9 ms·

Learning fast and accurate absolute pitch judgment in adulthood

174 points by dr_dshiv 2y ago

zx2c4 2y ago
> By the end of the training, they learned to name an average of 7.08 pitches (ranging from 3 to 12) at an accuracy of 90% or above and within a response-time (RT) window of 1,305–2,028 ms. That doesn't actually seem very promising, or at least useful at all. It still seems way less useful than my accurate and near instantaneous relative-pitch. What could I do as a musician with 2 seconds of latency to be wrong some amount of the time.
- neuralkoi 2y ago
  I don't understand (I am not a musician). This was an 8-week training program (21.4h). How long have you spent perfecting your relative pitch?
  - groby_b 2y ago
    Your relative pitch gets decent within a few weeks of practice (<10h). Getting it always right takes longer, and so do "weird" intervals, but the basic intervals are not that hard. Also, basic knowledge of song structure, phrases, and chords helps with relative pitch, because it narrows down the set of choices in many circumstances. After all, the most useful exercise of relative pitch is "what's that melody", not "what's that random interval". As for precision of relative pitch: After a year of weekly training, most people are able to tune a guitar to within 2-3 cents. Which is, granted, a very specific form of relative pitch, but it shows you can get pretty good precision at that. It probably extends further. (IDK, I have seen no examples of people explicitly practicing microtonal relative pitch outside of "tune an instrument")
- pazimzadeh 2y ago
  Pretty sure you don’t lose your relative pitch, and the better you are at relative pitch the better results you’ll have anyway
- wrs 2y ago
  Yes, thank goodness relative pitch is trainable, because that’s all you need, almost all the time. This new ability would let you come in on the right pitch for your first note, which is a cool trick. But after that, relative is fine. Indeed, it would be awful if you heard everything absolute and had to translate to relative (I’m guessing you can do both at the same time, though).
dr_dshiv 2y ago
I wonder if they combined this with Valproic acid, which supposedly can help adults learn perfect pitch https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...
- d1sxeyes 2y ago
  Interesting. Word of caution though, valproic acid is teratogenic, and should not be taken by anyone who may become pregnant. The linked article suggests it could be a “wonder drug” to enable learning, but there are also downsides to taking it.
  - pazimzadeh 2y ago
    Yeah, until they figure out how to target it to your ears/brain/whatever I would not take something that wipes your body’s epigenetic slate
ydnaclementine 2y ago
Is this type of training more beneficial to do first rather than recognizing intervals?
- beepbooptheory 2y ago
  I think its gotta be just interesting on the theoretical side around learning/cognition. Otherwise yeah, its like learning exactly how salty something is when you taste it: not a total waste of time maybe, but not directly beneficial for you as the cook. In school, at least when I was there, ear training was a combination of recognizing harmony, rhythm, and simple melodies with an arbitrary key, ontop of, of course, sight singing. It is of course quite sufficient to have this skill with all of that, but hardly necessary!
- olddustytrail 2y ago
  It's not beneficial at all. Don't do it. The only music that will sound "right" is autotuned crap from the most boring types of music. Anything interesting will sound "out of tune".
2c2c2c 2y ago
i made https://perfectpitch.study https://perfectpitch.study a week or so ago. i am old and musically untrained and wanted to see if rote practice makes a difference (it clearly does). most of the sites of this type i found annoying as you can't just use a midi keyboard, so you just get RSI clicking around for 10 minutes. I tried getting adsense on it, but they seem to have vague content requirements. Apparently tools don't count as real websites :-(. I couldn't even fool it with fake content. what's the best banner ad company to use in this situation?
- jawon 2y ago
  Gave it a try. After a few minutes I felt more like I was recognising the samples than I was recognising the notes. Not sure what you can do about that short of physically modeling an instrument.
  - yojo 2y ago
    Latest browser APIs expose everything you need to build a synth. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Simple_synth https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A... There are some libraries that make it easy to simulate instruments. E.g. tone.js https://tonejs.github.io/ https://tonejs.github.io/ It should be possible to generate unique-ish variants at runtime.
    - westurner 2y ago
      OpenEar is built on tone.js: https://github.com/ShacharHarshuv/open-ear https://github.com/ShacharHarshuv/open-ear limut implements WebAudio and WebGL, and FoxDot-like patterns and samples: https://github.com/sdclibbery/limut https://github.com/sdclibbery/limut https://glicol.org/ https://glicol.org/ runs in a browser and as a VST plugin https://draw.audio/ https://draw.audio/ "Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem" (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471723 gh topics/webaudio: https://github.com/topics/webaudio https://github.com/topics/webaudio awesome-webaudio: https://github.com/notthetup/awesome-webaudio https://github.com/notthetup/awesome-webaudio
appleorchard46 2y ago
The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me. Not surprised this reinforces that it's mostly about memorization and practice. Think of a song you know best, one you've listened to hundreds of times: can you sing it or hear it in your head pretty accurately (edit - not accurate intervals, but accurate pitch)? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch. Learn what note it starts on and you're 1/12 of the way there.
