[HN Gopher] Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire ab... ___________________________________________________________________ Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012) Author : marcorentap Score : 269 points Date : 2023-04-29 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago) (HTM) web link (journals.sagepub.com) (TXT) w3m dump (journals.sagepub.com) | Tade0 wrote: | I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons | growing in a certain pattern? | | When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too | loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something | akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a | sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase | wheel using your hand. | | It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in identifying pitch, | because the distortion would just sound differently depending on | pitch - I associated it with a few notes and could roughly | identify them - especially the lower ones (E, D and C# | specifically). | | The effect faded over time and now I can't do it any more. | | In any case, non-newtonian fluids exhibit such distortion and the | body is full of them(most notably blood). I wonder if they play | any role in this? | 1letterunixname wrote: | I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech | impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, | confirmed by tuning fork. | | From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian | or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number | of engines it had without looking. | | My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my | left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, and it | sounds like water is perpetually in my left ear. | stevekemp wrote: | I used to recognize cars by their engine-noises, and hear | bats when I was walking home through various parks late at | night up until I was early twenties. | | These days too much loud metal, and age, have taken their | toll, and I have no ability to do either of these things any | more. | tomcam wrote: | That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank | you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute | sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and | friends and it's a hard thing to explain with no one else | notices. | | For me however it's a largely positive experience. I am | hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, | voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed | digital music. | | On the other hand, musicians playing or singing out of tune, | gives me a visceral response, and I have been down to leave | clubs when a musician is having a slightly off night. | ChainOfFools wrote: | do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising) | misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above | average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point | where artifacts from music compression bother me that much. | I don't have an official testing result to prove or define | this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice | things in the ambient sound environment that most others | either don't notice or tune out, and this has at least as | many downsides as benefits. | | If someone is a loud chewer, or drink slurper, it's as if I | can hear every single bit of muscle and conjunctiva flexing | and saliva sloshing around inside their jaw, and the glorp | glorp sound of their swallows, if we're both in an | otherwise quiet room. Or if there is a car alarm going off | or dog barking three blocks away, sounds other people | appear to be completely unaware of or passively filter out | can sometimes drive me into quiet boiling stress that is | completely irrational yet impossible to reason myself out | of, and i just have to leave. | tomcam wrote: | Exactly as you describe. Agonizing but it sounds insane | to people so you can't say anything. I excuse myself from | social situations more than once a week. | Tade0 wrote: | Oh, this is a _fun_ (deep-fried sarcasm here) thing to | have, ask me how I know. | | It's not well researched, but apparently what you (or | actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response. | | I started using it to gauge whether I'm upset with a | particular person over something, because it would | intensify in such cases, and reflect on that. | | Also helped my friend manually remove breath and lip | sounds from a recording he was doing for an indie mod for | a game because, well, with enough compression it was | painful to listen to for me. | tomcam wrote: | > apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a | fight-or-flight response. | | OK I can come out of the closet. These sounds provoke a | kind of panic inside me, but I never connected it to | fight or flight. Feels very right to me. | Tade0 wrote: | I see red. I'm surprised I had any friends in school, | because I was just awful to people. | 1letterunixname wrote: | The only known condition for hearing one's eyeball move is | a 3rd window somewhere in the inner ear, so there's no | meaningful differential diagnosis. I received a formal | diagnosis by an otolaryngologist (via high-resolution CT of | the superior canal) and audiology but I already knew the | conclusion. | | I could get brain surgery and I'm "a good candidate" for | it, but do I really want a surgeon cutting a large hole in | the side of my head, jacking up my brain, and then packing | my superior canal with my spare tissue*? | | * I flatly refuse to have tissue implanted that isn't my | own. | aphexcx wrote: | What you heard is likely a rare hearing disorder called | Diplacusis or Polyacusis - aka hearing additional erroneous | pitches: | https://www.neilsperlingmd.com/blog/2018/05/everything-you-n... | | I've had it in my right ear ever since being exposed to a loud | engine for 9+ hours in 2021. It gets noticeable for loud | sounds, especially in the 3700-5200hz range; in my right ear, | I'll hear a high-pitched ringing overtone on top of whatever | external I'm hearing. It's quite frustrating, but seems to come | and go. Nice to hear that it faded over time for you - gives me | hope! | Tade0 wrote: | I think it was three years before it stopped being unpleasant | and another three that made it largely go away. | | I remember designing an amplifier circuit for a college | project, listening to the output sine wave while looking at | the frequency domain and thinking "that unpleasant feeling is | just the THD being over 0,5%". | | Fingers crossed for your recovery! | Infernal wrote: | I'm really curious about the circumstances of a loud engine | for 9+ hours. Were you involved in auto racing or something? | seanhunter wrote: | Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other | things. People learn to identify the pitches because they sound | different and learn the names for them. | | Nerd note: the name "Perfect pitch" is something of a misnomer | because the frequencies the note names refer to is a social | construct which has changed over time[1]. A=440 is the | predominant concert pitch now but since "pitch taste" generally | gets brighter/sharper over time A=443 is used now by the Berlin | Philharmonic for example instead as a concert pitch. In the | Baroque period we know (from looking at surviving fixed-pitch | instruments like historical organs) that their reference A was | generally a bit flatter than that but it's