[HN Gopher] Perfect pitch study: Why can't we identify music not...
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Perfect pitch study: Why can't we identify music notes as well as
colors?
Author : mzs
Score : 65 points
Date : 2021-08-31 17:23 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.uchicago.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.uchicago.edu)
| The_rationalist wrote:
| There is a drug that allow perfect pitch to be learned past early
| childhood
| https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
| mkr-hn wrote:
| The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about
| it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life
| while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other
| drawbacks.
|
| Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
| kazinator wrote:
| We do not identify colors well.
|
| The eye is receptive to three colors, that's it.
|
| We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture
| of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas
| we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having
| harmonics).
|
| We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But
| there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate
| as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you
| think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put
| them side by side, you generally find that they are totally
| different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored
| surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not
| uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all
| directions.
|
| When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch,
| but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves.
| Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the
| result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In
| relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also,
| regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man,
| woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered.
| Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near
| to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a"
| versus a slightly lower "a".
| utexaspunk wrote:
| >We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a
| mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure
| color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of
| notes having harmonics).
|
| Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the
| difference?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I don't think polarity has anything to do with this. The idea
| is that we can't distinguish at all between two independent
| light waves, one at ~600nm (red) and one at ~540nm (green),
| vs a single light wave at ~580nm (yellow).
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the
| difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where
| there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as
| long as they fall on the cones similarly.
|
| Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which
| the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not.
| Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4
| is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are
| constructed culturally.
|
| The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different
| purposes.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Indeed. The ear is a one-channel spectrum analyzer and the
| eye is a camera with a two very distinct regions each serving
| different purposes. Both of these then have a ton of post-
| processing done in the brain before their outputs are
| presented to higher order functions.
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| I'll agree and add one example: from a repeated sequence of
| played notes, and a repeated sequence of flashing colors - I
| can readily identify a modified note, however not a modified
| color. For context imagagine 10 seconds of a song VS 10 seconds
| of flashing lights... If on the 3rd repetition of the pattern,
| one random note was changed and one random color was changed,
| which change would be most immediately obvious?
| akomtu wrote:
| I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer.
| It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or
| violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do
| the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can
| hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to
| notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Harmonics _and_ base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed
| string have a completely different shape, the first is going to
| decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of
| the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly
| triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or
| open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative
| strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that
| some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes
| of vibration.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| "Base wave form" (ignoring transients and such) doesn't
| matter for humans, and how a wave is perceived by humans is
| determined by the set of harmonics it contains.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Fair enough, the waveform is the relative strength of the
| harmonics. But it's a convenient short-cut to 'the whole of
| the relative strength of each harmonic as compared to the
| fundamental, as well as which harmonics are present'.
|
| A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a
| pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
| poetaster wrote:
| And modulating the string on a cello to harmonize with a
| reed is extraordinarily rich in harmonics.
| zwieback wrote:
| One of the papers quoted by this paper is something I always
| wondered about: how can anyone have absolute pitch when you can
| detune your intrument slightly, e.g. if the Oboe gives the A and
| everyone tunes to that there's no guarantee that it's 440. Not
| everyone picks 440 for A anyway so really absolute pitch has a
| basic cultural reference.
|
| Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds
| with some exposure.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Or they find it _extremely_ annoying. I once played a piece
| with notes that were hanging just below or above their 'true'
| pitch and then slowly home in on it and the listener could not
| stand it and asked for it to be switched off.
|
| If you want to test yourself against it:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM
|
| Enjoy :)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is basically rounding the
| frequency to the nearest pitch in your resolution. As a
| pianist, my resolution is more or less half of a semitone, so I
| can tell that a note is off, but it doesn't get _really_
| annoying until it 's so off that it's close to rounding to the
| next note.
|
| This resolution differs from person to person, mostly based on
| how they use it. I had a piano tuner visit my house yesterday
| as it so happens and his resolution was to about 10 cents. It
| was amazing.
| zwieback wrote:
| Do you think that over time you could "re-tune" yourself to
| different pitches, e.g. if you listened to a ton of music
| that's detuned by half a semitone that eventually you'd think
| that that's the new normal? Or maybe it's something that gets
| hardwired at a young age and then you're stuck with it?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I'm probably too old for that, but yes.
|
| Actually I'm now in my 50s and perfect pitch starts going
| south as you get older, at least for me and a number of
| others I know. I easily get locked into thinking things are
| a half-step lower than they really are.
| davepeck wrote:
| This tracks exactly with my experience. I'm in my 40s and
| my pitch is definitely no longer perfect -- it's close,
| though? It's not uncommon for me to be semitone off these
| days.
|
| Is this a studied aspect of perfect pitch? I've never
| read about it but, talking to friends, it seems like a
| common experience.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I had some fun with my piano tuner to 'check' his tuning
| using a stroboscope for each individual string (not a choir)
| after he was done and it was quite amazing to see how
| accurate he was. And what blows me away is how fast an
| experienced tuner can work, what would take me hours - and
| with tremendous fatigue in hearing afterwards - takes him 1/2
| hour and with much better results.