- ByThyGrace 2y ago
  > and you're 1/12 of the way there. I'm afraid my favorite song is on a microtonal scale...
- dingnuts 2y ago
  >Think of a song you know best, one you've listened to hundreds of times: can you sing it or hear it in your head pretty accurately? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch No, this is relative pitch. You might be singing it in the wrong key. That's why you can sing something a capella and it sounds right and then you add an instrument playing the correct notes and it doesn't.
  - zeroxfe 2y ago
    It's not. You should actually try out the exercise. (I used this approach to build partial perfect pitch, i.e., to sing/identify a small number of specific pitches.) Close your eyes and try to imagine a song that you know really well. Imagine the original version playing on your phone/mp3 player/cd/record. Pick a stable note from that song (for me, the third note of the beginning of "Tears in Heaven" is a solid A.) Try to sing it and match the pitch in your head. As you practice it you'll get better, and do it faster, and over time even be able to recognize it in the wild.
    - Rooster61 2y ago
      Wild. I read the bit about "Close your eyes and imagine...", and immediately also thought of the third note of "Tears in Heaven" without having read the rest of the comment. Those are either crazy odds or that's just THAT memorable of an opening to a song
narag 2y ago
"Code availability: The codes used in this study were not available to the public."
viraptor 2y ago
Watch out what you wish for though. With age our hearing degrades and the experienced frequency shifts. There's a number of people with perfect pitch recognition who mentioned getting annoyed when they got older and everything sounded slightly off. For practical music, relative pitch is fine and commonly trained.
- dbalatero 2y ago
  I'm 38, and my pitch recognition will degrade a half step off sometimes, often when I haven't been playing much.
  - TheBozzCL 2y ago
    Interesting… that’s been happening to me but because I’ve been playing a lot with my guitar tuned half-step down. I hear a note that I associate with a chord in my guitar, and I have to remind myself that I need to compensate for it.
- alfiedotwtf 2y ago
  Dave Smith restarted making Prophet 5 synthesizers a few ago, and the initial batch of users complained that the high frequencies weren’t like the original but when he tested them he couldn’t see any issue… Turns out he was testing by ear, and he was a few decades older since stopping the last production run, and his hearing had rolled off on the high end! Remake users were instructed on how to fix it and newer batches had the fixes built in - maybe by using a younger ear :)
  - brailsafe 2y ago
    The existential dread he might have felt after realizing this suddenly would be palpable.
  - musicale 2y ago
    > his hearing had rolled off on the high end! Depending on the degree of hearing loss, I wonder if hearing aids might have helped a bit?
yowzadave 2y ago
Absolute (“perfect”) pitch is, for some people, a kind of shorthand for supreme musical giftedness…when in reality it’s more of a curious party trick than a skill that is valuable for a musician or composer. So you can train yourself to do it—what’s the point exactly? Plenty of people who don’t have that skill have an extremely accurate ear for relative pitch, which is the one that actually matters.
- yongjik 2y ago
  I don't think it's just a parlor trick. (I don't have it, BTW.) Obviously it depends on the instrument: for example, if you're playing the piano you can completely forget about absolute pitch. But if you're singing a long passage without accompaniment, without absolute pitch you may end up drifting. Also, a lot of classical composers enjoyed elaborate key changes: e.g., you'll have your main theme in A major, and then it appears again in D major, and later it comes back as A major. If you have absolute pitch (those composers likely did), then they all sound different, as if you first see a picture in black and white and later it comes back in blue. If you don't, then that part of composition completely passes over your brain.
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    > But if you're singing a long passage without accompaniment, without absolute pitch you may end up drifting. You don't need absolute pitch to not drift. You just need to maintain relative pitch. That maintenance requires attention and some practice, but it doesn't even remotely require absolute pitch. And remember that singers with absolute pitch have their own problems, in that singing the same song when accompanied by a new piano that is tuned slightly differently becomes much harder and annoying. Whereas for most people they don't notice and sing in tune with it effortlessly. Also, people with relative pitch certainly experience key changes, the sense of tension introduced by a new one, and the sense of "returning home" and relief when you go back. Composers write for that sensation which is shared by everyone. Not for any kind of absolute perception. And I don't know why you think classical composers overwhelmingly had absolute pitch. Do you have any evidence?
  - physicles 2y ago
xhevahir 2y ago
This guy, Chris Aruffo, has an interesting blog about his research in absolute pitch. I don't think it's been updated in quite a while though: http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/ http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/
laurieg 2y ago
