14 ms·

Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

171 points by yuppiemephisto 2y ago

adastra22 2y ago
As someone clinically tone deaf (and no desire to change), this comments section is wild. Y’all experience sound very differently than me.
yuppiemephisto 2y ago
[flagged]
- angryjim 2y ago
  Your mileage may vary. BTW, is 10,000 hours not considered pseudoscience?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    It's absolutely pseudoscience. 10k hours doing what? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors? Veritasium has a really good video on the subject [0], with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic—the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible—and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
  - qwertytyyuu 2y ago
    10k hours of deliberate practise to achieve “mastery” as more of a heuristic than science
  - adamgordonbell 2y ago
    It's simplification of real research on expertise in a sound bite.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
zero-sharp 2y ago
You've had musical training since you were 5? And you say "Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn’t think so, because I couldn’t name notes for any instrument other than the clarinet." Okay, so then this doesn't seem like an article written for the average musician (person).
Rochus 2y ago
> I learned perfect pitch as an adult. Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect pitch would be good for.
- dhosek 2y ago
  I had a friend in high school who had amazing pitch recognition. I still remember being at band camp and watching him with a cassette player and a stack of manuscript paper transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago a measure or two at a time. He’d play a bar of music, then write down all the parts. It really ruined me because I assumed this was a binary thing, you either had it or you didn’t and didn’t realize it could be learned until I eventually learned it.
  - Rochus 2y ago
    Perfect pitch is in no way necessary for this. Interval listening is sufficient. The additional benefit of perfect pitch would be, that your friend would know the basic key of the tune without first playing one note on the piano. For example, I don't have perfect pitch, but I can play along with any pop song immediately, without sheet music and without knowing the piece. I just have to press a few keys on the keyboard to find the root note.
- criddell 2y ago
  Or both. You don't have to choose one or the other and I think the two skills could be very complementary.
  - Rochus 2y ago
    With perfect pitch, you save yourself the five dollars for a tuning fork. In my forty years of experience as a musician, I have yet to encounter any other benefit.
linux_is_nice 2y ago
> By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences; I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch. > Don’t learn a non-C instrument I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.
- mdwhatcott 2y ago
  Yeah, this advice doesn't hold up--even the OP mentions learning the clarinet, which is a B-flat instrument. I also play the clarinet and developed the same ability to detect each note by its timbre. I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates, the back-pressure or resistance you feel while playing, that becomes associated with the timbre the longer you play.
  - linux_is_nice 2y ago
    As a clarinet player myself, I think it's an instrument that's pretty unique in just how different the timbres of each note are, like Bb or an open G.
    - mrob 2y ago
      Recorders also have big variation in timbre (and volume) with different notes.
  - dhruvrajvanshi 2y ago
    > I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing. In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an anchor.
- 2y ago
muglug 2y ago
I could write a similar article "lose perfect pitch in 15 years". My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440. And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.
droideqa 2y ago
Or you could just take depakote[0]. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
- drumttocs8 2y ago
  Honestly fascinating. Any first-hand experience?
  - hirvi74 2y ago
    I do not know anyone that has taken Depakote for the purpose of perfect pitch. The individuals that I have known have taken it for severe psychotic/mood disorders. From what I remember, it's not a fun time for the side-effects can be absolutely brutal.
- Aeglaecia 2y ago
  was waiting for the inevitable hdac inhibitor comment seeing as vorinostat was recently so often spruiked by a vested individual on reddit. to other readers, these are literally chemotherapy drugs that globally inhibit cell formation, albeit taken at much lower dosages than therapeutic.
w-m 2y ago
Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :) A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%. It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music! Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways. [0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0 [1]: https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps
- amatecha 2y ago
  I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard somehow fades, or something...
- zeta0134 2y ago
  This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear" after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in perfect clarity in the proper key. I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
123124dfasd 2y ago
This is more common than people thought. I don't remember who said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of All Star - Smash Mouth for example. Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.
laurieg 2y ago
Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages. As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much. One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before. Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
- dberst 2y ago
  I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two. Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work. Best of luck!!
rybosome 2y ago
I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than not: * aurally identify key signatures * aurally identify chords * sing a given note on command It wasn't until I was into my early twenties that I could do this. For me, the single biggest stepping stone was building the connection between what I could hear in my head from a song that I remember clearly with the underlying music theory. Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked: * Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor * The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor * Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A * Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat * Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor * etc. Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in "Comfortably Numb". Huh, The Beatles "Across The Universe" sounds tonally like "Eet" - I guess it is also in D-flat. A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
- jebarker 2y ago
  > A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs. This is gold. I similarly maintain lists of melodies that prominently feature certain intervals.
- dberst 2y ago
  I'd be happy to see any "songs all in the same key" type playlists if anyone wants to share one I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these