not consistent. | Nowadays musicians playing historically-informed performances | have settled on A=415 as a common baroque pitch standard | because it's helpful for everyone to agree so they can have | instruments made that play that pitch standard. | | [1] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch... | bmitc wrote: | > Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other | things. | | Is that true though? I had a friend in college who had | perfect pitch. I asked him all the time how he learned it, | and he said he didn't know. It just started happening. He | never explicitly trained for it. | | It also wasn't just about notes. He could nearly | instantaneously tell chords and keys from the radio or going | to the symphony. I would test him using my guitar as well, an | instrument he didn't play. | | It's quite rare to obtain skills by never practicing them. | [deleted] | kortilla wrote: | He practiced somehow if he knew the names. You can practice | a skill without being trained. | kayson wrote: | I don't think "pitch taste" is a good way of describing it. | It's not about the pitch itself. It's about the timbre. | Musicians wanted a brighter sound, which they could | accomplish, for example, by tightening their strings a little | more. I personally really like a darker mellow sound and very | much enjoy the 415 A and historically informed performances. | I also think pushing to a 443 modern A is stupid and tune all | my ensembles to 440. There is a little practical bonus to | starting higher, though, which is that it helps mitigate the | tendency of pitch to drop over the course of the piece. | overgard wrote: | I've heard that some people with absolute pitch lose it as they | age (50's and 60's), but they tend to lose it in a weird way. | Apparently, they still have absolute pitch in a sense, but it | just kind of shifts over time so it's a little offset. It'd be | like if you could still see color, but all the sudden your blues | started to look purple or something like that. Curious if anyone | with absolute pitch can confirm. | troupe wrote: | If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach | children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. | They practice by associating a different colored flag with each | chord. | cvg wrote: | Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color | rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each | key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have | this same color, key association. | cosarara wrote: | But not every synesthetic person sees the same colors for | every key, right? | altairprime wrote: | I have a step in my fashion work where I pause and consider | what the colors I'm selecting will look and feel like to a | normal person. Converting back and forth between | [optimistic-seaglass-springtime] and "teal" isn't very | accurate, but I'm certainly accustomed to it. I'm going to | try this technique soon now that I know about it; as I'm | already color sensitive to pitch, I suspect the value will | be in training that sensitivity rather than memorizing | their hues. | j7ake wrote: | Anybody got a link to the article ? Or can summarise what the | chord identification strategy is ? | Willson50 wrote: | https://sci-hub.ru/https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... | lkschubert8 wrote: | https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html these seems to describe | it. | adverbly wrote: | Is there software available for training this? | somenewaccount1 wrote: | What is absolute pitch? | bjoli wrote: | I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony | orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, | achieve and sustain perfect pitch. | | I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice | it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note | was to put in in relation to my own voice. | | Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), | I still often just instinctively know what note I hear. | freedomben wrote: | How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I | can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about | it not being possible) | 49531 wrote: | There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and | then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note | is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error | learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of | create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use | a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others | out there. | sparky_z wrote: | That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a | standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being | able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, | without hearing the 1st note to reference from. | pclmulqdq wrote: | I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have | acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for | 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the | pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked | long-term. | C-x_C-f wrote: | I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around | I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the | standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that | strategy makes sense | [deleted] | ska wrote: | There is some good evidence that children whose first | language is tonal (e.g. chinese) develop perfect pitch at | much higher rates than those whose is not (e.g. english). | This strongly suggests that at least if you catch it at the | right developmental stage, it is learnable. | | I haven't seen anything equivalent for learning later in life | though, although ear-training exercises clearly make your | estimation better if you are disciplined about it, but that | is relative, not absolute. | diydsp wrote: | There are a handful of Android apps. Some use samples. Others | have addl ear training exercises that are even more useful | than PP. | vnorilo wrote: | Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My | "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what | each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. | | For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I | will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a | reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the | perfect pitch folks do. | | Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you | said, it is not that useful. | psutor wrote: | Same here, also as a former bassoonist - each note on the | bassoon has extremely unique timbre, and I find it very easy | to identify them. | | No perfect pitch for other instruments. | fsckboy wrote: | from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of | negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a | lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not | enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be | aggravated if I don't have to?" | muxator wrote: | Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the | same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a | timbre plus relative pitch sensibility. | | I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch. | samstave wrote: | May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? | | (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I | was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be | owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I | attribute it to 'bad actors' | hluska wrote: | Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to | distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. | Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on | command. | | If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a | piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a | continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch | after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect | pitch for a short time after they stop playing and others | (apparently) always have it. In that aspect, it's a little | like memory. | | Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald are two famous people you've | likely heard who had absolute pitch though I have never read | or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly | useful. Of the musicians I know who have worked to develop | it, it's mostly kind of a party trick. | | If you're interested in perfect pitch, you should likely | learn about relative pitch as well. Whereas perfect pitch | refers to the ability to correctly distinguish a note cold, | relative pitch refers to the ability to distinguish notes in | relation to each other. | h0h0h0h0111 wrote: | >I have never read or heard anything that suggests either | found it terribly useful | | Allegedly, Mozart transcribed Allegri's Miserere after | hearing it performed once in the Vatican: | https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart- | all.... | | Perhaps apocryphal, but sounds pretty useful to me. | Bud wrote: | [dead] | Gunax wrote: | But how accurate does it have to be to be considered | perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high | frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to | the frequency? | samstave wrote: | thank you for the 'perfect pitch' response <3 | coliveira wrote: | Perfect pitch means that you can identify (give the name of) | different pitches without the help of instruments. This is a | rare ability even for trained musicians. | samstave wrote: | We need a GPT for musical pitch. (unpack that) | KeplerBoy wrote: | The (fast) fourier transform has been around for a few | centuries. It's kind of a big deal. | klysm wrote: | I'm curious how much initial effort it took you to get decent | at it | 0x445442 wrote: | Interesting, I didn't know perfect pitch was something you | could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn | player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His | teachers always told us it was something you're born with. | opan wrote: | I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good | speller was something you were born with (she was not the | best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good, | to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how | people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how | they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from | people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's | cube. | belter wrote: | How far does it go on your own case? Are there degrees of it? | | Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video | below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's | own? | | https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY | helaoban wrote: | Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive | considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a | certain age (at least that's layman my understanding). | | Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and | now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a | new language?). | hluska wrote: | The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has | been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago's study | is most famous but results have been replicated at many other | schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine. | | The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as | artists they're better off spending their time elsewhere. | musicale wrote: | I hadn't actually heard of the Chicago work before, but | this is interesting: | | "These results suggest that the acquisition of intermediate | absolute pitch ability (significantly above chance but | below ''true'' AP performance) depends on an individual's | general auditory working memory ability" [1] | | Apparently learned absolute pitch wasn't as accurate as | "true" perfect pitch. | | [1] https://www.academia.edu/download/52277554/Auditory_wor | king_... | coliveira wrote: | Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that | Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference | between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is | relatively the same. Things would be different if every key | had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the | case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought | about different keys having different moods. | pjlegato wrote: | That statement is not true of Western music in general, | only of most (not all) classical and poular music since | roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," | tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became | popular.[1] | | Much Western music, such as that written during the the | Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as | certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern | classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. | use a variety of other systems such as some form of just | intonation[2], where different keys sound very different | as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same | interval. | | Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of | equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such | as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American | music.[1] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation | nostrademons wrote: | I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy | ear-training component. | | The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of | "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, | perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or | you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce | absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect | pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory | is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command. | But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl | in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist) | could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; | if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was | usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in | cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a | pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a | specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note | without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to | another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music | training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds. | | It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're | young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an | adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads | to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or | training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to | speak it without an