What's the gold standard for learning relative pitch? Related, how can you learn to hear multiple notes at the same time? It blows my mind that people can hear a piano chord and pick out individual notes.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  There are lots of different approaches to ear training. A very useful starting point is an app like EarMaster or Perfect Ear, which offer a Duolingo-like gamified course in ear training. Hearing simultaneous notes is really just a matter of decomposition. Can you sing the first three notes of Kumbaya or Ob-la-di Ob-la-da? If you can, then you already know the three notes of a major chord - root, major third and perfect fifth. If I were to play you a C major triad on the piano (C E G) then you'd easily be able to pick out those individual notes. Most people already have that kind of intuitive sense of pitch, they just need to learn how to name things to systematise that intuition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDIm_2qS5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDIm_2qS5s
  - laurieg 2y ago
    > If I were to play you a C major triad on the piano (C E G) then you'd easily be able to pick out those individual notes Unfortunately, that is exactly the thing I cannot do. I play the piano but I can't pick out multiple notes. From a simultaneous sound. To me it's like witchcraft. Same with singing. I find it very hard to tell if a recording is one person singing or two people singing in harmony.
lmpdev 2y ago
I’ve learnt absolute pitch for a single note - F3 I was learning to sing for the first time at age 20. Learning Michael Buble’s cover of the jazz standard Fever with my singing teacher at the time Mohini It took about an hour of reinforcing the first 5-10 seconds of the start of the song on loop That was almost 10 years ago - still nail that specific pitch every time From there I can usually sing that scale correctly without reference, but it’s all anchored on the initial interval of F3 down to D#3 Accurate relative ear is more important anyway, I don’t sing anymore but if I was learning I’d focus on intervals and scales/modes over anything else ——— Another helpful interval is just nailing the octave jump, an example is Chet Baker’s You Don’t Know What Love Is
- sarreph 2y ago
  That is not absolute pitch - it’s pitch memory, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory I too have experienced the same phenomenon of being able to recall a particular note. Agree with you that relative pitch is more important!
  - mettamage 2y ago
    Oh, is absolute pitch the ability to recall every note? I once heard a C on a piano and played it a few times and then remembered it. I thought it was absolute pitch.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      Perfect pitch is being able to name any individual note and to hear when they're not quite in tune. Although it's also a curse, because perceived pitch changes with age, so you have to keep learning to compensate. And domestic acoustic pianos are often tuned a semitone flat, which really messes with your head. Advanced pitch recognition is being able to pick out the notes in a complex chord in open form. Professional pitch recognition - as demonstrated by some conductors - is being able to list the pitches in any random set of notes played at the same time on a piano. Including notes in the lowest octave. It's a lot easier to get to the last two if you have the first.
anigbrowl 2y ago
Code availability The codes used in this study were not available to the public. Eyeroll
TimByte 2y ago
Many singers can reproduce pitches with high accuracy, even without formal AP. Would love to see a study comparing pitch accuracy in trained singers versus instrumentalists
20k 2y ago
>size of error reduced by 42.7% (from 2.62 to 1.50 semitones) for the trained timbre, which generalized partially to an untrained timbre. Overall, results provide more convincing evidence for the learnability of AP judgment in adulthood beyond the critical period, similar to most perceptual and cognitive abilities. >they learned to name an average of 7.08 pitches Its worth noting that this does not fall under a standard definition of absolute pitch. Being a semitone out with 7 tones of recognition isn't even close Its always been true that adults can learn pseudo absolute pitch - ie improved pitch classification compared to an untrained adult. What's up for debate is if you can learn true absolute pitch, which has an error of 0 semitones, and you can name all 12 pitches with a 0% error rate The slightly amusing thing is that the evidence they have is precisely the opposite of the conclusion - you cannot learn absolute pitch as an adult
- debeloo 2y ago
  > you cannot learn absolute pitch as an adult Why?
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    You can easily look it up yourself. Early musical training appears to be necessary but not sufficient for the development of AP. Forty percent of musicians who had begun training at ≤4 years of age reported AP, whereas only 3% of those who had initiated training at ⩾9 years of age did so. Self-reported AP possessors were four times more likely to report another AP possessor in their families than were non–AP possessors. These data suggest that both early musical training and genetic predisposition are needed for the development of AP. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707634867 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...
    - debeloo 2y ago
      > You can easily look it up yourself. Thanks for the quote and link. I do appreciate those who make the internet a better place even though they toss around a slightly passive aggressive advice along the way!
PaulRobinson 2y ago
