[HN Gopher] Show HN: Perfect Pitch Ear Training ___________________________________________________________________ Show HN: Perfect Pitch Ear Training Author : sergeykish Score : 90 points Date : 2020-10-23 19:08 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sergeykish.com) (TXT) w3m dump (sergeykish.com) | junon wrote: | You inspired me to make an actual Perfect Pitch Test. Not sure | how scientific it is but I randomized some notes prior to the | test note being played. | | https://codepen.io/junon/details/YzWNxZM | sergeykish wrote: | Nice! I am not musician and randomized notes while cool have | not tricked me. | qppo wrote: | How does this train perfect pitch? I have gone through years of | formal ear training, the closest techniques I've seen to true | perfect pitch were exercises for audio engineers to recognize | frequency ranges (iirc, pioneered at University of Michigan a few | decades ago). But even that doesn't give you perfect pitch, it | gives you a strong intuition. | | In conservatories and other classical schools, they teach | relative pitch recognition using the same techniques that have | been used for centuries because pitch is so subjective. When I | did it, they even used different keys to force the kids with | perfect pitch and synesthesia (they gravitate towards music | schools) to learn their intervals. | sergeykish wrote: | As I know no one achieved perfect pitch with this tool. I have | no your background, I've took tool name from the web [1]. Maybe | it is wrong like serverless is deployed on servers though it | should be p2p or flat files. | | I've thought perfect pitch is a knowledge like "this note is | G". You describe intuition as something different (or different | from perfect pitch), maybe we need a special word for it? | | [1] https://www.google.com/search?&q=perfect+pitch+training | supz_k wrote: | For anyone who might not know what perfect pitch is: Absolute | pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is a rare ability of a | person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the | benefit of a reference tone. - Wikipedia | | Most people, even musicians, don't know that this talent exists. | When I was in high school, there was someone who has this skill. | He had started music when he was a very little. Most perfect | pitch persons starts their music in their early ages. This person | in my school "senses" pitches (I think it's similar to how we see | colors.) | | THERE'S NO KNOWN CASES OF ANY ADULT DEVELOPING PERFECT PITCH. | There's a number of studies saying it cannot be developed as an | adult. | | However, I'm doing research for a few months and trying to | develop perfect pitch myself (I have a fine relative pitch). None | has worked for now. I strongly believe there must be a way for | adults to develop this. | | My thoughts on this app: It may help to improve something called | "tone identification", but that instinct of having perfect pitch | is completely different. | | By the way, anyone here have perfect pitch (possibility is | 1/10000)? | | (For any one interested, search Youtube for perfect pitch. | There's a lot of fascinating stories) | FalconSensei wrote: | For what I've seen, all apps/methods for 'developing perfect | pitch' would either not work on adults, or are not actually | perfect/absolute pitch. | y2bd wrote: | Count me in as someone who didn't know this existed/that I had | it until someone else pointed it out for me. I started music in | middle school and got frustrated with a friend who couldn't | play back a melody from a video game we both liked even though | I could (he was much better at violin so I wanted to hear him | play it, haha). | | Thankfully, he knew what perfect pitch was and after figuring | out the disconnect, explained it to me. I honestly thought he | was lying until I asked other folks in the class and found out | they couldn't identify the notes by ear either. I just assumed | it was something I learned to do as a part of the class | instruction. | | I wouldn't say I have any attached feelings/synesthesia to | particular notes besides their western names. | supz_k wrote: | That's awesome. Did you have any musical training when you | were little? (below 7 years) | y2bd wrote: | I think I played recorder for like two months around 8 | years old, but no education beyond that. Didn't have a | musical family either. My younger siblings all picked up | instruments during their schooling as well and I don't | believe any of them have perfect pitch. | kayson wrote: | I realize it defeats the purpose, but if you guess the correct | answer once you can keep clicking the same answer to make the | counter go up | ChrisSD wrote: | If the same instrument