| joegahona wrote:
| What is your reaction to some of the historical-tuning
| recordings that have proliferated in the past decade or so,
| especially on piano? Do you see aesthetic value in those
| tunings, when taken as a whole piece, or are you so locked in
| to equal temperament that it's irritating to hear alternative
| tunings?
|
| I have a pretty decent relative pitch but not perfect
| pitch... to me these tunings sound interesting but I can't
| say I derive any more pleasure from them. Sometimes they give
| me the feeling of not quite having my footing underneath
| myself. They're more of an oddity.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Those tunings are not so off as to be annoying, so I don't
| really have much of an opinion of them except to think that
| they're kinda silly. Other tunings (like 31 EDO) I just
| can't handle.
| joegahona wrote:
| Never heard of 31 EDO till now. Indeed, pretty brutal
| even for this non-perfect-pitch person:
| https://youtu.be/hLjnNflnvEQ
| jacobolus wrote:
| We can't identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all
| relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a
| visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of
| one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant
| training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be
| learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in
| isolation is just as difficult.
|
| (Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs.
| color identification, because the physical mechanisms and
| resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can
| reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red,
| Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal,
| and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when
| you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there
| are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular'
| Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a
| practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a
| standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones
| has no real equivalent in color.
| dhosek wrote:
| For all we know, there may be an equivalent light octave to
| the sound octave (mathematically it would make sense). The
| catch is that the frequency range of visible light falls
| entirely within a single "octave," but then if you think
| about the color wheel which puts red next to violet which are
| at opposite ends of the color spectrum and it suddenly makes
| sense.
| jacquesm wrote:
| In fact it would be only about half an octave.
| dhosek wrote:
| Unless I've done my math wrong, it's roughly a doubling
| of frequency between the two ends of the spectrum, that
| makes an octave. From Wikipedia: "A typical human eye
| will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to about 750
| nanometers.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to
| a band in the vicinity of 400-790 THz."
| mikewarot wrote:
| There are 88 notes on a piano, but there are at least 2000
| pantone colors... I'd be surprised if there are more than 10
| people total who can correctly match them all.
|
| The difficulty of both problems is understated.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'd be surprised if anybody would be able to do the color
| test.
|
| At the same time: even if people can't tune a piano they
| can usually fairly reliably tell when one is out of tune.
|
| But more impressive than absolute pitch to me is to be able
| to identify a four-note chord at once.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| A piano is particularly easy to tell if it is out of tune
| because most notes have multiple strings. They beat
| against each other horrendously when one of the strings
| is at a different frequency than the other. If all the
| strings for a single note were out of tune by the same
| amount most people would think the piano was fine.
|
| Can most people tell when a guitar is out of tune? A
| guitar so badly out of tune it plays different notes is
| recognizable by almost everyone, but a guitar only a
| little out of tune would not be noticed by most, IME.
| lhorie wrote:
| The weird aspect about our perception of colors is how our
| brains interpret them _relative_ to nearby colors (e.g. https
| ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:C...)
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, but that's optical illusion territory, similar things
| will happen with music, there are all kinds of acoustical
| illusions:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
|
| As well as the 'missing fundamental' I linked to in another
| comment in this thread.
|
| If you pick some Jazz piece apart it isn't rare at all to
| come across a chord that sounds absolutely awful. But then
| you play the piece as intended and it all makes sense
| within the larger context of the notes/chords/intervals
| around that chord. This never ceases to surprise me.
| nautilius wrote:
| How do you explain optical phenomena such as the viral dress
| phenomenon then?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres.
| ..
| nitrogen wrote:
| Part of that was variations in displays. Cheap laptop LCDs
| especially crush white levels and black levels if not
| viewed from exactly the right angle.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That is based on the color of the illumination and this of
| course affects the perceived color. It's the difference
| between emitted and reflected light, but in the case of a
| comparison with musical notes it would be fair to only use
| emitted light.
|
| There is no exact equivalent to reflected light with its
| own color illuminating a colored drawing. Though it would
| be interesting to see if such a thing could be constructed
| somehow artificially using a device that receives sounds
| and then somehow frequency shifts them before emitting them
| again. That would be a fun experiment!
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| > It's the difference between emitted and reflected light
|
| Wat?
|
| Everyone who observed that optical illusion did so by
| observing it on an emitted light panel.
|
| Color perception is entirely relative. There are
| countless images that demonstrate this. For example:
| http://www.optical-illusionist.com/illusions/same-color-
| illu...
|
| When we perceive emitted light color we're also
| perceiving RGB emissions that are blended. I love giant
| LED panels that when you get close you can clearly see
| the individual colors. It's a trip.
|
| Humans are horrible (incapable?) at evaluating absolute
| color. It's entirely relative.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Ah ok, that's simply an optical illusion. The brain is
| full of pre-processing that you can mess with in order to
| trick it to see things that aren't there and to shift
| colors around as well as to play with figure-background.
| But that is a case of 'bad faith', you could do the same
| for audio illusions, it wouldn't help to draw any further
| equivalence between the visual and the auditory system.
