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I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory",

I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command. But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist) could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds. It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent.

vnorilo 4y ago
I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it lose focus by a semitone or three. Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just shrug and accept the new A4.
- klipt 4y ago
  > Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediately after but also months later. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-pitch-may-not-be-absolute-after-all.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...
  - humanizersequel 4y ago
    Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch being detuned "months later."
  - maroonblazer 4y ago
    A good friend of mine in high school had perfect pitch. We played music together and he would complain about his 'anchor' of pitch getting thrown off if/when we wouldn't tune to A 440Hz but instead something else slightly up or down from A440.
    - smeej 4y ago
      My choir director finds it easier to transpose organ pieces on the fly than "set the organ to a different key" and just play the keys as written for that reason: There's too much dissonance between what his fingers know they're playing and what his ears are hearing. He was one of those little kids who had absolute pitch from the start, though, and he definitely views it as a two-edged sword!
- nostrademons 4y ago
  I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.) I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I don't have perfect pitch.)
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago
> ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. > had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting curves — I wonder what would happen if you tried to train with the specific goal of extending that window, rather than just noting what your window is during other training. Maybe it's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect pitch in this way? Especially in your case, since you already have data that your window of 5-10 minutes could extend to 1.5 hours, it seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you'd spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this — e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week, then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc...
- nostrademons 4y ago
  We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to developing better relative pitch and being able to name intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch, because you'll almost always have a reference note available. It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the psych and music departments got together though. If I were still in college I'd suggest it. :-)
samstave 4y ago
I wish I was in this class?? LINK????
- nostrademons 4y ago
  It was Tonal Harmony and Counterpoint. Unless you're at the specific college I went to, it wouldn't do you any good, but an equivalent course is offered at most universities and liberal arts colleges. FWIW I found it well worth it. My mom had been encouraging me to take something far outside my major (physics at the time, then I switched to CS), and was suggesting Art History. I couldn't make Art History work with my schedule, but I took this music theory class and it was great.
samstave 4y ago
Wow, but YES, but NO at the same time :: there are the certain skills which can be "forgot" but can be picked up {"like riding a bike"}
echelon 4y ago
> It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent. This is a function of time, not age. Adults can (though seldom) learn languages to perfect fluency with zero accent. It's all a matter of how much time and immersion you put into it. Adults are mostly too busy and have too many responsibilities. Children have all the time in the world.
- kaba0 4y ago
  The brain’s ability to learn does change by age, as an extreme example people who didn’t learn to speak until like 8, will never be able to.
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
I've never heard of pitch memory before, but this makes total sense. When things make noise around me, I sometimes remember songs that have that note. My favourite one was my motorised stand-up desk which when going up would sound the same as Beyonce's Crazy in Love - and when I think about it right now, I hear the pitch, the song, and that motor in my head.
wyager 4y ago
(Neuro-)Physiologically, it's not clear to me why the sense of pitch should decohere. It's not like the cochlea is physically unstable, and the hartley-ish-transformed data the brain is pulling out of the cochlea should be quite repeatable. I wonder if the brain converts the cochlear data into some other representation that is not (inherently) stable, and those with perfect pitch have or develop a more stable version than most other people.
- kaba0 4y ago
  Absolute data points rarely make sense, they are rigid and inflexible, which is not good against an always changing environment. You should be able to recognize the same scene both with a clear sky and a partly cloudy one, and it’s hardly important that this tiger had a deeper voice, the important part to recognize is the fact that there is a tiger. But even something as trivial as movement coordination is constantly updated by feedback mechanisms, like training with weights and dropping them in the end will temporarily make the movements “weird”.
AbsoluteCabbage 4y ago
That’s not what perfect pitch is. Perfect pitch is “color hearing”- recognizing the unique sound properties of each not along the scale, much in the same way colors of the rainbow can be distinguished. It can also be trained for.

vnorilo 4y ago

I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it lose focus by a semitone or three. Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just shrug and accept the new A4.

klipt 4y ago
> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediately after but also months later. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-pitch-may-not-be-absolute-after-all.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...
- humanizersequel 4y ago
  Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch being detuned "months later."
- maroonblazer 4y ago
  A good friend of mine in high school had perfect pitch. We played music together and he would complain about his 'anchor' of pitch getting thrown off if/when we wouldn't tune to A 440Hz but instead something else slightly up or down from A440.
  - smeej 4y ago
    My choir director finds it easier to transpose organ pieces on the fly than "set the organ to a different key" and just play the keys as written for that reason: There's too much dissonance between what his fingers know they're playing and what his ears are hearing. He was one of those little kids who had absolute pitch from the start, though, and he definitely views it as a two-edged sword!
nostrademons 4y ago
I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.) I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I don't have perfect pitch.)

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 4y ago

> ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. > had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting curves — I wonder what would happen if you tried to train with the specific goal of extending that window, rather than just noting what your window is during other training. Maybe it's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect pitch in this way? Especially in your case, since you already have data that your window of 5-10 minutes could extend to 1.5 hours, it seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you'd spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this — e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week, then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc...

nostrademons 4y ago
We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to developing better relative pitch and being able to name intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch, because you'll almost always have a reference note available. It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the psych and music departments got together though. If I were still in college I'd suggest it. :-)

samstave 4y ago

I wish I was in this class?? LINK????

nostrademons 4y ago
It was Tonal Harmony and Counterpoint. Unless you're at the specific college I went to, it wouldn't do you any good, but an equivalent course is offered at most universities and liberal arts colleges. FWIW I found it well worth it. My mom had been encouraging me to take something far outside my major (physics at the time, then I switched to CS), and was suggesting Art History. I couldn't make Art History work with my schedule, but I took this music theory class and it was great.

samstave 4y ago

Wow, but YES, but NO at the same time :: there are the certain skills which can be "forgot" but can be picked up {"like riding a bike"}

echelon 4y ago

> It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent. This is a function of time, not age. Adults can (though seldom) learn languages to perfect fluency with zero accent. It's all a matter of how much time and immersion you put into it. Adults are mostly too busy and have too many responsibilities. Children have all the time in the world.

kaba0 4y ago
The brain’s ability to learn does change by age, as an extreme example people who didn’t learn to speak until like 8, will never be able to.

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

I've never heard of pitch memory before, but this makes total sense. When things make noise around me, I sometimes remember songs that have that note. My favourite one was my motorised stand-up desk which when going up would sound the same as Beyonce's Crazy in Love - and when I think about it right now, I hear the pitch, the song, and that motor in my head.

wyager 4y ago

(Neuro-)Physiologically, it's not clear to me why the sense of pitch should decohere. It's not like the cochlea is physically unstable, and the hartley-ish-transformed data the brain is pulling out of the cochlea should be quite repeatable. I wonder if the brain converts the cochlear data into some other representation that is not (inherently) stable, and those with perfect pitch have or develop a more stable version than most other people.

kaba0 4y ago
Absolute data points rarely make sense, they are rigid and inflexible, which is not good against an always changing environment. You should be able to recognize the same scene both with a clear sky and a partly cloudy one, and it’s hardly important that this tiger had a deeper voice, the important part to recognize is the fact that there is a tiger. But even something as trivial as movement coordination is constantly updated by feedback mechanisms, like training with weights and dropping them in the end will temporarily make the movements “weird”.

AbsoluteCabbage 4y ago

That’s not what perfect pitch is. Perfect pitch is “color hearing”- recognizing the unique sound properties of each not along the scale, much in the same way colors of the rainbow can be distinguished. It can also be trained for.