRealPomax 3y ago
    Equal temperament strikes again.
  • SoftTalker 3y ago
    It can be useful, but it's not necessary to have perfect pitch to be a musician. Relative pitch (the ability to identify notes relative to each other) can be learned and is good enough.
  • canjobear 3y ago
    My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is that it’s more an annoyance than anything. They’re always hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch.
    • raincole 3y ago
      How much "resolution" do their ears have? Like can someone with absolute pitch tell whether an instrument is in 12-ET or just intonation without a reference?
      • hammyhavoc 3y ago
        Microtonality is a rabbit hole you'll likely enjoy.
      • colanderman 3y ago
        Intonation is a matter of relative pitch. I have good relative pitch, and can distinguish intonation to a degree. People with absolute pitch can nonetheless distinguish pitch with better than semitone accuracy. This is why it's often a hindrance, because if an ensemble is tuned to a slightly different reference, it is quite noticeable to them.
        • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
          I've wondered if it's possible to train exact, frequency-based pitch, instead of this relative tuning-based absolute pitch. I wonder if that would be as discordant to the trained ear when switching to another tuning.
      • giraffe_lady 3y ago
        Perfect pitch is a simplification, it's not really binary like you either have it or don't. People have varying ability, practice, and speed at identifying a note relative to a reference, and "perfect" is how we describe being past some threshold. When we talk about perfect pitch we're usually assuming 12-tet tuned to A440 but you correctly homed in on the "problem" with perfect pitch. Is that C a little sharp, or did they just tune to A446 for some reason? Just intonation, microtonal scales, there are a lot of notes out there. How do you know they're "wrong" and not just trying to play the note that sounds out of tune to your ear. "Perfect" has to be established against some intention, we just usually assume 12-tet A440. Anyway the ability is at least somewhat a matter of practice and training, so you can develop it against any consistent reference, regardless of the tuning or intonation system.
  • crabkin 3y ago
    I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any problem appreciating what they like.
    • florbo 3y ago
      Heh, I'm that friend in my circle. I certainly don't bash anyone's music preferences but everyone has to know why a song/artist "just isn't my thing," and I get the "snob" label. Ah well. But I get where your friend is coming from. When I hear something off pitch, for whatever reason, it's just distracting and pure cacophony.
  • wrs 3y ago
    As an amateur musician and composer who doesn’t have it, seems like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I don’t know what else. You must still be able to “switch modes” to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn’t even hear musical structures the same way, because aside from timbre they’re all relative.
    • pclmulqdq 3y ago
      I used to moonlight as a harpsichord tuner, and I didn't know anyone in the field or any piano tuners with perfect pitch. As I understand it, it doesn't help at all because perfect pitch is not precise enough to tell 440 Hz from 440.1 Hz for example, while you can do that easily with a tuning fork (once you learn how to listen for the beats). On the flipside, unequal temperaments - which are frequently used if you are a harpsichord tuner - are hell for people with perfect pitch who listen to only equally-tempered music. When you "merely" have relative pitch, unequal temperaments can actually be nice.
    • vlovich123 3y ago
      My mom says it’s helpful for her as a music teacher. It was annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she’d be cooking in the kitchen and I’d be playing in the other room and she’d call out when I made a mistake. But that’s probably just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I’m sure perfect pitch is only a small part of it but it helps.
      • sidibe 3y ago
        It seems like hearing someone make a mistake, especially on a piano (vs a trombone or violin), isn't related at all to perfect pitch... unless the mistake is playing the whole piece in the wrong key
        • vlovich123 3y ago
          That’s fair. I could also play any note on the piano and she would play the exact same note back.
  • recursive 3y ago
    It's very useful for a session musician. You could pick up a song without hunting for the key.
    • SeanLuke 3y ago
      I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
      • wrs 3y ago
        Ah, this answers my question above about “switching modes” to relative. Sounds like that’s not a thing. But can you hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you’re not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing interval math all the time!
        • SeanLuke 3y ago
          I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and people learn to write down the chords based on relative position. But I and another student with perfect pitch would ace the class by just writing down the chords based on what they actually were. This went on until he started playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#. Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone except for us two, who were totally hosed. When I went to my parent's church, the organist would spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank just between us two, and he knew that I was the only other person in the room who knew what he had done to me.
      • Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
        It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the sound that's coming out.
  • 49531 3y ago
    Nah you're right, intervals ear training will always give you more bang for your buck than absolute pitch, and even though absolute pitch is trainable, I don't know any serious musicians who have put effort into it. This is why I think folks think absolute pitch is innate (it isn't): some folks just have a knack for it, and those who don't quickly learn that the effort to build the skill isn't worth the payoff.
  • slmjkdbtl 3y ago
    Not that useful if you have very good relative pitch. One advantage is you can walk in a jam and start playing from bar 1, instead of having to figure out which key they're in. However if you have good relative pitch you can also figure it out within 10 seconds.
• KerrAvon 3y ago
  A summary of the teaching method, which dates back to apparently 1991 https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html
• j7ake 3y ago
  Anybody got a link to the article ? Or can summarise what the chord identification strategy is ?
  • lkschubert8 3y ago
    https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html these seems to describe it.
  • Willson50 3y ago
    https://sci-hub.ru/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0305735612463948 https://sci-hub.ru/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...
• BearOso 3y ago
  Most kids achieve level, upright pitch at ages 2-3. It's the yaw and roll you have to worry about. Those are literally all over the place.
  • tinco 3y ago
    If your kid can achieve absolute pitch in geometric space, like.. epsg:4978? That would be epic. Your kid could always tell you what coordinates you're at if you're standing at a known angle.
    • windowshopping 3y ago
      What does "epsg:4978" mean?
      • rightbyte 3y ago
        A longer name for WGS 84.
        • tinco 3y ago
          Sort of but not exactly. The way I'd explain it as someone who's had to deal with a lot but has not been formally trained in it is that WGS 84 is a system for reasoning about the earth spatially. EPSG:4978 and its more commonly used sister EPSG:4326 are standardized ways of writing down coordinates relative to the WGS84 model of the earth. The "joke" in my comment is that EPSG:4978 coordinates are written down in distance in meters from the center of the earth, as a sort of absolute position that's nice to use in maths. In contrast to EPSG:4326 where coordinates are written down (usually in degrees) relative to the equator and a line through some place in England over an idealized representation of the surface of the earth.
  • racedude 3y ago
    Wrong kind of pitch. Read the article.
    • 3y ago
• irq 3y ago
  Can we get a (2012) added to the headline here?
• SoftTalker 3y ago
  If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, not just what's on the top 40 radio. Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes if we had a language codified that way.
  • hgsgm 3y ago
    Most kids are exposed to language a lot in their childhood, they don't automatically learn to produce "perfect words".
    • pclmulqdq 3y ago
      This is more like learning phonemes. It significantly helps language acquisition to expose your children to a lot of different word sounds. Similarly, if you only play top 40 pop music or baroque music, your child likely won't be able to acquire perfect pitch.
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      They do, most kids learn to say words perfectly imitating what they hear, including regional accents. Of course some people have speech impediments but it's a minority.
  • medler 3y ago
    I am very skeptical that a child can learn perfect pitch merely by listening to classical music.
• rahimnathwani 3y ago
  It sounds like the system is based on a few mins of audio flashcards each day. Has anyone here tried this?
• Tade0 3y ago
  I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern? When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand. It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in identifying pitch, because the distortion would just sound differently depending on pitch - I associated it with a few notes and could roughly identify them - especially the lower ones (E, D and C# specifically). The effect faded over time and now I can't do it any more. In any case, non-newtonian fluids exhibit such distortion and the body is full of them(most notably blood). I wonder if they play any role in this?
  • 1letterunixname 3y ago
    I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, confirmed by tuning fork. From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number of engines it had without looking. My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, and it sounds like water is perpetually in my left ear.
    • tomcam 3y ago
      That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and friends and it’s a hard thing to explain with no one else notices. For me however it’s a largely positive experience. I am hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed digital music. On the other hand, musicians playing or singing out of tune, gives me a visceral response, and I have been down to leave clubs when a musician is having a slightly off night.