Whenever AP comes up I feel I see the same discussion over and over: A bunch of people with AP state that AP can't be learned in adulthood, that it is a rare gift that can only be learned in childhood. Another group of people who enjoy music deeply who did not learn AP as children counter: they have trained themselves to be able to recognise notes well enough that they can play or sing by ear, to a high degree of accuracy. AP crowd counter: you've learned relative pitch. That's a party trick. The "gift" is being able to hear an obscure note and immediately recognise it out of context and to tell when it's even very slightly out by a tiny amount. The other group counter that that sounds like a party trick, and anyway, doesn't that make getting old really horrible as hearing changes? AP group insist that no, it's not a party trick and you can't come in. The difference is like being a native fluent speaker of a language instead of learning it as an adult: when you learn a language you translate it in your head, that's not true fluency, and people with AP have "fluency" in tones in a way that isn't like a "translation step" that learned behaviour is like. Then the other group come back with "Wait, I know people who became fluent in another language in adulthood by complete immersion and who think and dream in their adopted language, so are you saying that's not real, or that a musical equivalent can't exist?" AP crowd stand firm: you just don't understand, you can't learn it, please don't say you can, you're doing something different... And this goes on, and on, and on... And this thread is just more of that. People with AP insist it can't be learned in adulthood, but I'm not sure what scientific evidence they have to support this, other than their own (seemingly unscientific) observations and interpretation. Studies that show RP improving towards AP are dismissed because the subjects have yet to reach the same skill level, but without evidence that it can't. I think most people would argue relative pitch allows you to enjoy listening to and creating music at least as much as AP does, but does not have the downside of hearing degradation causing existential angst and disappointment to the same degree in later life. As somebody who likes listening to music and occasionally tinkering at a keyboard or bass guitar, I'm a bit confused why this is such a contentious debate every time, and why in particular the AP crowd are insistent they're special even though it seems to be a curse to have AP rather than a blessing, as they themselves describe it. I'm also not convinced that somebody starting out with RP can't develop "fluency" in terms of AP over time. Instead of everyone just arguing about their own interpretations and experiences, is there clear science one way or the other?
soyyo 2y ago
Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't think this is absolute pitch. It is pseudo-perfect pitch, based on pitch memory, and it was already known that it can be trained. As an amateur musician myself, I understand the desire to have perfect pitch, but it seems that the problem of perfect pitch is seldom mentioned. Usually, people talk about the common annoyances, such as transposed music, non-standard tuning, choruses that drift in pitch, etc... but the actual hard one is that it fades away with age. First, it starts "shifting," and people will start to believe that a note is actually a semitone higher or lower than it actually is, and then eventually, it is completely lost. There is research that indicates that this is very common, and people with perfect pitch are more likely to lose it than to keep it. This is a huge blow—imagine a whole life relying on this one skill to support all your music-related activities, and suddenly, it's completely gone. I think this video gives a nice summary of all this from the point of view of a musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
- bjoli 2y ago
  I think one problem that the people with extreme sensitivity have is that not only choruses but also orchestras drift in pitch. I work professionally, and some orchestras are extreme. My orchestra usually starts at a at 442 but end up at 443,5 but I have played in places that start 441 and end up above 445. Good orchestras with very good reputation. Some are extreme at the other end. I played with the Munich Phil and despite the concert being a killer for every woodwind and brass instrument involved, we didn't drift a cent despite the hall being almost 28c and the end of the concert. A colleague (now retired) had the crazy kind of perfect pitch where he could say the note and how many cents off it was. At least to something like a 5 cent sensitivity. Back before we switched to LED lighting that must have been horrible. The stage r got crazy hot during concerts, and I remember having to struggle to not end up at 446.
tzs 2y ago
> Piano tones from three octaves (C4 to B6) were generated using two different digital pianos (Roland FP60 and Yamaha Arius), and guitar tones spanning the same range were generated by an online synthesizer B6 would be the 31st fret on the high E string on a guitar, which is why I suppose they had to use a synthesizer instead of a real guitar since real guitars generally have 19 frets (classical), 19-22 (acoustic), or 21-24 (electric). Guitars have been built with more than 24 frets but most guitar players will have never played one or even heard one. Personally I'd find about half of that C4 to B6 range to be in what I consider to be the annoyingly screechy range which would probably affect my performance on the training.
antoinebalaine 2y ago
That's not perfect pitch. 90% accuracy in pitch recognition based on memory retrieval is not perfect pitch. As for the bunch of comments here claiming they acquired AP at adult age for "only" one or two notes: that's not perfect pitch either. AP can't be acquired at adult age - your brain only learns to recognize pitches during your neural plasticity phase as a baby (provided it's exposed to enough variety), just like it acquires speech and color-discrimination. Also, AP is not a party trick. Not having it is akin to being color blind - even if you could "remember" what colors are supposed to look like, you would _still_ be color blind. That the article's abstract and researchers are willing to claim the opposite despite their own evidence : this smells like butt-hurt denial.
viburnum 2y ago
Looking at the graphs it appears that two people had big improvements and the others not very much.