|
| Both work on the perception of waves with a certain
| periodic repetition but there the equivalence ends, there
| is no such thing as 'timbre' in vision, we simply don't
| work with harmonics there and the shape of the wave in
| sound is very important and non existent in vision (you
| can see a single photon in sufficiently dark adapted
| conditions, your eye as a fundamental particle
| detector!).
| ikura wrote:
| I think a Ring Modulator might have some equivalence.
| Depending on the frequency you set it to the ability to
| accurately detect the frequency of the input notes can
| diminish quite drastically.
| nautilius wrote:
| But then still everyone would have the identical
| misconception. Clearly, that was not the case.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Even if we can reliably identify 12 unique divisions of
| spectral color, that's still very different from the 12
| semitones in Western music, because the 12 spectral colors
| would span the entire range of human spectral color
| perception, whereas the 12 semitones repeat every octave, and
| humans can hear up to 10 octaves.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a
| baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone.
|
| It's when you start trying to distinguish the same type of
| sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless
| trained, ideally from a young age).
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick
| out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes.
| However, this is much more difficult if not nearly
| impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre
| changes can even differ between two semitones depending on
| the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B
| on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B
| is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st
| position.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, this is very clear on wind instruments where the
| timbre can change substantially from one note to the
| next. The saxophone is notorious for this, it is
| technically a woodwind and it is absolutely unplayable if
| you don't tune the individual notes as you play them, you
| have to use your embouchure to get the notes to match
| pitch. Especially noticeable when playing with other
| instruments.
|
| https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-
| staff/2020/1/30/...
| jacquesm wrote:
| I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from
| middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of
| course that only works for the range that I can whistle.
| pimlottc wrote:
| "Everyone can do it, aside from those who can't"
| Grustaf wrote:
| Brightness is not related to colours, and while colours are
| "relative" in the sense that colour perception is influenced by
| context, it's still the case that you can accurately identify
| lots of colours in an absolute sense, given a specific context.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You can also accurately identify a lot of sounds, given a
| specific context.
|
| But if you had to identify colors with the same precision
| that you expect someone to identify pitches to be considered
| to have "perfect pitch", it would be very difficult for
| almost everyone. If you took random chips from the
| Farnsworth-Munsell 100 hue test, one at a time, and had to
| give the correct numerical code for each hue, you would not
| be able to do it. (Which is why the test itself only requires
| that people put the hues in order when comparing them side by
| side, not identify each one absolutely.)
| Grustaf wrote:
| I mean you can easily identify 5-10 absolute colour
| frequencies, but how many can identify even a single
| absolute tone?
|
| Ordering things in relative order isn't very relevant to
| this discussion I think, since the point was about the
| difficulty in detecting absolute sound frequencies. And of
| course, anyone can put all the notes on a piano in relative
| order.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Identifying 5-10 absolute colors is similar in difficulty
| to being able to identify whether a note is bass,
| baritone, tenor or soprano. Which anybody who knows what
| those 4 words mean would be able to do.
|
| Except for border or overlapping notes of course. Giving
| them one of those would be like expecting cyan to be
| consistently labelled as blue or green.
| Grustaf wrote:
| "bass, baritone, tenor or soprano", that's only four
| categories, that's much less than 10. And I would guess
| that timbre will play in here as well, since the human
| voice is pretty restricted. A bass is not just a
| frequency shifted soprano.
|
| Play a note and ask someone to reproduce it after ten
| seconds or so. How close would people come? Then show
| them a card with a certain pure colour and then ask them
| to reproduce that with a hue slider.
|
| Don't you think people would come much closer with the
| colours?
|
| Don't confuse language and perception, we are not talking
| about labels such as "cyan" here, that's not directly
| relevant.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| The difference between red and blue is half an octave in
| frequency. So 4 tones is about right.
| sfink wrote:
| Heh. Personal anecdote: at 10 seconds I would do as you
| expect, but if the gap were longer I would do much better
| with sound.
|
| I discovered relatively recently that I simply cannot
| remember colors. My vision is fine, and my short-term
| memory for colors is also fine. If I'm in a room and you
| ask me to close my eyes and say what color the walls are,
| I can do it. But if you ask me the color of the wall of
| my bedroom, where I go every night, then I will only be
| able to tell you if we recently painted it and verbally
| discussed paint colors. (I think it's a shade of blue? Or
| maybe green. Possibly gray. My family likes to pester me
| with this question, so you'd think I would memorize the
| answer at some point, but I haven't.)
|
| I'm kind of curious how common this is. But since I lived
| several decades without noticing it in myself, I wouldn't
| be surprised if it wasn't very well recognized.
| watwut wrote:
| People will fail the pure color test and that is all
| there is to it. They will know it was light blue, but
| won't be able to choose correct light blue. Nad they will
| sux even more with mixed non-primary colors.
|
| Reproducing visual properties is much harder then you
| think.
| Grustaf wrote:
| There is no "fail", it's just a matter of how many
| colours one can distinguish, vs how many absolute tone
| frequencies.