      • ChainOfFools 3y ago
        do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising) misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point where artifacts from music compression bother me that much. I don't have an official testing result to prove or define this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice things in the ambient sound environment that most others either don't notice or tune out, and this has at least as many downsides as benefits. If someone is a loud chewer, or drink slurper, it's as if I can hear every single bit of muscle and conjunctiva flexing and saliva sloshing around inside their jaw, and the glorp glorp sound of their swallows, if we're both in an otherwise quiet room. Or if there is a car alarm going off or dog barking three blocks away, sounds other people appear to be completely unaware of or passively filter out can sometimes drive me into quiet boiling stress that is completely irrational yet impossible to reason myself out of, and i just have to leave.
• troupe 3y ago
  If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. They practice by associating a different colored flag with each chord.
  • cvg 3y ago
    Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have this same color, key association.
    • cosarara 3y ago
      But not every synesthetic person sees the same colors for every key, right?
      • altairprime 3y ago
        I have a step in my fashion work where I pause and consider what the colors I’m selecting will look and feel like to a normal person. Converting back and forth between [optimistic-seaglass-springtime] and “teal” isn’t very accurate, but I’m certainly accustomed to it. I’m going to try this technique soon now that I know about it; as I’m already color sensitive to pitch, I suspect the value will be in training that sensitivity rather than memorizing their hues.
• adamgordonbell 3y ago
  Many people have absolute pitch for certain well known sounds. Who can't tell if a sine wave sound is higher or lower than the emergency broadcast tone. That tone is 1000 hz. So, that is absolute pitch, just low resolution. I'm assuming if you can add in a lot of reference points that you know well, you could get better resolution.
• tomcam 3y ago
  My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening to an exhaust pipe. I also had a classmate who could identify any pitch to the exact frequency, so A443 versus A440, for example. Of course we tested him.
  • birdyrooster 3y ago
    I remember watching a documentary about this savant and his ability was perfect pitch and now you are totally ruining the story.
    • tomcam 3y ago
      Lol I hate myself! But I’m sure the doc will be more interesting to you than my teacher’s 1920s kindergarten tales. I found her fascinating though.
  • dekhn 3y ago
    In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86 code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office mate that I could make my computer play A440. He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost everything was out of tune.
    • tomcam 3y ago
      Love that story! > He said he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost everything was out of tune. I very much feel I would share that feeling if I had it.
  • srcreigh 3y ago
• vajrabum 3y ago
  Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. Also, conductors frequently have perfect pitch, probably because a strong musical memory and being able to sight sing on pitch from a score are valuable and depend to a certain extent on perfect pitch. See here for a lot more. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory Perfect pitch is also apparently more common in people who speak tonal languages like Mandarin.
  • mhh__ 3y ago
    Dylan is very impressive but I find there to be something disturbing in that dynamic
    • freedomben 3y ago
      What do you find disturbing in that dynamic?
      • bobsmooth 3y ago
        It's something you commonly see in videos with YouTubers showing off their kids. The adult is trying to make an engaging video and the kid just looks bored or shy around the camera.
  • vnorilo 3y ago
    Perfect pitch is by no means a requirement for musicians, although it is more common than in the general population, even more so for conductors. But intonation is equally easy/hard for absolute and relative ears. Some tasks, like transposition, can require more practice for people with perfect pitch. Source: lived experience from my doctorate in music from Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.
• AlbertCory 3y ago
  To me, the ultimate test of perfect pitch is: "can you whistle (or hum) an F# below middle C?" (or some other random note)
  • analog31 3y ago
    Just tested myself. Pass. However, I played a rehearsal and two concerts this week. I know that my pitch dissipates after a period of time. As a kid, I could tune my cello by ear, but I noticed after coming back from a long family vacation, I had lost that ability. It came back quickly, but still, it means that I don't really have perfect pitch.
• bjoli 3y ago
  I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.
  • vnorilo 3y ago
    Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.
    • muxator 3y ago
      Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility. I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.
      • cormacrelf 3y ago
        It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.
        • Tor3 3y ago
          There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano. As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.
• captainmuon 3y ago
  I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.)
• illwrks 3y ago
  Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are).
• deleted 3y ago
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• somenewaccount1 3y ago
  What is absolute pitch?
• amelius 3y ago
  Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch? And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?
  • Paianni 3y ago
    It makes composition easier. By that I mean, I can mentally simulate music and pick out the sequence of tones to write it down in sheet music or a DAW piano roll, and I don't need to 'calibrate' my pitch beforehand.
  • flappyeagle 3y ago
    We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".