174 points by dr_dshiv 2y ago

> By the end of the training, they learned to name an average of 7.08 pitches (ranging from 3 to 12) at an accuracy of 90% or above and within a response-time (RT) window of 1,305–2,028 ms. That doesn't actually seem very promising, or at least useful at all. It still seems way less useful than my accurate and near instantaneous relative-pitch. What could I do as a musician with 2 seconds of latency to be wrong some amount of the time.

neuralkoi 2y ago
I don't understand (I am not a musician). This was an 8-week training program (21.4h). How long have you spent perfecting your relative pitch?
- groby_b 2y ago
  Your relative pitch gets decent within a few weeks of practice (<10h). Getting it always right takes longer, and so do "weird" intervals, but the basic intervals are not that hard. Also, basic knowledge of song structure, phrases, and chords helps with relative pitch, because it narrows down the set of choices in many circumstances. After all, the most useful exercise of relative pitch is "what's that melody", not "what's that random interval". As for precision of relative pitch: After a year of weekly training, most people are able to tune a guitar to within 2-3 cents. Which is, granted, a very specific form of relative pitch, but it shows you can get pretty good precision at that. It probably extends further. (IDK, I have seen no examples of people explicitly practicing microtonal relative pitch outside of "tune an instrument")
pazimzadeh 2y ago
Pretty sure you don’t lose your relative pitch, and the better you are at relative pitch the better results you’ll have anyway
wrs 2y ago
Yes, thank goodness relative pitch is trainable, because that’s all you need, almost all the time. This new ability would let you come in on the right pitch for your first note, which is a cool trick. But after that, relative is fine. Indeed, it would be awful if you heard everything absolute and had to translate to relative (I’m guessing you can do both at the same time, though).

dr_dshiv 2y ago

I wonder if they combined this with Valproic acid, which supposedly can help adults learn perfect pitch https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...

d1sxeyes 2y ago
Interesting. Word of caution though, valproic acid is teratogenic, and should not be taken by anyone who may become pregnant. The linked article suggests it could be a “wonder drug” to enable learning, but there are also downsides to taking it.
- pazimzadeh 2y ago
  Yeah, until they figure out how to target it to your ears/brain/whatever I would not take something that wipes your body’s epigenetic slate

ydnaclementine 2y ago

Is this type of training more beneficial to do first rather than recognizing intervals?

beepbooptheory 2y ago
I think its gotta be just interesting on the theoretical side around learning/cognition. Otherwise yeah, its like learning exactly how salty something is when you taste it: not a total waste of time maybe, but not directly beneficial for you as the cook. In school, at least when I was there, ear training was a combination of recognizing harmony, rhythm, and simple melodies with an arbitrary key, ontop of, of course, sight singing. It is of course quite sufficient to have this skill with all of that, but hardly necessary!
olddustytrail 2y ago
It's not beneficial at all. Don't do it. The only music that will sound "right" is autotuned crap from the most boring types of music. Anything interesting will sound "out of tune".

2c2c2c 2y ago

i made https://perfectpitch.study https://perfectpitch.study a week or so ago. i am old and musically untrained and wanted to see if rote practice makes a difference (it clearly does). most of the sites of this type i found annoying as you can't just use a midi keyboard, so you just get RSI clicking around for 10 minutes. I tried getting adsense on it, but they seem to have vague content requirements. Apparently tools don't count as real websites :-(. I couldn't even fool it with fake content. what's the best banner ad company to use in this situation?

jawon 2y ago
Gave it a try. After a few minutes I felt more like I was recognising the samples than I was recognising the notes. Not sure what you can do about that short of physically modeling an instrument.
- yojo 2y ago
  Latest browser APIs expose everything you need to build a synth. See: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_API/Simple_synth https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Web_Audio_A... There are some libraries that make it easy to simulate instruments. E.g. tone.js https://tonejs.github.io/ https://tonejs.github.io/ It should be possible to generate unique-ish variants at runtime.
  - westurner 2y ago
    OpenEar is built on tone.js: https://github.com/ShacharHarshuv/open-ear https://github.com/ShacharHarshuv/open-ear limut implements WebAudio and WebGL, and FoxDot-like patterns and samples: https://github.com/sdclibbery/limut https://github.com/sdclibbery/limut https://glicol.org/ https://glicol.org/ runs in a browser and as a VST plugin https://draw.audio/ https://draw.audio/ "Using the Web Audio API to Make a Modem" (2017) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471723 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15471723 gh topics/webaudio: https://github.com/topics/webaudio https://github.com/topics/webaudio awesome-webaudio: https://github.com/notthetup/awesome-webaudio https://github.com/notthetup/awesome-webaudio

appleorchard46 2y ago

The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me. Not surprised this reinforces that it's mostly about memorization and practice. Think of a song you know best, one you've listened to hundreds of times: can you sing it or hear it in your head pretty accurately (edit - not accurate intervals, but accurate pitch)? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch. Learn what note it starts on and you're 1/12 of the way there.