is played one after the other I can tell | if it's higher or lower in tone. Otherwise I'm pretty useless. | I'm starting to thing I'm almost tone deaf. | | That would explain my singing. | dang wrote: | HN did tone deafness the other day: | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24852401. From one extreme | to the other. | sergeykish wrote: | That's why I've posted my tool. It is private but looking at | the interest on Tone-Deafness Test why not to share it? | ksherlock wrote: | Doesn't work on Safari. tried it on chrome and clicking on the | correct answer has a tendency to not do anything. | sergeykish wrote: | Click on correct answer increases the counter. My routine | | 1. Ctrl-t to hear the sound | | 2. Ctrl-* to give answer | | 3. Wrong if hear sound, try again (2) | | 4. Correct if no sound, take next sound (1) | | Unfortunately can't check on Safari yet, any errors in console? | raidicy wrote: | I was under the notion that perfect pitch cannot be obtained | after a certain age. | sergeykish wrote: | I doubt it. I have G and C harmonicas, they are very different. | When playing harmonica ears help to find holes. | | I've been practicing for two weeks, currently on G3, C4, G4, | C5, mostly confident (100 correct answers) though sometimes it | tricks me. | necubi wrote: | You're talking about relative pitch, not perfect (absolute) | pitch. Any competent musician will have excellent relative | pitch, which is the ability to recognize intervals between | pitches. This is necessary for transcription, learning music | by ear, jamming, etc. | | Perfect pitch means that, if someone plays a sine wave with | no context, you can tell what pitch it is. | davio wrote: | We had a guy in our college band with perfect relative and | absolute pitch. One time we walked out of the dorms and the | AC was squealing on top the building across the street. | | "Hey Dave, what note is that?" "Do you really want to | know?" heads nod "It's a G" | | One of the other tales was someone with true perfect pitch | could tell the difference between A at 440 vs 441 hz. | dekhn wrote: | I've seen this. When I was in grad school I was playing | with assembly language to click a speaker in a timed | loop, such that it would generate A440. | | I played it to my coworker who was working in my lab, and | he said: "I'm a singer and I have perfect pitch. THat | isn't A440, it's slightly low. Probably one hertz." | | I checked my code and indeed, I had miscomputed the | timer, it was slightly longer than it should have been. | Fixed the code and he confirmed it sounded better, but | not absolutely perfect. | filmor wrote: | AC squealing (and a lot of other noises that are somehow | synchronous to the grid frequency) would be a slightly | off G outside of North America (slightly to high, G is | ~49 Hz and the grid frequency almost everywhere is 50 | Hz), no need for perfect pitch to guess that. | | In North America (60 Hz grid frequency), I'm not quite | sure whether one would recognise it as a A# (58.3 Hz) or | a B (61.8 Hz). | sergeykish wrote: | I know the difference and that's what I am striving for. So | far several weeks, an hour a day, it is quite hard, 700 | answers on answer / 5s rate. | yorwba wrote: | > Perfect pitch means that, if someone plays a sine wave | with no context, you can tell what pitch it is. | | What bothers me about that definition is that it doesn't | specify accuracy. If I play a sine wave at 498.753 Hz, how | many of those decimal places will someone with perfect | pitch get correct? Since classical music is based on | discrete notes with intervals of at least a semitone, maybe | an error of less than half a semitone is acceptable, | because that's enough to sort a note into the correct | bucket? But then what's the average error for people who | don't have perfect pitch? | [deleted] | FalconSensei wrote: | I think it's like: at which point it's a sharp A or a | flat A#? Because when we talk about perfect pitch, is in | a musical context, in the sense that a person can tell | the note that would classify that wave, even without | knowing how many Hz it is | getpost wrote: | I was intrigued by this paper. Haven't tried it though. | | Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ | | Absolute pitch, the ability to identify or produce the pitch of | a sound without a reference point, has a critical period, i.e., | it can only be acquired early in life. However, research has | shown that histone-deacetylase inhibitors (HDAC inhibitors) | enable adult mice to establish perceptual preferences that are | otherwise impossible to acquire after youth. In humans, we | found that adult men who took valproate (VPA) (a HDAC | inhibitor) learned to identify