| roberto wrote:
| > If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a
| visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12)
|
| Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
| spiraling_shape wrote:
| The visual light spectrum starts at around 380nm, if we
| arbitrarily assign that to be "C", and we ascend(ascending
| wavelength, descending frequency) from that with the same
| 12-tone "equal temperament" used in music we get:
|
| C 380
|
| B 402.595975856532 ~violet
|
| - 426.535578357562
|
| A 451.898703701034 ~blue
|
| - 478.769998960052
|
| G 507.239144584613 ~green
|
| - 537.401153701776
|
| F 569.356689213139 ~yellow
|
| E 603.212399747916
|
| - 639.081275592823
|
| D 677.083025786658 ~red
|
| - 717.344477638087
|
| C 760 infrared
|
| With 760 being one "octave" below 380, though the visual
| spectrum ends at around 740, which means the visual light
| spectrum is a bit less than one octave.
| jacobolus wrote:
| If your ear had only 3 types of detectors which only
| detected 3 specific frequency distributions within about
| half an octave but could locate stimuli within your field
| of hearing with pinpoint accuracy, after a lifetime of
| using that equipment you would probably be able to make
| relatively fine distinctions in pitch in that very limited
| range.
|
| Instead, the human cochlea contains thousands of little
| pitch detectors spread over 10 octaves, and the perceptual
| architecture and typical training built around it is
| designed to detect relative pitches (e.g. noticing the
| difference between two different people's voices more
| strongly than the absolute frequency of the fundamental
| pitch of either voice).
|
| Eyes and ears just have fundamentally different physical
| mechanisms and we make sense of visual and auditory stimuli
| in fundamentally different ways. They are not really
| directly comparable.
|
| In both cases, however, our perception is strongly context-
| relative.
| nwatson wrote:
| But yellow isn't necessarily just a spike at 569.356...
| There are plenty of other combinations of frequencies that
| together will stimulate the green- and red-cones enough to
| create a perception of (nearly?) the exact same yellow.
| spiraling_shape wrote:
| Right. I put the tildes before the color names to
| indicate that they are "around here".
| srcreigh wrote:
| The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different
| sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a
| female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
|
| Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to
| determine exact rgb values of a color.
|
| What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks
| still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to
| 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if
| this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is
| something deeper there.
| Grustaf wrote:
| > Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a
| female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
|
| That's about timbre, not pitch.
| srcreigh wrote:
| That's my point. I believe red vs blue is more like violin vs
| voice than A440 vs Exyz.
| jacquesm wrote:
| But it isn't. To make it a bit more specific:
|
| Red vs Blue is ~700 nm vs ~475 nm (about because they are
| ranges rather than specific frequencies where most people
| who are not vision impaired will agree something is either
| red or blue).
|
| Violin vs voice is more like 'triangular wave form with f,
| 2f, 3f, 4f, etc as the harmonics and voice would be 'mostly
| sinusoidal waveform with a bunch of vocal 'chords' acting
| as strings each of them with a sligthly different base
| pitch, with those same harmonics.
|
| But if you were to compare for instance to a reed
| instrument the harmonics would look completely different.
|
| Some singers by the way are capable of controlling their
| vocal chords in such a way that they can create rising and
| falling pitches at the same time.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas
| srcreigh wrote:
| Although I concede and agree with you on a basic level
| that base frequency is more like color than timbre, there
| are some other interesting factors.
|
| One. Almost all instruments have different timbre
| depending on the pitch. At least at large scales, your
| voice's deepest note does not have the same timbre as
| your midrange, or your highest note. Similarly with
| pianos. I wonder if this is also true on a micro level
| between A and B on a piano?
|
| Two. As I mentioned above, perfect pitch folks _don't
| recognize sine waves as well as piano notes_. Why? That's
| very curious.
|
| In any case, I was also going to mention that musical
| notes are interesting because they loop. A is 440Hz and
| 880Hz. I was expecting to find something like 2x blue
| frequency = yellow, which would highlight a difference
| between color and sound. However, interestingly, that is
| not the case. The entire visible spectrum of light is
| within one "octave" of frequency. Fascinating... :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, it is fascinating, highly recommended book about
| sound:
|
| "The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus.
| Grustaf wrote:
| It's not though, red and blue have specific frequencies,
| just like a 440 Hz sine has.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, red and blue have a 'range' where most people will
| agree on what's red and what's blue. They are not exact
| frequencies but frequency bands that have been culturally
| defined. You can most easily see this in green, there are
| 100's of 'greens' but we call all of them green.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Sure, but we are still talking about bands of
| _frequencies_, not sets of harmonics (although there are
| colours that are not pure). So it would correspond to
| identifying 440 Hz with a tolerance of N Hz.
|
| And we are not talking about colour naming, we are
| talking about colour perception. So the situation would
| be "here's a particular green colour, please find a patch
| from this heap that has the same colour."
|
| I mean, just because the word "green" is very broad
| doesn't mean we can't _see_ the difference.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Of course we are not talking about harmonics, the first
| overtone of 'red' would be a bit above ultra-violet and
| invisible.
