4 ms·

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 a

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
- appleorchard46 2y ago
  That's not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to songs you know intimately enough that you can sing a capella (or at least hear in your head) in the right key. Edited original comment for clarity. This might not be something you personally can do, but for those who have memorized a song in that way it's a convenient way of demonstrating that perfect pitch isn't as unattainable as it might seem.
  - viraptor 2y ago
    That's a different exercise though... wrong direction. Absolute pitch recognition is hearing -> pitch. What you describe is memory -> performance -> comparison <- hearing.
    - appleorchard46 2y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean. > Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. [Wikipedia] This is what I'm describing: knowing a song well enough that you can 'hear' it in your head, and use that to accurately identify and re-create a note from it. This is a few more steps than being able to simply 'know' a note upon hearing it but nonetheless can demonstrate the capacity to do so for those who haven't specifically practiced it.
      - Aurornis 2y ago
        This study is specifically about the ability to identify heard tones. It's literally the first line of the abstract: > Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    I have trouble understanding your comment. To me, it sounds like saying that, if I have absolute pitch (i.e., being able to start a song in the right key), then I have absolute pitch. Well, sure, the problem is that I don't have absolute pitch!
stackedinserter 2y ago
> The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me Because it is really magical and unattainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI Show me an adult that trained to this level.
- makeset 2y ago
  That example is literally Beato demonstrating that it's perfectly attainable through deliberate training. Adulthood is a separate discussion.
  - stackedinserter 2y ago
    What made you think this boy got through "deliberate training"? What point are you trying to make?
    - lolinder 2y ago
      The first words of the video are "we're going to do the hardest ear training test of all time", and the description contains a link to "The Beato Ear Training Program". I'm really not sure what it is that you're missing, it's pretty clear. Also, I know from my own experience that the idea that this is an innate skill is bunk—my wife's mother taught her children absolute pitch through deliberate training. Sing a note to them, they identify it, they check themselves on the piano. Repeat. No one in any prior generations had the skill, nor do any of the cousins. Just the kids my wife's mom trained. I'm sure like most skills it's one that is easier to pick up in childhood than later, but it's not some musical innate ability that you either have or lack, it is trained.
      - stackedinserter 2y ago
        > The first words of the video are "we're going to do the hardest ear training test of all time", and the description contains a link to "The Beato Ear Training Program". I'm really not sure what it is that you're missing, it's pretty clear. So you heard a word "test", then looked at a link that says "ear training" (and leads to a page that says "improving your __relative__ pitch") and decided that this 8yo went through the training and got this perfect pitch? Is that what you're saying?
perching_aix 2y ago
> The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me. Not sure why, it's taught and commonly considered to be an ability you're born with rather than something you can develop yourself later on. > However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability, because all adults who have been formally tested after AP training have failed to demonstrate "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch The Wiki article also describes just prior to this cited section that there have been countless attempts at it over the centuries. Doesn't exactly sound like a learnable skill to me.
- appleorchard46 2y ago
  This is literally what the paper we're commenting on is challenging. The source for that claim in Wikipedia (Levitin & Rogers) is expressly addressed in the paper.
Aurornis 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 (edit - not accurate intervals, but accurate pitch)? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch. Absolute pitch can't be self-assessed subjectively like this. Hearing a song in your head is meaningless because you don't have an absolute reference to compare to. Also, please read the first line of the abstract: Absolute pitch in this context also specifically refers to identification of heard tones, not ability to produce those tones yourself (in your head or otherwise). The test for absolute pitch involves playing different pitches spanning an octave and measuring how accurately and quickly the candidate can identify each pitch. The first line of the abstract: > Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references. Even studies of students at prominent music Conservatories have shown low prevalence among their students. These are people who have been training for years and started at a young age. So you can't expect to come anywhere near perfect pitch as a casual person singing a song in your head. Absolute pitch isn't a strictly defined trait. The participants in this study improved their pitch identification abilities after intense training, but they still haven't approached the thresholds of absolute pitch identification used in many of the studies of music students. A common theme among absolute pitch studies is that people who started music at a young age (typically less than 5) score higher on absolute pitch tests. This study doesn't undermine that fact.
- pclmulqdq 2y ago
  I had a music theory teacher who suggested that to acquire absolute pitch, you listen to a tuning fork at A = 440 for 10 minutes a day. Everyone in the class could do all the intervals by ear, so with a strong memory of an A reference, you can fake it. However, my sister does have absolute pitch (I don't), and the difference between "studying a known reference and knowing the intervals" and true absolute pitch is crazy. She can tell you what pitch the fluorescent lights are vibrating at, she can tell you what pitch your speaking voice is at, and all sorts of other things. My understanding of the psychology is that this is more like synesthesia than like something that you can study. There are some people who suggest that kids who hear a lot of "atonal" music (modern jazz, modern classical, etc. - things whose pitch is hard to predict) at a young age are more likely to develop absolute pitch, which makes sense to me but also seems like it might be pseudoscience.