pitch significantly better than | those taking placebo--evidence that VPA facilitated critical- | period learning in the adult human brain. Importantly, this | result was not due to a general change in cognitive function, | but rather a specific effect on a sensory task associated with | a critical-period. | necubi wrote: | I think it's not so cut-and-dry. As a violinist, I can | recognize absolute violin pitches, but can't do so with other | instruments. This is definitely a learned skill; presumably | there's something about the timbre of the different pitches | that my brain has memorized after so many years of playing. | | However someone with "true" perfect pitch is able to detect | pitches across instruments (or even a sine wave) and can | distinguish minute differences in pitch; for example, someone | with perfect pitch can tell that an instrument has been tuned | to A415 (a typical tuning for Baroque music) instead of the | standard A440. | thewebcount wrote: | Similar thing here. I'm a pianist, and while I don't have | perfect pitch, there are certain piano chords that I can pick | out and definitively say, "That's an F major, root position, | with the root just over middle C". But other chords or even | individual notes - I'm not able to distinguish them in that | way. | Nimitz14 wrote: | I do not understand how to use this... how is this supposed to | train something when I'm selecting and can see the note played? | sergeykish wrote: | Thank you, I've updated instructions. | | Click on "Test" to selects new sound and play it. Click buttons | for answer, it plays sound if answer is wrong. I use it with | eyes closed to concentrate on sound. Guess visual indication | would be a good start. I've changed it so it marks wrong button | with color until next "Test". | | The idea is not to guess but to start with one sound, make it | familiar, add another, etc. | grizmaldi wrote: | Rick Beato's take on adults not being able to develop perfect | pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM | | I must say though, watching videos of his kid demonstrate perfect | pitch is quite astounding! | Dowwie wrote: | Rick Beato explains on his YouTube that a child can learn pitch | perfection but it must be trained before 10 years of age | | https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM | RunawayGalaxy wrote: | Rick Beato has some great videos on this subject | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXivZlPu0ms | pier25 wrote: | Been making music on and off for the past 20 years. Over the | years, I've tried many ear training apps but there was little | progress after hours of frustration. | | A couple of months ago I found a very different method. The idea | is is to internalize pitch by singing. For example, you play a | triad on the piano and then sing the 3 notes individually. Or you | train yourself to sing an interval. Say you're working on fifths. | You play a C in the piano and then sing G, then play D and sing | A, etc. I saw results within the first hour. | | If anyone is interested I can try to find the video where I got | this from. | | Another method I can recommend is transcribing music by ear. | You'll be amazed how quickly you will be able to find notes and | then chords once you get more experience. | powersnail wrote: | That's exactly how I was trained. | | The first step is always sight-singing. The teacher gave me a | drone note (for example an A4), and I sang according to a sheet | music. Not necessarily a triad, though. | | Then, it's the other way around, where the teacher played on a | piano, and I tried to figure out the note. | kelnos wrote: | > _The first step is always sight-singing. The teacher gave | me a drone note (for example an A4), and I sang according to | a sheet music._ | | That's a demonstration of relative pitch, not | absolute/perfect pitch. | | > _the teacher played on a piano, and I tried to figure out | the note._ | | It makes sense that you'd be able to retain it for a little | bit, but could you, say, walk into your lesson, cold from the | prior week, and immediately the teacher hits a note, and you | identify it, without practicing first? | supz_k wrote: | This is RELATIVE pitch, which anyone can develop. Perfect pitch | is kind of a mystery. (However, there are some known dogs and | frogs with perfect pitch) | coffeemaniac wrote: | That's not true, by learning what it feels like to sing | different notes it's absolutely possible to "learn" perfect | pitch. There are some individuals of course who are born with | a very acute sensitivity from a very young age (which is | spooky) but there are also people who learn it later. | | If you can imagine learning to recognize and accurately