|
| And as for green, yes that is the best color to do that
| test with because we have the biggest discriminatory
| capability for green. And most people would be able to
| distinguish with a large degree of accuracy an
| increasingly high frequency shade of green given similar
| intensity. But once you start varying the intensity and
| the hue at the same time I think people will get confused
| quite rapidly as to which shade has the higher frequency
| hue.
|
| Color is much more 'loose' than sound, that's why we
| 'tune' our instruments and why painters don't necessarily
| need to 'tune' their palettes so precisely to be able to
| make something that looks harmonious.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Sure, it's complex, but the basic point still stands.
| Most people will probably be able to accurately identify
| 10-20 different colours, if we fix the luminosity etc and
| they are given cards with each colour.
|
| When it comes to sound though, even many musicians won't
| be able to find even a single absolute note, even if we
| fix the timbre, intensity etc.
|
| So colour and sound are definitely fundamentally
| different, which I don't find very surprising, there are
| few situations in the wild where it would help us to be
| able to distinguish absolute frequencies, timbre is more
| important.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What is known as timbre is technically the degree to which
| certain harmonics are present or not.
|
| The most interesting case of this is the missing fundamental,
| which we apparently re-create in our heads to hear it even
| when it isn't really present!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
|
| This really threw my for a loop while building my mp3->midi
| convertor.
| Grustaf wrote:
| I know what timbre is, that's my point. The difference
| between a violin and a piano is not about frequency.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Who says we can identify colours well?
|
| Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception
| of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly
| opened my eyes, pun intended.
|
| As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to
| play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the
| skill unfold.
|
| Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as
| distinct as different people's voices.
|
| The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's
| "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then
| FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...)
|
| I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another
| level.
|
| I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that
| there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even
| imagine until one begins to acquire them.
|
| I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs
| so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I
| can sort of see what that must be like.
| ThomPete wrote:
| you can learn relative pitch not absolute pitch. Absolute pitch
| is only possible before 3 years old or something like that.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Prove it.
|
| This is just argument by assertion.
| tralarpa wrote:
| Maybe 3, maybe 6, maybe 9. Different sources give different
| numbers. But "there are no known cases of an adult
| successfully acquiring [Absolute Pitch]" (from the
| Valproate paper).
| jacquesm wrote:
| He's not in your pay.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Yeah, and I don't have to take his word for it either.
| swalls wrote:
| Absolute pitch may not be possible to learn as an adult, but
| what they're describing is having good pitch memory, which is
| different from absolute/perfect pitch, and is definitely
| something you can develop with a bit of practice.
| dylan604 wrote:
| you keep replying with this like it is absolute. why do you
| feel so strongly about this "fact"?
| dekhn wrote:
| This is, in fact, current mainstream scientific position.
| There is a lot of distinction in abilities between absolute
| and relative.
|
| What I personally experienced is there are some individuals
| who can identify specific notes down to the unit frequency
| (I played a 439Hz tone, the person said "Uh you're a hertz
| short" and I fixed the bug in my program). That level of
| ability is generally believed to be not learnable after the
| brain loses a certain amount of plasticicity.
|
| Continuing from my own experience, people who do not have
| absolute pitch at that level can improve their skills in
| pitch detection including: identifying intervals,
| identifying octave, identifying common notes in an octave,
| and people like me who can barely tell you the interval
| between two notes can improve their pitch detection
| somewhat.
|
| Whta is rarely or never observed it people with relative
| pitch gaining perfect absolute pitch after growing up,
| regardless of the amount of training.
| gerbilly wrote:
| > rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch
|
| This seems like hair splitting to me. You even refute
| yourself by including the word _rarely_.
| dekhn wrote:
| human physiology is not self-consistent, nor is the
| language I use to communicate those facts./
| dylan604 wrote:
| > and people like me who can barely tell you the interval
| between two notes
|
| And a musician probably couldn't tell the difference
| between = vs == or & vs &&. If you don't recognize that
| someone that spends all of their time doing something
| will be better at that something compared to someone
| else, then there's just a large disconnect. Also, the
| concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new
| concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of
| a concept.
| chatbot2 wrote:
| As someone who studied music throughout school and played
| for quite some time, there is clearly be something innate
| about perfect pitch. I think a good allegory is people
| who can multiply giant numbers in their heads easily
| (previously referred to as "idiot savants" though that
| term sounds ridiculous now). While the rest of us can
| certainly practice and improve our multiplication skills,
| we'll always be missing some connection that allows them
| to do so effortlessly.
|
| The link below is a study which shows that the
| distribution of pitch recognition among the general
| populace is bimodal (you have to scroll down a bit). This
| matches with my experience that, irrespective of
| practice, people either have it or they don't.
|
| https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
| empeyot wrote:
| "In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary
| adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child
| passes about six years old [...]. (Although [...] there are
| exceptions of sort [...])" in Prof. Anders Ericsson's book
| "Peak" in which he presents results from his research area of
| expert performance. He also quotes a published study in which
| childs aged 2 to 6 consistently were taught perfect pitch: "A
| longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute
| pitch: A practical report of training with the 'chord
| identification method'"
| MandieD wrote:
| I wonder how much overlap there is with the ability to
| easily gain native-level proficiency in a language. We're
| raising our child bilingual, partially because no one
| should learn German from me (started in college, speak well
| enough to get through life, but everyone knows I'm a native
| English speaker), but I'd be ok with our child learning
| English from my husband, as he speaks well enough that
| Americans think he's British. His mother, who also learned
| in high school and university, taught him for a maternity
| leave year at age 4, then left it to the school system,
| which didn't expose him to English again until he was 10.