mquander 2y ago
A lot of people arguing in this thread. I'm an adult who started learning piano about two years ago. I found that the following exercise was immediately easy for me with no special practice: - Learn a piano song, memorize it, play it many times. - My wife plays random keys on the keyboard. - I tell her when she got to the opening note of the song by comparing what she played to my memory of the sound. So then I was confused because aren't I not supposed to be able to do that? After reading online it became clear to me that this is called "pitch memory" by musicians and it's a totally normal ability that anyone should be able to do if they remember a sound well enough, and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights. The study linked is also aware of this distinction: > It remains unclear whether the participants [in prior research] really learned the chroma of the tones, which is shared by notes that are one or more octave(s) apart with the same pitch name and considered the essence of AP (Bachem, 1955; Zatorre, 2003), or they merely learned to name a highly specific set of tones based on pitch height.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights. What you're describing is the same concept as fluency in a language. You're at the place where you are still translating the language in your head, but once someone becomes fluent it just comes out in the second language. That there exists a lower bar of skill is actually evidence that it is a learned skill, not evidence that the higher bar is only attainable by some select few who were chosen by genetics or something. We'd expect it to be relatively teachable to young children and rather difficult to pick up as an adult, like languages, and that's pretty much what I've seen in my experience with a lot of very musical people.
PaulHoule 2y ago
Actually many ordinary people have perfect pitch when it comes to hearing a song and singing it https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-memory-unlocks-surprisingly-common-musical-superpower https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-memory-u... It's the being able to name a note and sing it or hear a note and give the name that's rare.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Right, but their point is that if what the article you link to is true—if 44% of people are right on key when singing a song—then it should also be just a matter of collecting 12 songs with different starting pitches and mapping songs to notes and now you've learned a full scale of absolute pitch. Few people do this because it's simply not practical, but that 44% of recordings match the pitch of their source exactly shows pretty conclusively that there's nothing magical behind absolute pitch, it's just that most of us learn to associate pitches with songs rather than giving them names.
  - appleorchard46 2y ago
    Yes, this is exactly what I meant. There are many different interpretations of the original comment in these replies but you're spot on here, thank you for articulating it better.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    That could be a formula to generate notes but might not work backwards. There is something special about musical memory. When I was starting out as an anime fanatic I would quickly learn to sing theme songs like [1] [2] although I didn't understand Japanese at all then. Notably different language have different words for colors, for instance the Japanese word 青い (pronounced aoi) can mean either blue or green. [3] There's been a lot of controversy over whether language shapes perception, but if you do psychophysical tests that don't involve language you find people can tell colors apart pretty much the same no matter how rich or impoverished their vocabulary is [4]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hulET9tn9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hulET9tn9M [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9BapLxwkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9BapLxwkw [3] ラム (Lum), the girl with oni horns and a tiger stripe bikini who appears in [1] has 青い-colored hair which seems to drift in the blue-green area throughout the 5-season anime [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
losvedir 2y ago
I disagree. Absolute pitch is a neurological phenomenon. People who have it experience the world differently. It's not a party trick like you're talking about here to name a note in isolation. There's a fascinating phenomenon known as the Stroop effect[0], where if you get people to read a series of color words (e.g. "purple blue green red"), where the words are colored, but in the wrong color, it slows them down quite a bit. This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly. Well, the Stroop effect applies to music notes, too! People with absolute pitch are impaired from reading a sequence of note names when a non-matching pitch is played at the same time. People without AP can read it just fine. People with true absolute pitch can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has. It taps into the language center of the brain. Does your song trick give you such an overwhelming sense of the note, that if someone played a different note it would be noticeable and distracting enough that you can't read a simple word or music note on the page? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
- smogcutter 2y ago
  > This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly. Hold up, I’m confused. How could people who didn’t know Russian read them at all? There’s probably something obvious I’m missing, but I just can’t parse this at all.
  - Crespyl 2y ago
    I think the idea is that you're reading out the color of the printed word, not the word itself (despite the fact that the word is the name of a different color). So you might have, in a red font, the word "blue", followed by the word "green" in yellow letters. The correct response is to say out loud "red, yellow". This is hard to do when the words are in your native language. So if the words are in Russian, it's an easier task for someone who doesn't read that language, because they aren't distracted by the meaning of the word and can just see the colors. See the example on the wiki page for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
TimByte 2y ago
It's probably just a skill most people never consciously develop because relative pitch is so much more useful in practice.