  - smitelli 2y ago
    Not a playlist, but I've always hit up Song Key Finder[1] when trying to figure out what songs might fit together for mashup-type purposes. They rank the songs by popularity within their user community. [1]: https://www.songkeyfinder.com/ https://www.songkeyfinder.com/
  - yaur 2y ago
    Not a playlist per se, but https://www.hooktheory.com/cheat-sheet/key-popularity https://www.hooktheory.com/cheat-sheet/key-popularity Has popular songs for each key and mode
folkrav 2y ago
I don't have perfect pitch, but I basically have a 440Hz sine embedded in my brain which I can use for tuning stuff and figure out the rest through relative pitch. Perfect pitch sounds actually extremely distracting as a listener...
- bluGill 2y ago
  In my city we tune to A=441 I have no idea why but when in Rome...
  - dhosek 2y ago
    It’s very much a regional thing where Europeans tend to tune higher than Americans, as I recall. A lot is going to be dictated by the pitch of the local church organ. Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      A440 was standardized in 1939. There was an earlier attempt to standardize on A435 in the late 1800s, but they specified a temperature uncomfortably cold, when you move something (I'm not sure what) tuned at A435 to a more comfortable room temperature you get close to A440, and from there a little rounding and we have A440. Before the 1850s every town had their own standard which was mostly based on whatever the A note of their organ was. Turning a pipe organ takes an expert hours and costs a lot of money so if it is in tune without you make everyone else tune their instrument to the organ. The tuning fork was invented in 1711, before then we didn't even have a way to move a tuning between downs - the act of transporting most instrument changes the tuning.
      - dhosek 2y ago
        There’s also a standard of using the metric system, but there are still plenty of backwards places that don‘t follow it. One of the instruments I play is flute and while there is some flexibility possible to adjust the pitch by moving the headjoint in or out, there is an idealized pitch for the best intonation.¹ Most student instruments are A440 but some intermediate and professional models are tuned to A442 or A444. ⸻ 1. Granted, the player’s technique also affects intonation so this is not insurmountable.
antegamisou 2y ago
As expected, another one of the many that conflates well trained relative pitch with absolute. Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days. All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable. However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to immediately [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of any pitch-producing entity (keyboard/string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish. Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days. All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2]. I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected. But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from. [1] https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
- 2y ago
mastercheif 2y ago
I have perfect pitch–your color analogy is exactly how I describe my bewilderment that it isn’t the default state for humans.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
analog31 2y ago
I had "temporarily perfect" pitch when I was younger, especially when I was regularly playing the cello. I could pick up my cello and tune it without a reference, and I could recognize a note or key that was being played. I kind of took it for granted. Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining. I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing. I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.
- mafuyu 2y ago
  I've often heard people say that "true" perfect pitch can only be accomplished with synesthesia, but I have no idea if it's true. Back when I played clarinet, I had decent relative pitch and I could ballpark a B-flat tuning note if I thought hard enough. That was enough to work my way to an absolute pitch, but it took a while. I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.
- atto 2y ago
  I can also do this, don't have perfect pitch, was also a cello player, and have a guess. Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches, and our brain can pattern match that more effectively than pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get pretty close. Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
- brilee 2y ago
  It sounds like you had something similar to what I had with the clarinet in middle school.
masspro 2y ago
I accidentally trained myself by playing with SimTunes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes> a lot as a kid. But I think it trained me to be slightly flat. Electronically perfect notes sound wrong, and I tune things down when that's an option. I wish I cared enough to try running SimTunes today and see if A was 440 Hz or not.
browningstreet 2y ago
Beato has a course for it. He says he used to have it but it has drifted over time. He also claims his young daughter has it now.
bluGill 2y ago
Someone introduce the author to microtunings. there is a whole - much more harmonic - world out there. Equal temperment is a harmonic disaster and it is time to end it. (there are advantages to equal temperment but harmony is lost)
- drivebyhooting 2y ago
  I’m not convinced. Share a microtonal piece that can stand up against something by Chopin or any other great composer.
  - bitwize 2y ago
    For that you will have to look outside the west. Consider traditional Arabic maqam music.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    With some effort you can find the microtonal chords Chopin was thinking of and prove it yourself. There are of course places where it isn't clear which chord Chopin was thinking of though, so it would be fun to hear different people do this assignment... To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you it. Such a person may not even exist today.
- brilee 2y ago
  Choral/string music is quite nice - the musicians have an opportunity to bend pitch as locally appropriate to make perfect intervals. I definitely did this when I was singing in a chorus. But piano is still my first love :)
- mrob 2y ago
  You can use equal temperament with any number of divisions of the octave (or other interval, e.g. Bohen-Pierce tuning's equal division of the "tritave" into 13). Some of these provide excellent approximations of common just intonation intervals, e.g. dividing the octave into 53 gives you fifths that are only 0.07 cents off the just interval, and all other intervals in standard 5-limit Western harmony within 1.5 cents of just. It's simpler to compose with than stacking frequency ratios and in practice sounds equally good.
vunderba 2y ago
It should be noted that a lot of people mistake relative pitch for perfect pitch. Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it. Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example. You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.
- brilee 2y ago
  > Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it. Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    I don't think anyone's gatekeeping it - it's important that you define something as it actually is otherwise it ceases to lose all meaning. (Cough fascism cough).