| His younger sister does not speak English nearly as well as
| he does. I'm quite sure that early exposure is why he
| doesn't have a German-sounding accent when speaking
| English.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into
| two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously
| through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities,
| each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when
| that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other,
| filtering out effects due to changing light sources and
| qualities.
|
| That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can
| tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at
| filtering out common timbres.
|
| I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine
| wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same
| position.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Sound perception is _extremely_ parallel at the physical level,
| each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid
| filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer).
|
| Your characterization is not in line with how things actually
| work.
|
| > I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine
| wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same
| position.
|
| I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than
| identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical
| level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct
| (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum
| analyzer).
|
| But isn't the result a curve that can be expressed as the
| simple superposition of waves? That simply can't be done for
| vision. (edit: without breaking time by encoding scanlines -
| which is just serializing it.)
|
| > I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than
| identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
|
| I'd take it. I'd imagine it'd be as easy to train somebody to
| recognize 12 pitches from a particular piano in a particular
| room as it would to train someone on sine waves. But my point
| was it'd be easier to train them on either than on pitch in
| general, from many different instruments with different
| timbres.
| Hoasi wrote:
| Some people can identify music notes as well as colour. One
| should note that colours perception may also essentially differ
| from one individual to another. Early training works wonder for
| music. Colours are everywhere, and most people can see, whereas
| most people don't train to recognize individual notes. That skill
| is not that useful, including for trained musicians. Most people
| can agree that the sky is _blue_. However, a trained painter may
| be able to see much more nuance.
| mywittyname wrote:
| There is a training aspect to identifying color as well. People
| from cultures without the name for a color group have
| difficulty identifying a color as distinct without a name for
| such group.
|
| Heck, even people from the same cultures will disagree on the
| classification of the same color experienced in the same
| situation. Remember the dress controversy a while back? People
| couldn't agree whether or not it was black & blue or white &
| gold.
| Grustaf wrote:
| > One should note that colours perception may also essentially
| differ from one individual to another.
|
| Sure, but most people can reliably and predictably name some
| dozen colours.
|
| > That skill is not that useful, including for trained
| musicians.
|
| If people in general had had perfect pitch, music might have
| looked different from today. Absolute pitch would probably have
| been an important feature. The reason it isn't important is
| precisely because most people can't perceive it.
| Grustaf wrote:
| Without having read the link, one obvious answer is that colour
| vision helps us tell what plants are ripe, but detecting absolute
| frequencies probably has little survival value.
| toast0 wrote:
| A shared understanding of what colors are what helps us
| communicate as well. Of course, some of that is reinforcing,
| but I would never tell people I'm at the house where the
| windchime rings about a middle C; but I would tell them I've
| got a white fence and a red door.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| We're _terrible_ at identifying colours, because colour is
| context dependent. Which makes it easy to create colour illusions
| like these:
|
| http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm
|
| We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled
| conditions.
|
| No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers,
| commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such -
| minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-
| calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled
| ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.
| swayvil wrote:
| As for the "Why". Speaking as a guy who meditates.
|
| We usually don't actually perceive stuff. Sights, sounds,
| thoughts, smells.
|
| What we perceive is a reaction to the actual perception. Or a
| reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Down that chain a bit.
| Ending, more or less, with an idea.
|
| Those reactions are like a fog between you and the actual
| perception.
|
| When we concentrate, or meditate, or otherwise get a clearer,
| closer look at the perception, we see it in an uncommon way.
|
| We see the "truer" form. And much that was hidden becomes
| evident.
|
| This is the main power of the artist, musician, athlete,
| scientist.
| TaupeRanger wrote:
| The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is
| based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between
| the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you
| divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them
| (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think
| you'd see very similar performance.
|
| Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even
| _that_ good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
| watwut wrote:
| Significant proportion of population is color blind to some
| extend. The rest sux about identifying colors too, just somewhat
| less.
| twirlock wrote:
| Perfect absolute pitch would not be convenient for certain types
| of creativity, e.g. improv. It's not conducive to an
| understanding of modality.
| poetaster wrote:
| No one has mentioned microtonak music. The breadth of perception
| on the continuum becomes more similar between sight and sound
| when you discriminate more. Think the carnatic system. Or Harry
| Partch. Or the oud. Modal music in microtunings gets very
| colourful.
| pjdorrell wrote:
| Some observations:
|
| * The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our
| ears is absolute.
|
| * Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to
| calculate relative pitch.
|
| * Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical"
| skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the
| musical quality of music.
|
| Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as
| an "amazing" skill.
|
| But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should
| be amazed by is relative pitch perception.
|
| My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists
| because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute
| pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical
| function.