ByThyGrace 2y ago
> and you're 1/12 of the way there. I'm afraid my favorite song is on a microtonal scale...
dingnuts 2y ago
>Think of a song you know best, one you've listened to hundreds of times: can you sing it or hear it in your head pretty accurately? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch No, this is relative pitch. You might be singing it in the wrong key. That's why you can sing something a capella and it sounds right and then you add an instrument playing the correct notes and it doesn't.
- zeroxfe 2y ago
  It's not. You should actually try out the exercise. (I used this approach to build partial perfect pitch, i.e., to sing/identify a small number of specific pitches.) Close your eyes and try to imagine a song that you know really well. Imagine the original version playing on your phone/mp3 player/cd/record. Pick a stable note from that song (for me, the third note of the beginning of "Tears in Heaven" is a solid A.) Try to sing it and match the pitch in your head. As you practice it you'll get better, and do it faster, and over time even be able to recognize it in the wild.
  - Rooster61 2y ago
    Wild. I read the bit about "Close your eyes and imagine...", and immediately also thought of the third note of "Tears in Heaven" without having read the rest of the comment. Those are either crazy odds or that's just THAT memorable of an opening to a song

narag 2y ago

"Code availability: The codes used in this study were not available to the public."

viraptor 2y ago

Watch out what you wish for though. With age our hearing degrades and the experienced frequency shifts. There's a number of people with perfect pitch recognition who mentioned getting annoyed when they got older and everything sounded slightly off. For practical music, relative pitch is fine and commonly trained.

dbalatero 2y ago
I'm 38, and my pitch recognition will degrade a half step off sometimes, often when I haven't been playing much.
- TheBozzCL 2y ago
  Interesting… that’s been happening to me but because I’ve been playing a lot with my guitar tuned half-step down. I hear a note that I associate with a chord in my guitar, and I have to remind myself that I need to compensate for it.
alfiedotwtf 2y ago
Dave Smith restarted making Prophet 5 synthesizers a few ago, and the initial batch of users complained that the high frequencies weren’t like the original but when he tested them he couldn’t see any issue… Turns out he was testing by ear, and he was a few decades older since stopping the last production run, and his hearing had rolled off on the high end! Remake users were instructed on how to fix it and newer batches had the fixes built in - maybe by using a younger ear :)
- brailsafe 2y ago
  The existential dread he might have felt after realizing this suddenly would be palpable.
- musicale 2y ago
  > his hearing had rolled off on the high end! Depending on the degree of hearing loss, I wonder if hearing aids might have helped a bit?

yowzadave 2y ago

Absolute (“perfect”) pitch is, for some people, a kind of shorthand for supreme musical giftedness…when in reality it’s more of a curious party trick than a skill that is valuable for a musician or composer. So you can train yourself to do it—what’s the point exactly? Plenty of people who don’t have that skill have an extremely accurate ear for relative pitch, which is the one that actually matters.

yongjik 2y ago
I don't think it's just a parlor trick. (I don't have it, BTW.) Obviously it depends on the instrument: for example, if you're playing the piano you can completely forget about absolute pitch. But if you're singing a long passage without accompaniment, without absolute pitch you may end up drifting. Also, a lot of classical composers enjoyed elaborate key changes: e.g., you'll have your main theme in A major, and then it appears again in D major, and later it comes back as A major. If you have absolute pitch (those composers likely did), then they all sound different, as if you first see a picture in black and white and later it comes back in blue. If you don't, then that part of composition completely passes over your brain.
- crazygringo 2y ago
  > But if you're singing a long passage without accompaniment, without absolute pitch you may end up drifting. You don't need absolute pitch to not drift. You just need to maintain relative pitch. That maintenance requires attention and some practice, but it doesn't even remotely require absolute pitch. And remember that singers with absolute pitch have their own problems, in that singing the same song when accompanied by a new piano that is tuned slightly differently becomes much harder and annoying. Whereas for most people they don't notice and sing in tune with it effortlessly. Also, people with relative pitch certainly experience key changes, the sense of tension introduced by a new one, and the sense of "returning home" and relief when you go back. Composers write for that sensation which is shared by everyone. Not for any kind of absolute perception. And I don't know why you think classical composers overwhelmingly had absolute pitch. Do you have any evidence?
- physicles 2y ago

xhevahir 2y ago

This guy, Chris Aruffo, has an interesting blog about his research in absolute pitch. I don't think it's been updated in quite a while though: http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/ http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/

laurieg 2y ago

What's the gold standard for learning relative pitch? Related, how can you learn to hear multiple notes at the same time? It blows my mind that people can hear a piano chord and pick out individual notes.