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
appleorchard46 2y ago
That's not what I'm talking about. I'm referring to songs you know intimately enough that you can sing a capella (or at least hear in your head) in the right key. Edited original comment for clarity. This might not be something you personally can do, but for those who have memorized a song in that way it's a convenient way of demonstrating that perfect pitch isn't as unattainable as it might seem.
- viraptor 2y ago
  That's a different exercise though... wrong direction. Absolute pitch recognition is hearing -> pitch. What you describe is memory -> performance -> comparison <- hearing.
  - appleorchard46 2y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean. > Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. [Wikipedia] This is what I'm describing: knowing a song well enough that you can 'hear' it in your head, and use that to accurately identify and re-create a note from it. This is a few more steps than being able to simply 'know' a note upon hearing it but nonetheless can demonstrate the capacity to do so for those who haven't specifically practiced it.
    - Aurornis 2y ago
      This study is specifically about the ability to identify heard tones. It's literally the first line of the abstract: > Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references.
- yongjik 2y ago
  I have trouble understanding your comment. To me, it sounds like saying that, if I have absolute pitch (i.e., being able to start a song in the right key), then I have absolute pitch. Well, sure, the problem is that I don't have absolute pitch!

stackedinserter 2y ago

> The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me Because it is really magical and unattainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI Show me an adult that trained to this level.

makeset 2y ago
That example is literally Beato demonstrating that it's perfectly attainable through deliberate training. Adulthood is a separate discussion.
- stackedinserter 2y ago
  What made you think this boy got through "deliberate training"? What point are you trying to make?
  - lolinder 2y ago
    The first words of the video are "we're going to do the hardest ear training test of all time", and the description contains a link to "The Beato Ear Training Program". I'm really not sure what it is that you're missing, it's pretty clear. Also, I know from my own experience that the idea that this is an innate skill is bunk—my wife's mother taught her children absolute pitch through deliberate training. Sing a note to them, they identify it, they check themselves on the piano. Repeat. No one in any prior generations had the skill, nor do any of the cousins. Just the kids my wife's mom trained. I'm sure like most skills it's one that is easier to pick up in childhood than later, but it's not some musical innate ability that you either have or lack, it is trained.
    - stackedinserter 2y ago
      > The first words of the video are "we're going to do the hardest ear training test of all time", and the description contains a link to "The Beato Ear Training Program". I'm really not sure what it is that you're missing, it's pretty clear. So you heard a word "test", then looked at a link that says "ear training" (and leads to a page that says "improving your __relative__ pitch") and decided that this 8yo went through the training and got this perfect pitch? Is that what you're saying?

perching_aix 2y ago

> The perception of perfect pitch as this magical, unattainable thing always seemed odd to me. Not sure why, it's taught and commonly considered to be an ability you're born with rather than something you can develop yourself later on. > However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability, because all adults who have been formally tested after AP training have failed to demonstrate "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch The Wiki article also describes just prior to this cited section that there have been countless attempts at it over the centuries. Doesn't exactly sound like a learnable skill to me.

appleorchard46 2y ago
This is literally what the paper we're commenting on is challenging. The source for that claim in Wikipedia (Levitin & Rogers) is expressly addressed in the paper.

Aurornis 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 (edit - not accurate intervals, but accurate pitch)? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch. Absolute pitch can't be self-assessed subjectively like this. Hearing a song in your head is meaningless because you don't have an absolute reference to compare to. Also, please read the first line of the abstract: Absolute pitch in this context also specifically refers to identification of heard tones, not ability to produce those tones yourself (in your head or otherwise). The test for absolute pitch involves playing different pitches spanning an octave and measuring how accurately and quickly the candidate can identify each pitch. The first line of the abstract: > Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references. Even studies of students at prominent music Conservatories have shown low prevalence among their students. These are people who have been training for years and started at a young age. So you can't expect to come anywhere near perfect pitch as a casual person singing a song in your head. Absolute pitch isn't a strictly defined trait. The participants in this study improved their pitch identification abilities after intense training, but they still haven't approached the thresholds of absolute pitch identification used in many of the studies of music students. A common theme among absolute pitch studies is that people who started music at a young age (typically less than 5) score higher on absolute pitch tests. This study doesn't undermine that fact.

pclmulqdq 2y ago
I had a music theory teacher who suggested that to acquire absolute pitch, you listen to a tuning fork at A = 440 for 10 minutes a day. Everyone in the class could do all the intervals by ear, so with a strong memory of an A reference, you can fake it. However, my sister does have absolute pitch (I don't), and the difference between "studying a known reference and knowing the intervals" and true absolute pitch is crazy. She can tell you what pitch the fluorescent lights are vibrating at, she can tell you what pitch your speaking voice is at, and all sorts of other things. My understanding of the psychology is that this is more like synesthesia than like something that you can study. There are some people who suggest that kids who hear a lot of "atonal" music (modern jazz, modern classical, etc. - things whose pitch is hard to predict) at a young age are more likely to develop absolute pitch, which makes sense to me but also seems like it might be pseudoscience.