- Rochus 2y ago
  That's correct. Relative pitch gives you 99.9% of the benefits, with 0.1% remaining for perfect pitch.
- illwrks 2y ago
  Nothing but a random comment, but my daughter has near perfect pitch and it amazes me to no end. She can hear a note and 99% of the time tell you exactly what it is. She loves telling me when I'm off key in the car singing along to things. She's only just turned 11.
crtified 2y ago
Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform - there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the particular harmonic structures that they've trained their ear to, e.g. a particular instrument. And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner. Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Yeah - there has been some speculation that the additional overlaying of a sound (overtones, timbre variations, etc) can help someone who has absolute pitch - whereas even those with the ability can sometimes struggle with something more pure - like a sine wave.
ConspiracyFact 2y ago
I have...good pitch? If you play notes on a piano I will guess right significantly more often than I could by chance, and my misses will often be one note away. Not perfect pitch, and not useful in any event.
mrcptthrowaway 2y ago
20% to 30% of autistic people seem to have perfect pitch [1, 2]. Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3]. I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid). [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/how_many_of_you_have_perfectabsolute_pitch/?rdt=62255 https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/h... - not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best, this is way too high. [2] More sources talk about it, but can't seem to find it right now. I'm pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don't want to do the research. [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/
musicale 2y ago
The perfect pitch skill I admire the most is being able to count cycles/recognize/sing pitches by frequency and/or sing various types of temperament. Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.
propoganda 2y ago
Not a single Rick Beato mention? Come on guys you’re losing out on a massive circlejerk opportunity!
slmjkdbtl 2y ago
I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2 years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2 years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.
- criddell 2y ago
  My kids somehow have perfect pitch. They hear a microwave beep and can say "that's b-flat". They say it's the same as looking at some shoes and naming the color. From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.
thih9 2y ago
> Don’t learn a non-C instrument I didn’t expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.
dhosek 2y ago
The thing that really accelerated my pitch learning was choral singing (in particular, with a serious classically-oriented choir at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago). If you’re singing the notes, they really get internalized. At the peak of my skills, I was able to compose a fully harmonized melody on a walk and then play it on piano when I got home.
- trgn 2y ago
  I'm middle aged and looking for a new hobby, and for this reason alone I might take up singing, to be able to play by ear much more easily on my instrument (iso by trial and error, I get there eventually but it's not effortless). I'm held back by a sense of embarrassment when singing. I feel weird singing by myself (always have), let alone with others around. I don't have this same embarrassment making mistakes when playing an instrument. Any tips on how to help with that?
  - dhosek 2y ago
    I think it helped that I was a regular attendee at Mass before becoming a chorister so I had the advantage of years of singing in the congregation where you’re surrounded by people singing (or not) of various skill levels and it’s kind of expected that you sing around others. Most church choirs are pretty welcoming though and tend to be a bit desperate for male voices. Only the Cathedral choir had an audition process.¹ Beyond that, I think a big part of it is to just accept that you’ll be with other amateurs and you won’t be the only one who makes mistakes on occasion. ⸻ 1. The cathedral choir kind of spoiled me for choral singing though. In most church choirs, the accompanist will play choral parts one at a time for the singers to hear them. At Holy Name, they just played all four parts together and you had to hear your part in the chord.
    - trgn 2y ago
      great thx! biggest issue now is to relapse my lapsed status ;) > they just played all four parts together .. that sounds like baptism by fire
tzs 2y ago
Careful what you wish for. • Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts. • Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because their perfect pitch was now off and everything sounded wrong to them.
- bowsamic 2y ago
  Yeah I've also heard that it's more of an annoyance than it's worth, in fact I'm not really sure of anyone who has said it's a benefit in any way. It's just not really an aspect of music that people usually enjoy anyway. Naturally, music is engineered more to be relatively pitched rather than absolute
  - mrob 2y ago
    It's useful if you're singing a song that starts a cappella and has instruments join later. Admittedly, this is not common. Only example I can think of is The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
- mrob 2y ago
  Also: * "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal. * 12 tone equal temperament is not universal. * Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect speeds. * Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the tuning will vary with temperature. Nobody is going to tune a pipe organ in a drafty church every time the weather changes. * DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching
  - lysp 2y ago
    > DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning. And with digital players now, you can speed it up but digitally alter the sound back to it's original pitch.
tzs 2y ago
OT: what ever happened to AB repeat? I remember that most of my CD players, and my MP3 players, and I think my iPods had AB repeat. For those who have not used a player with AB repeat, what it did was let you mark two points on a song ("A" and "B") and then it would loop the section between those two points. It was great if you were trying to transcribe a song or figure out how to play it on your instrument. You could put a couple chords or a section of the melody on AB repeat until you got it and then move on. The major streaming players don't seem to have this. Nor does Apple's Music player when playing local files. You can download a song (if your streaming service supports it) or record it (if downloads are not supported) and then open it in GarageBand or something similar which should have a way to repeat a section. That works but is a bit of a hassle, and sometimes you might want to try to figure out a song when you aren't at your computer.
haccount 2y ago
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swyx 2y ago
> Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform devices. And then, your brain then does something stupidly complicated to this set of clean inputs, so that you can instantly tell whose voice is whose in a multi-speaker environment, and so that you can detect the slightest tremor in somebody’s voice that might clue you in on their mental state as they say those words. We undergo decades of musical training so that we can train our brains to unwind all of this complicated processing and extract pure tones from this jumble of sound. i always wondered why we dont seem to have developed ML models that can do this yet. its not like the synthetic data is hard to generate, if data limitations are the excuse.
mcnichol 2y ago
I feel like this article is more of a "Here's all the things I think about perfect pitch and my journey with music" Maybe I took the title too literally. As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been the most helpful: * Get a string instrument * Strum the strings * Try to tune the first string by ear * Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner. This way will you see how progressively your feeling of "in tune" can be measured in hertz. I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz). I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun and a little less "maintenance". The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I "feel" I've hit that note I'm aiming for. As I've said, I can get within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close. Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you'll surprise yourself.
- golly_ned 2y ago
  I appreciated the detail of the article and its structure as a narrative rather than as a simple step-by-step presentation of a how-to. The article also presents different senses of perfect pitch, and categorizes your sense as being at the lowest threshold (or lower).
  - mcnichol 2y ago
    I'm not saying I didn't appreciate it. It just read like a story of their journey and reflection. I think "My journey of learning perfect pitch over 15 years" is more apt Learn perfect pitch in 15 years sounds more like a step by step article. I would have clicked both, just expect something closer to the latter.
- junar 2y ago
  Why would you measure in Hz and not cents [1]? 5 Hz is going to be larger practical pitch difference at G3 (196 Hz) compared to E5 (659 Hz). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)
zzzbra 2y ago
love to see someone I went to high school with on HN's front page :)
bunderbunder 2y ago
Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That could be a challenging thing to have to do late in your musical career.
- kqr 2y ago
  Also with perfect pitch you hear when things are even a tiny bit out of tune (and this will annoy you!) even if everything is just fine relatively speaking and you're the only one of 500 musically trained people who is even capable of noticing.
- omnicognate 2y ago
  As described to me by a couple of professional musicians who have absolute pitch (I don't) it's not so much that you lose it as that it shifts. For example the qualia you experienced for a B might now be felt in response to a slightly flat C, the whole sensation having shifted by a bit less than a semitone. This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a blessing for musicians.
lpnotes 2y ago
I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir director identified it and realized I could name all the notes from a random key played on the piano. Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register. Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!
commandlinefan 2y ago
I've been doing directed ear training online for several years now - if you think you have perfect pitch, you can actually test it at tonedear.com (I don't). I've been working instead on the first lesson, interval training. It plays two tones next to each other and you're supposed to identify if they're a major third, perfect fifth, octave, etc. I've been doing it for over two years and I've definitely gotten better, although I'm still not even at 100% at interval recognition.
empeyot 2y ago
Related: Ayako Sakakibara et al.: A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the ‘chord identification method’ https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948 https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948 Abstract TL;DR: Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.
danbmil99 2y ago
It's incorrect to say that Perfect Pitch means you can pick out any of the 12 tones commonly used in western music. It doesn't mean that; that can only come with training. The core ability with perfect pitch is to remember a note persistent over many months or years. If you know a song well, and you have perfect pitch, you will almost always sing it in the correct pitch. Not within a semitone; within a percent, enough that if you were singing with the recording, you would not be out of tune. There is overwhelming evidence that this ability is either genetic or acquired at a very early age. It's a difference between people like the way you can fold your tongue or move your thumb. It's innate. someone with musical training can use this skill to identify the 12 tones of western music, but that's frankly just a party trick built on the core capability. Here's the concrete example. My son has perfect pitch. I didn't know this until we were watching a Beatles movie, I think A Hard Day's night, and he asked why the instruments Were Out Of Tune. Later I played the record and compared it with the video, and they were off by less than a quarter tone. The Beatles another musicians in the '60s often used very speed to subtly change the tone and tempo and many Beatles Tunes are at a pitch that lies between the standard a 440 12 lb scale
exabrial 2y ago
I've yet to find a use for perfect pitch other than it's a cool parlor trick. I'm not a 100% perfect as I don't really practice the skill, and I have a hard time separating my relative pitch from absolute pitch. Although from time to time when the band looks at you and asks what key was that in it's fun to have an answer. Instead, I think interval identification is the most useful skill. Hearing two notes after each other and being able to name the interval is relevant to every genre of music and live performance, so it can be played back on whatever instrument is in front of you. The next most useful skill (in my opinion) is chord decomposition: hearing a chord and being able to identify the component notes, relative to the tonic. Diads are useful enough for guitar players/bassists, but triads are super useful for piano players, vocalists, or other polyphonic instruments.
kazinator 2y ago
I don't have perfect pitch. But I can open a tuner app and whistle an A, based on hearing (in my head) a chamber orchestra playing the opening bar of Bach's A minor concerto.
Madmallard 2y ago
perfect pitch is rare. it isn’t trainable. most people deep in music know this. u drop a ball on the piano and it hits 6 notes and the person tells u the pitches. you break glass on the ground and they tell you those pitches too. Meanwhile people with trained pitch can do somewhat decently with enough training and certainly someone playing an instrument long enough will just know which notes are being played on that instrument but it isn’t the same thing. absolute pitch is RNG even among music students.
methuselah_in 2y ago
I am into telesales and I was thinking it has something to take with sales pitch lol