jdietrich 2y ago
There are lots of different approaches to ear training. A very useful starting point is an app like EarMaster or Perfect Ear, which offer a Duolingo-like gamified course in ear training. Hearing simultaneous notes is really just a matter of decomposition. Can you sing the first three notes of Kumbaya or Ob-la-di Ob-la-da? If you can, then you already know the three notes of a major chord - root, major third and perfect fifth. If I were to play you a C major triad on the piano (C E G) then you'd easily be able to pick out those individual notes. Most people already have that kind of intuitive sense of pitch, they just need to learn how to name things to systematise that intuition. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDIm_2qS5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhDIm_2qS5s
- laurieg 2y ago
  > If I were to play you a C major triad on the piano (C E G) then you'd easily be able to pick out those individual notes Unfortunately, that is exactly the thing I cannot do. I play the piano but I can't pick out multiple notes. From a simultaneous sound. To me it's like witchcraft. Same with singing. I find it very hard to tell if a recording is one person singing or two people singing in harmony.

lmpdev 2y ago

I’ve learnt absolute pitch for a single note - F3 I was learning to sing for the first time at age 20. Learning Michael Buble’s cover of the jazz standard Fever with my singing teacher at the time Mohini It took about an hour of reinforcing the first 5-10 seconds of the start of the song on loop That was almost 10 years ago - still nail that specific pitch every time From there I can usually sing that scale correctly without reference, but it’s all anchored on the initial interval of F3 down to D#3 Accurate relative ear is more important anyway, I don’t sing anymore but if I was learning I’d focus on intervals and scales/modes over anything else ——— Another helpful interval is just nailing the octave jump, an example is Chet Baker’s You Don’t Know What Love Is

sarreph 2y ago
That is not absolute pitch - it’s pitch memory, see: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonal_memory I too have experienced the same phenomenon of being able to recall a particular note. Agree with you that relative pitch is more important!
- mettamage 2y ago
  Oh, is absolute pitch the ability to recall every note? I once heard a C on a piano and played it a few times and then remembered it. I thought it was absolute pitch.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    Perfect pitch is being able to name any individual note and to hear when they're not quite in tune. Although it's also a curse, because perceived pitch changes with age, so you have to keep learning to compensate. And domestic acoustic pianos are often tuned a semitone flat, which really messes with your head. Advanced pitch recognition is being able to pick out the notes in a complex chord in open form. Professional pitch recognition - as demonstrated by some conductors - is being able to list the pitches in any random set of notes played at the same time on a piano. Including notes in the lowest octave. It's a lot easier to get to the last two if you have the first.

anigbrowl 2y ago

Code availability The codes used in this study were not available to the public. Eyeroll

TimByte 2y ago

Many singers can reproduce pitches with high accuracy, even without formal AP. Would love to see a study comparing pitch accuracy in trained singers versus instrumentalists

20k 2y ago

>size of error reduced by 42.7% (from 2.62 to 1.50 semitones) for the trained timbre, which generalized partially to an untrained timbre. Overall, results provide more convincing evidence for the learnability of AP judgment in adulthood beyond the critical period, similar to most perceptual and cognitive abilities. >they learned to name an average of 7.08 pitches Its worth noting that this does not fall under a standard definition of absolute pitch. Being a semitone out with 7 tones of recognition isn't even close Its always been true that adults can learn pseudo absolute pitch - ie improved pitch classification compared to an untrained adult. What's up for debate is if you can learn true absolute pitch, which has an error of 0 semitones, and you can name all 12 pitches with a 0% error rate The slightly amusing thing is that the evidence they have is precisely the opposite of the conclusion - you cannot learn absolute pitch as an adult

debeloo 2y ago
> you cannot learn absolute pitch as an adult Why?
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  You can easily look it up yourself. Early musical training appears to be necessary but not sufficient for the development of AP. Forty percent of musicians who had begun training at ≤4 years of age reported AP, whereas only 3% of those who had initiated training at ⩾9 years of age did so. Self-reported AP possessors were four times more likely to report another AP possessor in their families than were non–AP possessors. These data suggest that both early musical training and genetic predisposition are needed for the development of AP. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0002929707634867 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000292970...
  - debeloo 2y ago
    > You can easily look it up yourself. Thanks for the quote and link. I do appreciate those who make the internet a better place even though they toss around a slightly passive aggressive advice along the way!