sing | just one particular note (say, middle C). Then if you develop | amazing "relative" pitch it's basically the same thing. | Training more still will enable you to hear very subtle | differences in tuning, but it has to be a standard part of | your training. | sergeykish wrote: | Yes, please. Are not interval training and perfect pitch | different things? | | I'm mostly concentrating on confidence and quantity -- one test | / 5s, running hundreds of tests, trying to discard intervals | and feel chroma. | memset wrote: | Singing - perhaps you know this - is standard in ear training | courses. We are required to sing intervals, sing Bach chorales, | and sing chords in all inversions and qualities, and sing their | resolutions. At advanced levels we are required to sing atonal | passages. | | Then there is the inverse - melodic dictation. Not just | identifying intervals, but chords, their qualities, and | inversions. | | The goal of these is to develop relative pitch, as it is | assumed that adults would generally not be able to acquire | perfect pitch. | ggrrhh_ta wrote: | I am interested. I put around 30 focused minutes to distinguish | E5 and have been able to endure that memory both to recognize | it in the piano and to sing it since. | Zarathu wrote: | B-natural is missing. | sergeykish wrote: | Thank you! Fixed. | junon wrote: | Yeah lol. A# is not the same thing as B. It's the same as Bb | though. | | Also, how do you answer sharps or flats? It just has the | natural notes as answers. | sergeykish wrote: | I will add buttons, which accesscodes would you recommend? | kayson wrote: | ctrl shift for # and ctrl alt for b? | sergeykish wrote: | I've thought of separate names "A z B C u D v E F w G" | (from the end of the alphabet). Your approach looks more | practical, have to ditch accesskey though. | biggieshellz wrote: | Semi-pro musician for 20+ years here. You can't teach this. My | mom has perfect pitch, and I do not. I can play a record and move | the pitch knob to make it play a bit fast, and it will bother her | enough to get up off the couch and change it back. No matter how | much ear training I do, that will never be the case with me. | | I have very good relative pitch, and a highly trained ear, and | that you _can_ teach. If you play me C, I can tell you what the | other notes are based on that, and my internal reference for what | C is persists for quite a while. If you play me a song, I can | hear what the chords are -- the color (major, minor, dominant, | diminished, etc.) and the degree of the scale. But that is all | relative to itself. If I hear the same song played in C, and then | in Db, the two of them will hit me emotionally the same. Whereas | for someone with perfect pitch, I understand it can be different. | And for someone with perfect pitch and synesthesia, I understand | it can be different still -- notes and keys are perceived as | colors. And while I can imagine what that might be like, there 's | no way for me to train myself to _be_ that. | nojs wrote: | I have perfect pitch. For me it's much easier to identify tones | on piano (which I play) than other instruments or sine waves. | So I feel like there is some part of it that's "tuneable". | alfiedotwtf wrote: | Perfect pitch here too... | | Curious if this happens to others - you'll hear a noise (e.g | a glass hitting something, an object falling to the ground | etc) that makes a single tone, and a song immediately starts | playing in your head because it starts with that same tone? | | My stand up desk at an old job was the starting pitch to | Beyonce's Crazy in Love | StavrosK wrote: | Not perfect pitch, but yeah, this does happen to me. I'll | hear a sound and start singing the rest of the song the | sound reminds me of, and everyone will look at me oddly. | toolslive wrote: | Not perfect pitch, but I play a fretless instrument. I | learned to map specific intervals to songs. | minor 2nd : Jaws major 2nd : Frere Jacques | ... | | Now every time I hear an interval these things enter my | brain. | toolslive wrote: | but the pitches on the piano are not perfect, aren't they ? | It uses equal temperament iso just temperament. So shouldn't | a piano sound out of key to you ? | core-questions wrote: | That's not what perfect pitch means, per se. It should work | with any tonal system. | pvarangot wrote: | That's fairly common and the simplest explanation I know | about is that you can "memorize" a sound if you train for it | and then when you hear it you recall the memory without going | through the whole "pipeline" for understanding what it is. | Your memory or "cache" for what C is indexes with the | specific harmonics that make the timbre of a piano. On | another