mquander 2y ago

A lot of people arguing in this thread. I'm an adult who started learning piano about two years ago. I found that the following exercise was immediately easy for me with no special practice: - Learn a piano song, memorize it, play it many times. - My wife plays random keys on the keyboard. - I tell her when she got to the opening note of the song by comparing what she played to my memory of the sound. So then I was confused because aren't I not supposed to be able to do that? After reading online it became clear to me that this is called "pitch memory" by musicians and it's a totally normal ability that anyone should be able to do if they remember a sound well enough, and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights. The study linked is also aware of this distinction: > It remains unclear whether the participants [in prior research] really learned the chroma of the tones, which is shared by notes that are one or more octave(s) apart with the same pitch name and considered the essence of AP (Bachem, 1955; Zatorre, 2003), or they merely learned to name a highly specific set of tones based on pitch height.

lolinder 2y ago
> and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights. What you're describing is the same concept as fluency in a language. You're at the place where you are still translating the language in your head, but once someone becomes fluent it just comes out in the second language. That there exists a lower bar of skill is actually evidence that it is a learned skill, not evidence that the higher bar is only attainable by some select few who were chosen by genetics or something. We'd expect it to be relatively teachable to young children and rather difficult to pick up as an adult, like languages, and that's pretty much what I've seen in my experience with a lot of very musical people.

PaulHoule 2y ago

Actually many ordinary people have perfect pitch when it comes to hearing a song and singing it https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-memory-unlocks-surprisingly-common-musical-superpower https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-memory-u... It's the being able to name a note and sing it or hear a note and give the name that's rare.

lolinder 2y ago
Right, but their point is that if what the article you link to is true—if 44% of people are right on key when singing a song—then it should also be just a matter of collecting 12 songs with different starting pitches and mapping songs to notes and now you've learned a full scale of absolute pitch. Few people do this because it's simply not practical, but that 44% of recordings match the pitch of their source exactly shows pretty conclusively that there's nothing magical behind absolute pitch, it's just that most of us learn to associate pitches with songs rather than giving them names.
- appleorchard46 2y ago
  Yes, this is exactly what I meant. There are many different interpretations of the original comment in these replies but you're spot on here, thank you for articulating it better.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  That could be a formula to generate notes but might not work backwards. There is something special about musical memory. When I was starting out as an anime fanatic I would quickly learn to sing theme songs like [1] [2] although I didn't understand Japanese at all then. Notably different language have different words for colors, for instance the Japanese word 青い (pronounced aoi) can mean either blue or green. [3] There's been a lot of controversy over whether language shapes perception, but if you do psychophysical tests that don't involve language you find people can tell colors apart pretty much the same no matter how rich or impoverished their vocabulary is [4]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hulET9tn9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hulET9tn9M [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9BapLxwkw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9BapLxwkw [3] ラム (Lum), the girl with oni horns and a tiger stripe bikini who appears in [1] has 青い-colored hair which seems to drift in the blue-green area throughout the 5-season anime [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...

losvedir 2y ago

I disagree. Absolute pitch is a neurological phenomenon. People who have it experience the world differently. It's not a party trick like you're talking about here to name a note in isolation. There's a fascinating phenomenon known as the Stroop effect[0], where if you get people to read a series of color words (e.g. "purple blue green red"), where the words are colored, but in the wrong color, it slows them down quite a bit. This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly. Well, the Stroop effect applies to music notes, too! People with absolute pitch are impaired from reading a sequence of note names when a non-matching pitch is played at the same time. People without AP can read it just fine. People with true absolute pitch can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has. It taps into the language center of the brain. Does your song trick give you such an overwhelming sense of the note, that if someone played a different note it would be noticeable and distracting enough that you can't read a simple word or music note on the page? [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

smogcutter 2y ago
> This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly. Hold up, I’m confused. How could people who didn’t know Russian read them at all? There’s probably something obvious I’m missing, but I just can’t parse this at all.
- Crespyl 2y ago
  I think the idea is that you're reading out the color of the printed word, not the word itself (despite the fact that the word is the name of a different color). So you might have, in a red font, the word "blue", followed by the word "green" in yellow letters. The correct response is to say out loud "red, yellow". This is hard to do when the words are in your native language. So if the words are in Russian, it's an easier task for someone who doesn't read that language, because they aren't distracted by the meaning of the word and can just see the colors. See the example on the wiki page for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

TimByte 2y ago

It's probably just a skill most people never consciously develop because relative pitch is so much more useful in practice.