As someone clinically tone deaf (and no desire to change), this comments section is wild. Y’all experience sound very differently than me.

yuppiemephisto 2y ago

[flagged]

angryjim 2y ago
Your mileage may vary. BTW, is 10,000 hours not considered pseudoscience?
- lolinder 2y ago
  It's absolutely pseudoscience. 10k hours doing what? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors? Veritasium has a really good video on the subject [0], with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic—the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible—and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
- qwertytyyuu 2y ago
  10k hours of deliberate practise to achieve “mastery” as more of a heuristic than science
- adamgordonbell 2y ago
  It's simplification of real research on expertise in a sound bite.
deleted 2y ago
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zero-sharp 2y ago

You've had musical training since you were 5? And you say "Sometime when I was ~12 years old, I remember surprising my clarinet teacher by correctly repeating some random notes that he played. He told me I had perfect pitch, but I didn’t think so, because I couldn’t name notes for any instrument other than the clarinet." Okay, so then this doesn't seem like an article written for the average musician (person).

Rochus 2y ago

> I learned perfect pitch as an adult. Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect pitch would be good for.

dhosek 2y ago
I had a friend in high school who had amazing pitch recognition. I still remember being at band camp and watching him with a cassette player and a stack of manuscript paper transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago a measure or two at a time. He’d play a bar of music, then write down all the parts. It really ruined me because I assumed this was a binary thing, you either had it or you didn’t and didn’t realize it could be learned until I eventually learned it.
- Rochus 2y ago
  Perfect pitch is in no way necessary for this. Interval listening is sufficient. The additional benefit of perfect pitch would be, that your friend would know the basic key of the tune without first playing one note on the piano. For example, I don't have perfect pitch, but I can play along with any pop song immediately, without sheet music and without knowing the piece. I just have to press a few keys on the keyboard to find the root note.
criddell 2y ago
Or both. You don't have to choose one or the other and I think the two skills could be very complementary.
- Rochus 2y ago
  With perfect pitch, you save yourself the five dollars for a tuning fork. In my forty years of experience as a musician, I have yet to encounter any other benefit.

linux_is_nice 2y ago

> By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences; I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch. > Don’t learn a non-C instrument I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.

mdwhatcott 2y ago
Yeah, this advice doesn't hold up--even the OP mentions learning the clarinet, which is a B-flat instrument. I also play the clarinet and developed the same ability to detect each note by its timbre. I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates, the back-pressure or resistance you feel while playing, that becomes associated with the timbre the longer you play.
- linux_is_nice 2y ago
  As a clarinet player myself, I think it's an instrument that's pretty unique in just how different the timbres of each note are, like Bb or an open G.
  - mrob 2y ago
    Recorders also have big variation in timbre (and volume) with different notes.
- dhruvrajvanshi 2y ago
  > I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing. In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an anchor.
2y ago

muglug 2y ago

I could write a similar article "lose perfect pitch in 15 years". My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440. And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.

droideqa 2y ago

Or you could just take depakote[0]. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/

drumttocs8 2y ago
Honestly fascinating. Any first-hand experience?
- hirvi74 2y ago
  I do not know anyone that has taken Depakote for the purpose of perfect pitch. The individuals that I have known have taken it for severe psychotic/mood disorders. From what I remember, it's not a fun time for the side-effects can be absolutely brutal.
Aeglaecia 2y ago
was waiting for the inevitable hdac inhibitor comment seeing as vorinostat was recently so often spruiked by a vested individual on reddit. to other readers, these are literally chemotherapy drugs that globally inhibit cell formation, albeit taken at much lower dosages than therapeutic.

w-m 2y ago

Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :) A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%. It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music! Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways. [0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0 https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0 [1]: https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps

amatecha 2y ago
I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard somehow fades, or something...
zeta0134 2y ago
This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear" after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in perfect clarity in the proper key. I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)

123124dfasd 2y ago

This is more common than people thought. I don't remember who said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of All Star - Smash Mouth for example. Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.

laurieg 2y ago

Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages. As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much. One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before. Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.

dberst 2y ago
I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two. Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work. Best of luck!!

rybosome 2y ago

I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than not: * aurally identify key signatures * aurally identify chords * sing a given note on command It wasn't until I was into my early twenties that I could do this. For me, the single biggest stepping stone was building the connection between what I could hear in my head from a song that I remember clearly with the underlying music theory. Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked: * Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor * The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor * Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A * Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat * Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor * etc. Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in "Comfortably Numb". Huh, The Beatles "Across The Universe" sounds tonally like "Eet" - I guess it is also in D-flat. A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.

jebarker 2y ago
> A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs. This is gold. I similarly maintain lists of melodies that prominently feature certain intervals.
dberst 2y ago
I'd be happy to see any "songs all in the same key" type playlists if anyone wants to share one I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these
- smitelli 2y ago
  Not a playlist, but I've always hit up Song Key Finder[1] when trying to figure out what songs might fit together for mashup-type purposes. They rank the songs by popularity within their user community. [1]: https://www.songkeyfinder.com/ https://www.songkeyfinder.com/
- yaur 2y ago
  Not a playlist per se, but https://www.hooktheory.com/cheat-sheet/key-popularity https://www.hooktheory.com/cheat-sheet/key-popularity Has popular songs for each key and mode

folkrav 2y ago

I don't have perfect pitch, but I basically have a 440Hz sine embedded in my brain which I can use for tuning stuff and figure out the rest through relative pitch. Perfect pitch sounds actually extremely distracting as a listener...