instrument it's a different sound, the main harmonic | is the same one but the timbre is so different that you need | to go through the "let's use perfect pitch for this" part of | your brain. | | It's the same thing mechanics use to identify engine sounds | quickly or why some people can tell who's walking on a | hallway because of how the steps sound. Repeated exposition | to a stimulus that then gets associated with something etches | a memory. | | This not only happens with perfect pitch. To for example know | how to tell a major third from a minor third on all keys you | can "memorize" all the sounds and know which one they are. I | think my brain kinda did that and now I sometimes get | confused with M3 and P5 because of how "similar" they sound | even though you can like totally fit another tone comfortable | between the root and the fifth and the root and the third | don't have enough air for that. | subroutine wrote: | My partner did her dissertation on exactly this. | | If you are interested, see Chapter 3: | | https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0rp5w2rd | dorkwood wrote: | This just makes me want to learn it even more. | sergeykish wrote: | I've heard a story of adult acquiring perfect pitch [1]. He | made a tool for Win32 platform years ago [2]. | | I play (hobby) harmonica and I feel them differently. I like | dark tone of G (blues in D), bright and someone neutral tone of | C, I have A and don't play it much. How can one explain this? | | Do you experience Doppler effect on ski elevator? It was | devastating. Can it be that harmonica trains ears to find a | hole and bend notes? But any fretles instrument should have | same requirement (violin). | | Some people claim adults can't learn languages, while in | reality we lack not neuron plasticity but time, patience, | culture. Maybe skill learned by adult and child is different | but serves same function. It is fine by me to learn "perfect | ear equivalent". At least I can train myself and play with a | kid, maybe he would acquire this skill in full potential. | | [1] http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/ | | [2] http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/software/ | lhorie wrote: | I'm curious how perfect pitch works in terms of temperaments | and tunings standards. For example, do they get bothered by | regular guitar over microtonal ones? (those weird guitars w/ | extra mini-frets)[1] | | I'm really fascinated by our ability to perceive relative pitch | even without training. See, for example, how "detuning" by a | few cents in lo-fi hip hop provides a very distinct feel to the | genre, compared to playing the same tune in standard equal | temperament tuning. | | [1] https://www.thatericalper.com/wp- | content/uploads/2015/06/max... | mhh__ wrote: | Jacob Collier can be accurate to a few cents, microtonal or | not (I assume he thinks in terms of offset to the nearest ET | pitch) | aczerepinski wrote: | I agree, you can't learn this after childhood. As somebody who | went to music school for 10 years I've been around literally | thousands of musicians and have never once met somebody who | developed perfect pitch as an adult. | | On the other hand, if you do have perfect pitch, you can lose | it over time! I've had perfect pitch all my life, and now that | I'm going on 40 I surprise myself by sometimes hearing a song a | half-step off (i.e. I'll assume a song is in F but it's really | in E). This has never happened to me until the past few years. | Not sure how much is due to my ears aging, and how much due to | I'm not a practicing musician anymore. | SeanLuke wrote: | I'm going sharp as well (this started in my 40s). My | understanding is that this is pretty common for people with | perfect pitch. And it is frustrating! | maxov wrote: | I agree, the scientific consensus appears to be that absolute | pitch cannot be developed after a certain age, and that this | age is related to the 'prime' language acquisition ages. Tonal | language speakers (e.g. Mandarin) have absolute pitch with | higher frequency, possibly because their ears have needed to | train to distinguish tones in this critical period. | | As someone with absolute pitch, I should say I have not found | it musically useful, and I would hesitate recommending people | train for it even if it was possible. When I was learning to | play jazz, it was actually a major crutch for me. For jazz | especially, the modes, chords, progressions, and relationships | between tones are really important and are what determines the | 'color' of what you're playing. Harmony in general is | determined by the relationships between tones, not the absolute | tones themselves (mostly - there are of