    • eternauta3k 3y ago
      Kind of, your eyes are doing automatic white balance.
    • stefncb 3y ago
      We can tell if something is red or blue, but red and blue are huge spectra. That's like telling the first third of a piano keyboard from the second. Even I can do it. Absolute pitch is more like telling exactly what wavelength it is (to a certain degree of course). Most people can't do that.
    • OscarCunningham 3y ago
      I can hear a note and say whether it's high, low, or in the middle. But perfect pitch further requires a resolution of 1 semitone.
    • opan 3y ago
      Have you never argued over colors before? I wouldn't trust eyes to be that accurate or objective.
• intrasight 3y ago
  Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which I'm hearing all the fucking time.
  • pb060 3y ago
    Why do you hear a persistent 60hz sound? Could it be linked to the AC frequency? I couldn't find anything about it online.
    • intrasight 3y ago
      I think I'm just too tuned into the background hum of our AC network.
• tzs 3y ago
  Is absolute pitch something you would actually want? From what I’ve read as people with absolute pitch get into late middle age in many their reference drifts and they start to perceive music that is in tune as being out of tune. For some this makes it hard to continue to enjoy music. People with relative pitch can learn specific notes well enough to be able to recognize them given the constraint that the note is being played roughly in tune on an instrument tuned to the common tunings of the music they are familiar with, and they can learn to recognize intervals. This allows them with practice to identify notes almost as fast as someone with absolute pitch, and allows them to do all the practical musical things people with absolute pitch can do.
  • 49531 3y ago
    Yea, absolute pitch is not very valuable for musicians. Interval training is much more common, where you train on the differences between notes (maj 3rd, minor 6th etc.). Good interval skills make improvisation and composition much easier. If you know the key you're in having absolute pitch doesn't really add anything, and if you're lacking in understanding intervals it won't make up for it.
• deleted 3y ago
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• tpmx 3y ago
  Electronic frequency counters are pretty accurate and cheap these days; I don't think we necessarily need to use human children for this task.
• joanne123 3y ago
  [flagged]
• adverbly 3y ago
  Is there software available for training this?
• ouid 3y ago
  I have tinnitus, so i only need perfect relative pitch.
• elecush 3y ago
  Lately I have a theory about perfect pitch training as an 18+ year old human, I think we will achieve it (my friend and I) via the following: Using Tuesdays to practice E chord songs, using Thursdays to practice C# minor chord songs. One day play only E songs, one day play only C#m songs, do this several weeks, pick 2 new chords for 2 fresh days, repeat.
• 8bitsrule 3y ago
  Interval-training is a lot more useful. Regardless of what key you're in, particularly if you're not playing (or don't know how to play) from sheet music. E.g. given two notes, what is the distance between them in semitones. Once you can recognize any interval then, given a pitch, you can identify the other notes in any chord (major, minor, etc.) it's a part of. Useful for tuning instruments (e.g. guitar). Useful for understanding chord notation (charts), and what chords are being used (progressions). Useful for quickly figuring out all the notes in a melody. (Especially one you want to remember.) Useful for deciding what -scale- is being used (dorian, phrygian, pentatonic, etc.)
• b800h 3y ago
  You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ in our church is a quarter-tone sharp. The goal should be very very very good relative pitch.
  • dehrmann 3y ago
    The other issue I've heard is it shift when you get old. I imagine everything sounding broken. Luckily, perfect-enough relative pitch is known to be very trainable in adults.
• slmjkdbtl 3y ago
  I was forced to learn piano when I was 6, really hated it and ended in 2 years. When I really got into music in high school and started playing guitar it's an amazing feeling to discover I actually have perfect pitch. However the perfect pitch I have is an inferior one, I sometimes even miss a note by a half step, curious if someone is the same.
• kqr 3y ago
  There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch". After the first note is known, the two are mostly indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can, once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch don't even need to be told what that first note is. (This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance, whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the same.)
• blindriver 3y ago
  My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect pitch.
• overgard 3y ago
  I've heard that some people with absolute pitch lose it as they age (50's and 60's), but they tend to lose it in a weird way. Apparently, they still have absolute pitch in a sense, but it just kind of shifts over time so it's a little offset. It'd be like if you could still see color, but all the sudden your blues started to look purple or something like that. Curious if anyone with absolute pitch can confirm.