bluGill 2y ago
In my city we tune to A=441 I have no idea why but when in Rome...
- dhosek 2y ago
  It’s very much a regional thing where Europeans tend to tune higher than Americans, as I recall. A lot is going to be dictated by the pitch of the local church organ. Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    A440 was standardized in 1939. There was an earlier attempt to standardize on A435 in the late 1800s, but they specified a temperature uncomfortably cold, when you move something (I'm not sure what) tuned at A435 to a more comfortable room temperature you get close to A440, and from there a little rounding and we have A440. Before the 1850s every town had their own standard which was mostly based on whatever the A note of their organ was. Turning a pipe organ takes an expert hours and costs a lot of money so if it is in tune without you make everyone else tune their instrument to the organ. The tuning fork was invented in 1711, before then we didn't even have a way to move a tuning between downs - the act of transporting most instrument changes the tuning.
    - dhosek 2y ago
      There’s also a standard of using the metric system, but there are still plenty of backwards places that don‘t follow it. One of the instruments I play is flute and while there is some flexibility possible to adjust the pitch by moving the headjoint in or out, there is an idealized pitch for the best intonation.¹ Most student instruments are A440 but some intermediate and professional models are tuned to A442 or A444. ⸻ 1. Granted, the player’s technique also affects intonation so this is not insurmountable.

antegamisou 2y ago

As expected, another one of the many that conflates well trained relative pitch with absolute. Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days. All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable. However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to immediately [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of any pitch-producing entity (keyboard/string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish. Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days. All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2]. I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected. But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from. [1] https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png [2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/

2y ago

mastercheif 2y ago

I have perfect pitch–your color analogy is exactly how I describe my bewilderment that it isn’t the default state for humans.

deleted 2y ago

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analog31 2y ago

I had "temporarily perfect" pitch when I was younger, especially when I was regularly playing the cello. I could pick up my cello and tune it without a reference, and I could recognize a note or key that was being played. I kind of took it for granted. Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining. I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing. I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.

mafuyu 2y ago
I've often heard people say that "true" perfect pitch can only be accomplished with synesthesia, but I have no idea if it's true. Back when I played clarinet, I had decent relative pitch and I could ballpark a B-flat tuning note if I thought hard enough. That was enough to work my way to an absolute pitch, but it took a while. I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.
atto 2y ago
I can also do this, don't have perfect pitch, was also a cello player, and have a guess. Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches, and our brain can pattern match that more effectively than pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get pretty close. Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
brilee 2y ago
It sounds like you had something similar to what I had with the clarinet in middle school.

masspro 2y ago

I accidentally trained myself by playing with SimTunes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes> a lot as a kid. But I think it trained me to be slightly flat. Electronically perfect notes sound wrong, and I tune things down when that's an option. I wish I cared enough to try running SimTunes today and see if A was 440 Hz or not.

browningstreet 2y ago

Beato has a course for it. He says he used to have it but it has drifted over time. He also claims his young daughter has it now.

bluGill 2y ago

Someone introduce the author to microtunings. there is a whole - much more harmonic - world out there. Equal temperment is a harmonic disaster and it is time to end it. (there are advantages to equal temperment but harmony is lost)

drivebyhooting 2y ago
I’m not convinced. Share a microtonal piece that can stand up against something by Chopin or any other great composer.
- bitwize 2y ago
  For that you will have to look outside the west. Consider traditional Arabic maqam music.
- bluGill 2y ago
  With some effort you can find the microtonal chords Chopin was thinking of and prove it yourself. There are of course places where it isn't clear which chord Chopin was thinking of though, so it would be fun to hear different people do this assignment... To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you it. Such a person may not even exist today.
brilee 2y ago
Choral/string music is quite nice - the musicians have an opportunity to bend pitch as locally appropriate to make perfect intervals. I definitely did this when I was singing in a chorus. But piano is still my first love :)
mrob 2y ago
You can use equal temperament with any number of divisions of the octave (or other interval, e.g. Bohen-Pierce tuning's equal division of the "tritave" into 13). Some of these provide excellent approximations of common just intonation intervals, e.g. dividing the octave into 53 gives you fifths that are only 0.07 cents off the just interval, and all other intervals in standard 5-limit Western harmony within 1.5 cents of just. It's simpler to compose with than stacking frequency ratios and in practice sounds equally good.

vunderba 2y ago

It should be noted that a lot of people mistake relative pitch for perfect pitch. Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it. Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example. You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.

brilee 2y ago
> Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it. Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
- vunderba 2y ago
  I don't think anyone's gatekeeping it - it's important that you define something as it actually is otherwise it ceases to lose all meaning. (Cough fascism cough).
Rochus 2y ago
That's correct. Relative pitch gives you 99.9% of the benefits, with 0.1% remaining for perfect pitch.
illwrks 2y ago
Nothing but a random comment, but my daughter has near perfect pitch and it amazes me to no end. She can hear a note and 99% of the time tell you exactly what it is. She loves telling me when I'm off key in the car singing along to things. She's only just turned 11.

crtified 2y ago

Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform - there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the particular harmonic structures that they've trained their ear to, e.g. a particular instrument. And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner. Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.

vunderba 2y ago
Yeah - there has been some speculation that the additional overlaying of a sound (overtones, timbre variations, etc) can help someone who has absolute pitch - whereas even those with the ability can sometimes struggle with something more pure - like a sine wave.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago

I have...good pitch? If you play notes on a piano I will guess right significantly more often than I could by chance, and my misses will often be one note away. Not perfect pitch, and not useful in any event.

mrcptthrowaway 2y ago

20% to 30% of autistic people seem to have perfect pitch [1, 2]. Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3]. I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid). [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/how_many_of_you_have_perfectabsolute_pitch/?rdt=62255 https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/h... - not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best, this is way too high. [2] More sources talk about it, but can't seem to find it right now. I'm pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don't want to do the research. [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/

musicale 2y ago

The perfect pitch skill I admire the most is being able to count cycles/recognize/sing pitches by frequency and/or sing various types of temperament. Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.

propoganda 2y ago

Not a single Rick Beato mention? Come on guys you’re losing out on a massive circlejerk opportunity!

slmjkdbtl 2y ago

I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2 years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2 years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.

criddell 2y ago
My kids somehow have perfect pitch. They hear a microwave beep and can say "that's b-flat". They say it's the same as looking at some shoes and naming the color. From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.

thih9 2y ago

> Don’t learn a non-C instrument I didn’t expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.

dhosek 2y ago

The thing that really accelerated my pitch learning was choral singing (in particular, with a serious classically-oriented choir at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago). If you’re singing the notes, they really get internalized. At the peak of my skills, I was able to compose a fully harmonized melody on a walk and then play it on piano when I got home.

trgn 2y ago
I'm middle aged and looking for a new hobby, and for this reason alone I might take up singing, to be able to play by ear much more easily on my instrument (iso by trial and error, I get there eventually but it's not effortless). I'm held back by a sense of embarrassment when singing. I feel weird singing by myself (always have), let alone with others around. I don't have this same embarrassment making mistakes when playing an instrument. Any tips on how to help with that?
- dhosek 2y ago
  I think it helped that I was a regular attendee at Mass before becoming a chorister so I had the advantage of years of singing in the congregation where you’re surrounded by people singing (or not) of various skill levels and it’s kind of expected that you sing around others. Most church choirs are pretty welcoming though and tend to be a bit desperate for male voices. Only the Cathedral choir had an audition process.¹ Beyond that, I think a big part of it is to just accept that you’ll be with other amateurs and you won’t be the only one who makes mistakes on occasion. ⸻ 1. The cathedral choir kind of spoiled me for choral singing though. In most church choirs, the accompanist will play choral parts one at a time for the singers to hear them. At Holy Name, they just played all four parts together and you had to hear your part in the chord.
  - trgn 2y ago
    great thx! biggest issue now is to relapse my lapsed status ;) > they just played all four parts together .. that sounds like baptism by fire

tzs 2y ago

Careful what you wish for. • Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts. • Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because their perfect pitch was now off and everything sounded wrong to them.

bowsamic 2y ago
Yeah I've also heard that it's more of an annoyance than it's worth, in fact I'm not really sure of anyone who has said it's a benefit in any way. It's just not really an aspect of music that people usually enjoy anyway. Naturally, music is engineered more to be relatively pitched rather than absolute
- mrob 2y ago
  It's useful if you're singing a song that starts a cappella and has instruments join later. Admittedly, this is not common. Only example I can think of is The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
mrob 2y ago
Also: * "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal. * 12 tone equal temperament is not universal. * Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect speeds. * Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the tuning will vary with temperature. Nobody is going to tune a pipe organ in a drafty church every time the weather changes. * DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching
- lysp 2y ago
  > DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning. And with digital players now, you can speed it up but digitally alter the sound back to it's original pitch.

tzs 2y ago

OT: what ever happened to AB repeat? I remember that most of my CD players, and my MP3 players, and I think my iPods had AB repeat. For those who have not used a player with AB repeat, what it did was let you mark two points on a song ("A" and "B") and then it would loop the section between those two points. It was great if you were trying to transcribe a song or figure out how to play it on your instrument. You could put a couple chords or a section of the melody on AB repeat until you got it and then move on. The major streaming players don't seem to have this. Nor does Apple's Music player when playing local files. You can download a song (if your streaming service supports it) or record it (if downloads are not supported) and then open it in GarageBand or something similar which should have a way to repeat a section. That works but is a bit of a hassle, and sometimes you might want to try to figure out a song when you aren't at your computer.

haccount 2y ago

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swyx 2y ago

> Your ears contain millions of tiny fine hairs of varying lengths which each vibrate in response to some set of frequencies, making them essentially analog Fourier Transform devices. And then, your brain then does something stupidly complicated to this set of clean inputs, so that you can instantly tell whose voice is whose in a multi-speaker environment, and so that you can detect the slightest tremor in somebody’s voice that might clue you in on their mental state as they say those words. We undergo decades of musical training so that we can train our brains to unwind all of this complicated processing and extract pure tones from this jumble of sound. i always wondered why we dont seem to have developed ML models that can do this yet. its not like the synthetic data is hard to generate, if data limitations are the excuse.