PaulRobinson 2y ago

Whenever AP comes up I feel I see the same discussion over and over: A bunch of people with AP state that AP can't be learned in adulthood, that it is a rare gift that can only be learned in childhood. Another group of people who enjoy music deeply who did not learn AP as children counter: they have trained themselves to be able to recognise notes well enough that they can play or sing by ear, to a high degree of accuracy. AP crowd counter: you've learned relative pitch. That's a party trick. The "gift" is being able to hear an obscure note and immediately recognise it out of context and to tell when it's even very slightly out by a tiny amount. The other group counter that that sounds like a party trick, and anyway, doesn't that make getting old really horrible as hearing changes? AP group insist that no, it's not a party trick and you can't come in. The difference is like being a native fluent speaker of a language instead of learning it as an adult: when you learn a language you translate it in your head, that's not true fluency, and people with AP have "fluency" in tones in a way that isn't like a "translation step" that learned behaviour is like. Then the other group come back with "Wait, I know people who became fluent in another language in adulthood by complete immersion and who think and dream in their adopted language, so are you saying that's not real, or that a musical equivalent can't exist?" AP crowd stand firm: you just don't understand, you can't learn it, please don't say you can, you're doing something different... And this goes on, and on, and on... And this thread is just more of that. People with AP insist it can't be learned in adulthood, but I'm not sure what scientific evidence they have to support this, other than their own (seemingly unscientific) observations and interpretation. Studies that show RP improving towards AP are dismissed because the subjects have yet to reach the same skill level, but without evidence that it can't. I think most people would argue relative pitch allows you to enjoy listening to and creating music at least as much as AP does, but does not have the downside of hearing degradation causing existential angst and disappointment to the same degree in later life. As somebody who likes listening to music and occasionally tinkering at a keyboard or bass guitar, I'm a bit confused why this is such a contentious debate every time, and why in particular the AP crowd are insistent they're special even though it seems to be a curse to have AP rather than a blessing, as they themselves describe it. I'm also not convinced that somebody starting out with RP can't develop "fluency" in terms of AP over time. Instead of everyone just arguing about their own interpretations and experiences, is there clear science one way or the other?

soyyo 2y ago

Maybe someone can correct me, but I don't think this is absolute pitch. It is pseudo-perfect pitch, based on pitch memory, and it was already known that it can be trained. As an amateur musician myself, I understand the desire to have perfect pitch, but it seems that the problem of perfect pitch is seldom mentioned. Usually, people talk about the common annoyances, such as transposed music, non-standard tuning, choruses that drift in pitch, etc... but the actual hard one is that it fades away with age. First, it starts "shifting," and people will start to believe that a note is actually a semitone higher or lower than it actually is, and then eventually, it is completely lost. There is research that indicates that this is very common, and people with perfect pitch are more likely to lose it than to keep it. This is a huge blow—imagine a whole life relying on this one skill to support all your music-related activities, and suddenly, it's completely gone. I think this video gives a nice summary of all this from the point of view of a musician: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4

bjoli 2y ago
I think one problem that the people with extreme sensitivity have is that not only choruses but also orchestras drift in pitch. I work professionally, and some orchestras are extreme. My orchestra usually starts at a at 442 but end up at 443,5 but I have played in places that start 441 and end up above 445. Good orchestras with very good reputation. Some are extreme at the other end. I played with the Munich Phil and despite the concert being a killer for every woodwind and brass instrument involved, we didn't drift a cent despite the hall being almost 28c and the end of the concert. A colleague (now retired) had the crazy kind of perfect pitch where he could say the note and how many cents off it was. At least to something like a 5 cent sensitivity. Back before we switched to LED lighting that must have been horrible. The stage r got crazy hot during concerts, and I remember having to struggle to not end up at 446.

tzs 2y ago

> Piano tones from three octaves (C4 to B6) were generated using two different digital pianos (Roland FP60 and Yamaha Arius), and guitar tones spanning the same range were generated by an online synthesizer B6 would be the 31st fret on the high E string on a guitar, which is why I suppose they had to use a synthesizer instead of a real guitar since real guitars generally have 19 frets (classical), 19-22 (acoustic), or 21-24 (electric). Guitars have been built with more than 24 frets but most guitar players will have never played one or even heard one. Personally I'd find about half of that C4 to B6 range to be in what I consider to be the annoyingly screechy range which would probably affect my performance on the training.

antoinebalaine 2y ago

That's not perfect pitch. 90% accuracy in pitch recognition based on memory retrieval is not perfect pitch. As for the bunch of comments here claiming they acquired AP at adult age for "only" one or two notes: that's not perfect pitch either. AP can't be acquired at adult age - your brain only learns to recognize pitches during your neural plasticity phase as a baby (provided it's exposed to enough variety), just like it acquires speech and color-discrimination. Also, AP is not a party trick. Not having it is akin to being color blind - even if you could "remember" what colors are supposed to look like, you would _still_ be color blind. That the article's abstract and researchers are willing to claim the opposite despite their own evidence : this smells like butt-hurt denial.

viburnum 2y ago

Looking at the graphs it appears that two people had big improvements and the others not very much.