• levitate 3y ago
  Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B' instead.
  • kombinatorix 3y ago
    Not necessarily. In Germany and probably also other parts of the world B is called H and B flat is called B.
  • ketzu 3y ago
    For funny historical reasons, the english tone B is called H in some countries, especially northern and central europe. (English B-flat is called B there) Wherever that figure is from.
• crispinb 3y ago
  I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names and sound. But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear I'll nearly always start on the right note. What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect it could be developed it were a priority.
• Engineering-MD 3y ago
  Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up during a critical period in early life. However, there was a fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
  • humanizersequel 3y ago
    >sodium valproate Wow, thanks for the link. Hopefully this doesn't leak too much medical information, but I used to take valproate for epilepsy and the time when I was on it almost directly corresponds to an unexpected and sharp rise in my musical ability/accomplishment. How much of this is attributable to the drug, I don't know — high schoolers discover they're good at something and throw themselves into it all the time — but I had piddled around the typical childhood music lessons a bunch as a child without demonstrating any remarkable talent. Certainly my trajectory was unexpected, this is very interesting.
• fuzzfactor 3y ago
  About this time I always "begin" to wonder how helpful would it really be for someone born with perfect pitch today at A=440 if they would have instead been born during a previous century when the recognized standard pitch was seldom A=440? I would have to imagine it would drive some of them nuts.
  • ryeights 3y ago
    I don’t think that’s how perfect pitch works, it might be more accurately described as tone memory. For example I’ve “memorized” the sound of standard C=262Hz and can work to other notes from there. But I imagine if C=259Hz instead it would have made no difference to my ability to recall it.
    • fuzzfactor 3y ago
      I'm with you on this actually. I don't care if the acoustic piano is C=259 or the full 262. The guitar and bass (and electronic keyboard!) just need to tune to it either way, a good singer can then follow and everything will sound fine regardless. But if people were truly born with perfect pitch you would expect them to be stuck at one particular reference frequency. And conversely if they only gained outstanding pitch reference during certain formative years, you would expect that would have been relative to the prevailing external reference they were exposed to at the time. So if some isolated child had great pitch but unfortunately was only exposed formatively to a non-standard reference they might be SOL if they could not adjust in later years to join a mainstream orchestra or something. In addition the agreed-upon reference frequencies have been a moving target over the long run. Perfect here may be more like perfect in a wide range of ways more so than really absolute. Some people sure can tune an instrument in isolation using no external reference and it will be a perfect A=440 even without the ability to identify notes by name, that seems to be very helpful right there.
• gcanyon 3y ago
  I've read that perfect pitch can be a burden later in life, because it wanders. So as an older person, you still have the notes in your head, but they're off by a little bit.
• fshbbdssbbgdd 3y ago
  One time in physics lab we had an experiment with tuning forks. I rung the fork, put it to my ear, did the “do re mi” song in my head and I unmistakably recognized that one of the notes matched. I told my lab partner, we looked it up and determined that I was correct. I don’t have much musical training, I’ve tried to learn an instrument a few times but never motived myself to practice.
• femto 3y ago
  A member of my family is an interesting case, in that he technically doesn't have perfect pitch, but does for all practical purposes. He has a clear memory of a particular note that he heard as a child and can recount that memory. Years later he is able to identify the pitch of anything by comparing it with that memory. He might think about it for a second or hum a note to himself, but invariably can identify the pitch without have to hear a reference (apart from the one in his head). He's got the best of both worlds, in that he doesn't get driven crazy by something being out of tune, but can accurately name a pitch without a reference. He's also been able to transpose on the fly from an early age.
  • dcsommer 3y ago
    The opening F# upward octave in Paganini's La Campanella is that pitch memory for me. It's fairly well seared in my brain from violin practice. It's very similar for me where I remember the F# pitch and then work out the relationship to the heard tone. However, I am worse with non-orchestral instruments. I think I "cheat" by remembering The timbre of the instrument in certain ranges. I'm most accurate with my own instrument (violin). The less I practice though, the harder it is getting to remember the pitch. I always figured I was somewhere between relative and perfect pitch. I'm curious what this training could do for adult musicians.