course differences in | sound playing three octaves up or down), and an ear for | absolute pitch doesn't help much there at all. | | I could use absolute pitch to identify chords and modes, but it | didn't help me 'think' about and play within them the way | relative pitch does. A good ear for relative pitch, and an | understanding of harmony go much farther. | toolslive wrote: | There are several recorded cases of people acquiring perfect | pitch late in life as a result of getting _tinnitus_. So what | they do is learn the frequency of their 'ring' and map | everything from there. I guess some people would call that | cheating. | kelnos wrote: | > _Tonal language speakers (e.g. Mandarin) have absolute | pitch with higher frequency_ | | This is interesting, because a tonal language like Mandarin | does not care about absolute pitch; it's all relative. For | example, 1st tone is a (usually higher) flat tone. But it | doesn't matter what pitch you use. 2nd tone is a rising tone, | but it doesn't matter what pitch you start at or end at; it | just matters that the two pitches differ enough that your | listener can tell that there was a change, and that it was | rising. | | I wonder why that sort of thing _also_ leads to a higher | prevalence of absolute pitch. | akeck wrote: | A friend of mine has a teenager who developed perfect pitch | in middle school. Their first language is English, but they | are learning Mandarin very rapidly (along with 2-3 other | Chinese dialects). | Hoasi wrote: | > As someone with absolute pitch, I should say I have not | found it musically useful | | True. Perfect pitch can indeed prevent you from appreciating | some kinds of music that become too predictable, too fast. | gabereiser wrote: | Or purposefully recorded at 432hz instead of 440hz... :( | viraptor wrote: | Considering 432hz is not really wrong, just different, | does it bother you when listening? Is it the same with | microtonal music? Or performances in baroque pitch? | kazinator wrote: | I don't have perfect pitch, but I have pitch memory. I can | recall the sound of the A string of a guitar being plucked, | then hum the note which matches what I "hear" in my head, whip | out tuner app and see that I'm indeed at 110 Hz. | wdfx wrote: | I mostly agree with all the above, but as a guitarist/singer* | there is distinctly something about transposing songs - it is | clearly obvious that most songs work best in their original | keys and quite a number of times transposition completely | changes how a song sounds, to the point where some songs when | transposed simply do not work at all. | | If music was all about relative intervals, surely this wouldn't | be an issue? | | * Not the world's best singer, hence my observations around | transposition, as I try to bend songs I like into a range I can | just about manage. | powersnail wrote: | That's because you are using a guitar, which is not perfectly | in tune no matter how you tune it. | | For an equal temperament instrument (like a midi keyboard), | transcription would be seamless. | | For a fretless instrument, transcription can be made | seamless, if the player is good at intonation. | | However, the timbre of the instrument can still be a little | different for each key (e.g. open strings vs fingered notes), | but that's a nuance on instrument rather than transcription | per se. | jdashg wrote: | Sound recording, reproduction, and even instrument | resonance are usually not a perfectly flat EQ also, so | transposing up or down can hit different frequency- | dependent distortions. | sergeykish wrote: | Transposing with a capo should preserve it exactly. | necubi wrote: | At least on violin the different strings have slightly | different timbres, as do different fingerings. Playing a G4 | as 3rd finger on the D string will not sound the same as | playing it in third position on the G string even with very | precise intonation. | amelius wrote: | > My mom has perfect pitch, and I do not. I can play a record | and move the pitch knob to make it play a bit fast, and it will | bother her enough to get up off the couch and change it back. | | This makes me wonder why someone would _want_ to have perfect | pitch. | kelnos wrote: | Right. It's perhaps useful if you're a musician (though I'd | argue having relative pitch is much more useful), but | otherwise it just feels like an annoyance that will reduce | your enjoyment of many everyday musical things. | jdnier wrote: | This is such a good explanation, and similar to my experience. | You've hit all the points that I've tried to explain to | musician friends. Some people have a very different experience. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2020-10-23 23:00 UTC)