|
| It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute
| pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative
| pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to
| distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a
| deep rumbling sound.
| psychometry wrote:
| >They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a
| dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have:
| Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum.
|
| Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article.
|
| I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for
| notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as
| hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes.
|
| I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three
| or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative
| pitch and chord theory.
|
| I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I
| could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
|
| There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the
| things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've
| seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing
| mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in
| bizarre 15-note chords.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect.
|
| > I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I
| could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
|
| But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that
| initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from
| there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a
| random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one
| reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that
| one random note and getting it to within some tolerance.
|
| > I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants
| doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note
| in bizarre 15-note chords
|
| That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same
| time these savants often seem to have to have given up
| something else.
| poetaster wrote:
| The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid
| fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is
| always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on
| sax.
| dhosek wrote:
| The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really
| tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer
| ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so
| that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that
| key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered
| twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered--I
| had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and
| things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the
| church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to
| playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on
| organ.)
| jacquesm wrote:
| True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It
| all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period
| correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with
| other instruments.
|
| There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing.
|
| A great piece of open source software for anybody that is
| even remotely serious about this:
|
| http://piano-tuner.org/
| kqr wrote:
| What fascinates me about this topic is that both "absolute pitch"
| and "absolute colour recognition" is essentially cultural.
|
| We are born with perfect pitch but lose it when we don't use it.
| How our culture uses and names colour determines which we can
| perceive absolutely.
|
| The point is they're more similar than they seem.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > We are born with perfect pitch
|
| I know there are some studies on this but it's far from
| conclusive enough to state this without any further qualifiers.
| I suppose you are indirectly referring to the study referenced
| in this article?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford
| itronitron wrote:
| There are also individual differences in how people perceive
| color (not just how they label them), even among those who are
| not color blind.
| jancsika wrote:
| > Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening
| expertise of most people.
|
| Isn't naming CSS colors also beyond the visual expertise of most
| people?
|
| Granted there are more CSS colors than there are keys on a piano.
|
| Still-- give me a color scheme with 80 distinct colors and I'll
| give you poor scores of test subjects.
| dhosek wrote:
| I had the "misfortune" of having a friend in high school who was
| preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify
| pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex
| arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, _that_ time), he was
| sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of
| manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing
| the "Get Away" break from Chicago 's "Hard to Say I'm Sorry" by
| playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then
| repeating the process.
|
| My take away from this was that this was something that either
| you could or couldn't do and there was no in-between.
|
| Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of
| demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being
| produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7
| days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for
| rehearsals.1 By the end of the process, I was transcribing
| straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a
| piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I
| could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song
| that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head.
|
| So, it is a learnable experience.
|
| But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly
| losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear
| implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my
| ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In
| researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone
| deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the
| hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to
| recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case
| with a CI.
|
| ------
|
| 1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from
| my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and
| brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music
| at rehearsal.
| lhorie wrote:
| > I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of
| a song
|
| I've seen this being described as _relative pitch_ , which is
| apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to
| acquire via practice.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch.
| While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute
| pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if
| done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely
| indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it
| becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians
| are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period
| of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones.
|
| In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than
| absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as
| people get older and because it works better in ensembles since
| A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque
| performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard.
| Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind
| instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on
| chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major
| thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment).
| Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments
| since it feels wrong.
| tbihl wrote:
| > because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a
| reference pitch for a very long period of time.
|
| Not just highly skilled ones. I just checked, and I still
| have my A-flat 2 reference note that I've been carrying
| around since 2013, having not used it for at least 5 years
| and barely doing any singing/piano these days.
| cameronh90 wrote:
| So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or
| Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted,
| even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped
| up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too
| long.
|
| This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute
| pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
| ThomPete wrote:
| i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch
| after the age of 3.
| [deleted]
| vdqtp3 wrote:
| Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3
| other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?
| dsego wrote:
| Probably Rick Beato.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It is possible, but it requires some native talent and a
| painful amount of practice.
|
| https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-
| may-...
|
| https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-
| pitch...
| The_rationalist wrote:
| There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do htt
| ps://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010..
| .
| jimhefferon wrote:
| > perfect relative pitch is completely learnable
|
| Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
| Bud wrote:
| The same way it's taught if you go to music school.
| Practice. Have music played to you, and write it down.
| Start with very short pitch sequences; this will require
| you, of course, to learn to recognize intervals accurately.
| Then move on to longer and more complex sequences. Lather,
| rinse, repeat.
| sharkjacobs wrote:
| I used to have a music teacher who taught me to practice by
| associating the openings of common songs with each interval
|
| I've forgotten most of them now but the Jaws theme "duh-
| duh-duh-duh" is a minor 2nd, Twinkle Twinkle little star is
| a perfect 5th, and "my bon-" of My Bonnie Lies Over the
| Ocean" is a major 6th
| klodolph wrote:
| Practice transcribing music. There are also simple ear
| training applications you can get for your phone. Relative
| pitch is a fairly simple concept, so there's a
| proliferation of apps that teach it, at least to a basic
| level.