• Psychlist 3y ago
  People can have absolute/exception memory for other things too. I dated a woman who could look at a bit of cloth and say "that's the same colour as..." and be right every time. Even when she hadn't seen the other item of clothing for months. It made shopping with her somewhat less painful because she wasn't constantly swapping things just to look at the colours. Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.
• deleted 3y ago
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• emckay 3y ago
  I couldn't find any apps that use this method to try it with my 3 y/o, so I started working on my own here: https://eguchi.app https://eguchi.app . I'd love feedback if anyone is interested in trying it!
• koinedad 3y ago
  I do not have perfect pitch but the concept of pitch memory is something I’ve experienced. I’ll occasionally hear a chord or a pitch and then a song will also pop in my head. I started ear training in college and it was pretty rough but has come a long way
• aoeusnth1 3y ago
  I taught my son perfect pitch. AMA.
  • tomtom1337 3y ago
    How did you do it? How old was he?
    • aoeusnth1 3y ago
      He was two. I used color stickers on a keyboard, using the We Hear and Play system: http://www.wehearandplay.com/ http://www.wehearandplay.com/ The Japanese method is based on chord identification, but I found that note identification worked directly. Play a note, point out a toy of that color. Kid brings a toy, play the note for the color. Kid plays a note, you bring a toy. Color association is the tool that lets you connect the music to everyday things and make up all kinds of natural games that interact with the kid’s interests.
      • tomtom1337 3y ago
        Very interesting! I'll try that when mine turns two!
• tinideiznaimnou 3y ago
  What's with nerddom's fascination with absolute pitch? I've already made several lifetimes' worth of ruckus in my few and am continually only barely learning to listen. Is it because for so many of us music lessons have proved a more affordable form of childcare than the presence of a compassionate, listening human being? If you ask me, it's pretty fucking neat if you're someone who from some early years is already fluent in the universal language of 440Hz. But chief, what do we do with the 438Hz ninjas from the other village then? And there surely must be a solution to many of existentialism's pointless crises to be found in elucidating a universal theory of how brains pick up language, music, (hello tonal languages), maths, and all other myriad traditional symbol systems using the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms. But every day this spring, hearing the birds outside teaches me new unique facets of the sense of hearing. (It's a mad racket out there - there are the birds that I could possibly learn to name, and then there is this one that sounds totally out there - nuff said). Funny testament of how we seek to cultivate in others what we fail to cultivate in ourselves. The committee for meta-ethics is mildly piffed at un(ac)countable replications of the natural phenomenon that, yes, young children can be taught symbol systems of arbitrary complexity up to maximum sensory perception (and, if they're anything like us, they'll even manage to pick up a bunch of metaphysical spooks on the way to the oceanic moment of unlearning it all and interfacing more directly with "real reality" beyond their nervous system lol) Thankfully, if they're anything like us, by middle age they will have reverted back to monkeys.
• rendall 3y ago
  This video convinced me that adults cannot develop or train perfect pitch. "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch" by Rick Beato https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM
• jongjong 3y ago
  I'm in my 30s and have had almost 0 experience in music before. I bought my toddler a xylophone a few months ago and I started playing random keys (just trying to improvise a melody on the spot) every day or so for less than an hour each time... Then after about a month, I found that I could teach myself to play pretty much any piece of music from memory in only a few minutes (national anthem level complexity). My improvised melodies have been getting better as well. The xylophone helps a lot because each note has a different color and so I now associate each color with a particular sound. I tend to think of notes as (left to right) going from sad to happy. There are 2 notes I use as a reference which are 'emotionally stable'; one on the left (sad) side and one on the right (happy) side. On the left side, there is a blue note which I consider to be the last one in the 'sad' spectrum just before it gets happy... And on the right side, there is a yellow note which is at the end of the 'happy' spectrum just before the mood goes into a kind of mania.
• okko 3y ago
  [dead]
• someweirdperson 3y ago
  Really slow (impossible) to train, if some understanding/training for realtive pitch is already present. Try with one single note, training session is over, because at that moment the brain switches to relative mode, and refuses to process absoltute information. A couple (max) of individual stimulations per day isn't sufficient to learn.
• AbsoluteCabbage 3y ago
  Perfect pitch can be acquired by anyone. It’s the ability to distinguish notes by their unique sound characteristic much like seeing colors of the rainbow. It’s akin to “color hearing”.