mcnichol 2y ago

I feel like this article is more of a "Here's all the things I think about perfect pitch and my journey with music" Maybe I took the title too literally. As someone who wants to gain perfect pitch (and still feels mildly distant from this ability) one thing I can say has been the most helpful: * Get a string instrument * Strum the strings * Try to tune the first string by ear * Once you think you have it, check it against a chromatic tuner. This way will you see how progressively your feeling of "in tune" can be measured in hertz. I can get pretty pretty close (within about 5hz). I used to have competitions with my children on who could get the note closest without a tuner. One of my kids got pretty good where they could almost nail it within 1 hz. It made things fun and a little less "maintenance". The best way I can describe the process is you have a sensitivity to a threshold of being in tune. I hear the note but there is something inside myself, it almost feels like anxiousness that kinda peaks right before I hit the note and then stops when I "feel" I've hit that note I'm aiming for. As I've said, I can get within about 5hz which to a musician they can probably notice it is off but for the average ear, it feels muddy but close. Long story short, practice with a tuner and within a year you'll surprise yourself.

golly_ned 2y ago
I appreciated the detail of the article and its structure as a narrative rather than as a simple step-by-step presentation of a how-to. The article also presents different senses of perfect pitch, and categorizes your sense as being at the lowest threshold (or lower).
- mcnichol 2y ago
  I'm not saying I didn't appreciate it. It just read like a story of their journey and reflection. I think "My journey of learning perfect pitch over 15 years" is more apt Learn perfect pitch in 15 years sounds more like a step by step article. I would have clicked both, just expect something closer to the latter.
junar 2y ago
Why would you measure in Hz and not cents [1]? 5 Hz is going to be larger practical pitch difference at G3 (196 Hz) compared to E5 (659 Hz). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cent_(music)

zzzbra 2y ago

love to see someone I went to high school with on HN's front page :)

bunderbunder 2y ago

Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That could be a challenging thing to have to do late in your musical career.

kqr 2y ago
Also with perfect pitch you hear when things are even a tiny bit out of tune (and this will annoy you!) even if everything is just fine relatively speaking and you're the only one of 500 musically trained people who is even capable of noticing.
omnicognate 2y ago
As described to me by a couple of professional musicians who have absolute pitch (I don't) it's not so much that you lose it as that it shifts. For example the qualia you experienced for a B might now be felt in response to a slightly flat C, the whole sensation having shifted by a bit less than a semitone. This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a blessing for musicians.

lpnotes 2y ago

I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir director identified it and realized I could name all the notes from a random key played on the piano. Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register. Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!

commandlinefan 2y ago

I've been doing directed ear training online for several years now - if you think you have perfect pitch, you can actually test it at tonedear.com (I don't). I've been working instead on the first lesson, interval training. It plays two tones next to each other and you're supposed to identify if they're a major third, perfect fifth, octave, etc. I've been doing it for over two years and I've definitely gotten better, although I'm still not even at 100% at interval recognition.

empeyot 2y ago

Related: Ayako Sakakibara et al.: A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the ‘chord identification method’ https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948 https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735612463948 Abstract TL;DR: Results suggest that, at a minimum, children younger than 6 years old are capable of acquiring AP through intentional training.

danbmil99 2y ago

It's incorrect to say that Perfect Pitch means you can pick out any of the 12 tones commonly used in western music. It doesn't mean that; that can only come with training. The core ability with perfect pitch is to remember a note persistent over many months or years. If you know a song well, and you have perfect pitch, you will almost always sing it in the correct pitch. Not within a semitone; within a percent, enough that if you were singing with the recording, you would not be out of tune. There is overwhelming evidence that this ability is either genetic or acquired at a very early age. It's a difference between people like the way you can fold your tongue or move your thumb. It's innate. someone with musical training can use this skill to identify the 12 tones of western music, but that's frankly just a party trick built on the core capability. Here's the concrete example. My son has perfect pitch. I didn't know this until we were watching a Beatles movie, I think A Hard Day's night, and he asked why the instruments Were Out Of Tune. Later I played the record and compared it with the video, and they were off by less than a quarter tone. The Beatles another musicians in the '60s often used very speed to subtly change the tone and tempo and many Beatles Tunes are at a pitch that lies between the standard a 440 12 lb scale

exabrial 2y ago

I've yet to find a use for perfect pitch other than it's a cool parlor trick. I'm not a 100% perfect as I don't really practice the skill, and I have a hard time separating my relative pitch from absolute pitch. Although from time to time when the band looks at you and asks what key was that in it's fun to have an answer. Instead, I think interval identification is the most useful skill. Hearing two notes after each other and being able to name the interval is relevant to every genre of music and live performance, so it can be played back on whatever instrument is in front of you. The next most useful skill (in my opinion) is chord decomposition: hearing a chord and being able to identify the component notes, relative to the tonic. Diads are useful enough for guitar players/bassists, but triads are super useful for piano players, vocalists, or other polyphonic instruments.

kazinator 2y ago

I don't have perfect pitch. But I can open a tuner app and whistle an A, based on hearing (in my head) a chamber orchestra playing the opening bar of Bach's A minor concerto.

Madmallard 2y ago

perfect pitch is rare. it isn’t trainable. most people deep in music know this. u drop a ball on the piano and it hits 6 notes and the person tells u the pitches. you break glass on the ground and they tell you those pitches too. Meanwhile people with trained pitch can do somewhat decently with enough training and certainly someone playing an instrument long enough will just know which notes are being played on that instrument but it isn’t the same thing. absolute pitch is RNG even among music students.

methuselah_in 2y ago

I am into telesales and I was thinking it has something to take with sales pitch lol