|
| It's also common to have a library of songs in your head
| that start off with each interval. Everything from "Fur
| Elise" for the minor second, to "Somewhere Over the
| Rainbow" for an octave.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've put some links in a comment below to help with pitch
| and interval training.
| pvarangot wrote:
| If a beginners point of view is useful, let me tell you I'm
| using Ear Trainer on iOS and was using Complete Ear
| Training on Android, I've only been doing it for like six
| or eight months with a break in-between. I went from
| nothing to being able to recognize m2, M2, m3, M3, P4 and
| P5 upwards and I'm working on m3/M3 downwards and
| harmonically now, usually with 85%/90% accuracy. I can also
| tell major from minor 7th chords apart with like 70%
| accuracy and tell the major and minor scale and their
| pentatonics apart upwards and downwards with above 80%.
|
| If you are interested in transcribing I would recommend a
| teacher. My girlfriend can arrange live on piano and has
| insanely good absolute pitch and I she helped me on moments
| of extreme confusion and frustration that I wouldn't have
| gotten out of on my own. Also I have a tuner app on iOS
| that plays a reference pitch and also tells you what
| interval you sang, it's called TonalEnergy Tuner. I didn't
| need to sing until I got into learning downwards intervals,
| and I think I would never would be able to learn those
| without being able to sing do re mi in tune. Singing for
| some reason really helps you "imagine" and remember tunes.
|
| On the same amount of time I am now very seldom but
| sometimes able to transcribe very simple synth lead
| melodies to my synthesizer, as I was also learning basic
| sound design in parallel to this.
|
| One year ago I didn't even know you could learn absolute
| pitch as an adult, I'm 37. I'm completely mind blown by the
| fact I learnt what I learnt so far and sometimes I just
| don't believe it happened and am scared it will just like
| completely go away or something because it's like a very
| alien thing for me to be able to do. I don't even know what
| my objective is but it's probably being able to musicalize
| things in my mind and being able to jam with friends.
| bitwize wrote:
| I've been told I have fantastic relative pitch (but not
| perfect pitch) and it's exactly as you describe. For me, it's
| the theme to Super Mario Bros. I _know_ what that sounds like
| in my head, and I know also that it 's in C major. Taking the
| root of that will get me within epsilon of middle C, just
| from my head (I can also take the E or G from the first six
| notes), and then I can reckon whatever note I'm listening to
| on the C scale. I suspect most instances of "perfect" pitch
| are this skill, honed to a much greater degree.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing
| your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present
| day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears
| ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only
| very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment
| of music.
| smegger001 wrote:
| i wonder how long until they can match average default human
| hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed
| it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the
| sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the
| peripheral auditory system. If we were to exceed human
| hearing would people then get implants without a medical
| need?
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing
| changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop
| perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it
| keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function
| of the various components of the cochlear channel getting
| stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not
| sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to
| recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear
| win already.
| jeffwass wrote:
| Thanks for this information, I've been recently going through
| some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what
| they are able to pick out.
|
| Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music
| now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ?
|
| Also which implant model do you feel is best for music
| listenability?
|
| My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is
| very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She's still getting
| used to the new way of listening post-implantation.
| asimpletune wrote:
| That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a
| very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around
| that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always
| people who didn't really put any time into music that would
| talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic
| gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I
| perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their
| kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people
| who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's
| just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100%
| accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff
| all the time.
|
| Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who
| were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who
| just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it.
|
| In general, I would say that people who don't really do music
| are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate
| musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always
| the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth
| is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't
| really make all that much of a difference in the end, after
| practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things
| that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the
| real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have
| that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it
| in whatever aspect you please.
|
| And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano
| is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the
| _character_ of the sound.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like
| to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out
| polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if
| he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I
| say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not
| because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is
| that he has fun making music (which he does).
|
| There is a similar thing about music theory where people from
| the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something
| you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it
| after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all
| that much about a particular piece of theory until they need
| it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that
| they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the
| theory behind it.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like
| this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it,
| and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes.
|
| Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing
| the transcribing was still more talented than I.
| DennisP wrote:
| Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of
| reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without
| anything to compare it with?
| jacquesm wrote:
| I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note
| (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably
| detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is
| higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any
| random note. So identification without some kind of extra
| mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some
| tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano
| takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to
| develop that skill because it would be very useful.
|
| There are some interesting websites for this:
|
| https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
|
| https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
| a9h74j wrote:
| Rick Beato on YT tells stories of musicians realizing that they
| are losing their perfect pitch.
|
| Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training
| around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable
| skill.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord
| progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a
| bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower
| than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing).
| They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct
| what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive
| knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I.
|
| Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of
| work in transcription because unless the piece is doing
| something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an
| equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you
| just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest
| of it can usually be inferred.
| slaymaker1907 wrote:
| It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord
| progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a
| bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower
| than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing).
| They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct
| what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive
| knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I.
|
| Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of
| work in transcription because unless the piece is doing
| something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an
| equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you
| just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest
| of it can usually be inferred.
| leoc wrote:
| Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of
| perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 .
|
| Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
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