accent. | [deleted] | vnorilo wrote: | I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon | as perfect (absolute) pitch. | | I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of | random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" | our ears. Only works for relative ears. | | Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I | practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches | it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it | lose focus by a semitone or three. | | Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, | no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also | a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they | need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their | "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just | shrug and accept the new A4. | nostrademons wrote: | I think there's different components to pitch memory, | including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect | there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear | a chord as a single unit while others pick out the | individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear | for timbre.) | | I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have | anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on | 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you | describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I | try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently | sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I | don't have perfect pitch.) | klipt wrote: | Have a look at this study about moving the "absolute" | pitch anchor: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/r | eleases/perfect-p... | | Maybe you could apply their methodology to yourself to | retrain your A to 440Hz? | unc0n wrote: | When I played in a youth orchestra our music director | told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he | said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be | others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many | recordings with such tuning. | pclmulqdq wrote: | 441+ is also very common in the US. Top-tier orchestras | rarely use 440 at this point. | klipt wrote: | > Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always | anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them | | Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was | an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a | long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over | the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study | found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not | just immediately after but also months later. | | https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect- | p... | humanizersequel wrote: | Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch | being detuned "months later." | q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: | > ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour | session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she | was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came | in cold. | | > had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were | working on a specific interval, I could remember and | reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, | but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. | | This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a | spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've | basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting | curves -- I wonder what would happen if you tried to train | _with the specific goal of extending that window,_ rather | than just noting what your window is during other training. | Maybe it 's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect | pitch in this way? | | Especially in your case, since you already have data that | your window of 5-10 minutes _could_ extend to 1.5 hours, it | seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you 'd | spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this -- | e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week, | then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc... | nostrademons wrote: | We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to | developing better relative pitch and being able to name | intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh | hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the | session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick | aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth | it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch, | because you'll almost always have a reference note | available. | | It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the | psych and music departments got together though. If I were | still in college I'd suggest it. :-) | levitate wrote: | Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there | are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B' | instead. | kombinatorix wrote: | Not necessarily. In Germany and probably also other parts of | the world B is called H and B flat is called B. | ketzu wrote: | For funny historical reasons, the english tone B is called H in | some countries, especially northern and central europe. | (English B-flat is called B there) Wherever that figure is | from. | captainmuon wrote: | I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute | pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that | tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically | laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask | that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years | later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how | they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the | (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and | just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.) | intrasight wrote: | Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at | 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which | I'm hearing all the fucking time. | pb060 wrote: | Why do you hear a persistent 60hz sound? Could it be linked to | the AC frequency? I couldn't find anything about it online. | illwrks wrote: | Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious | how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did | some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our | daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family | and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are). | tzs wrote: | Is absolute pitch something you would actually want? From what | I've read as people with absolute pitch get into late middle age | in many their reference drifts and they start to perceive music | that is in tune as being out of tune. For some this makes it hard | to continue to enjoy music. | | People with relative pitch can learn specific notes well enough | to be able to recognize them given the constraint that the note | is being played roughly in tune on an instrument tuned to the | common tunings of the music they are familiar with, and they can | learn to recognize intervals. | | This allows them with practice to identify notes almost as fast | as someone with absolute pitch, and allows them to do all the | practical musical things people with absolute pitch can do. | 49531 wrote: | Yea, absolute pitch is not very valuable for musicians. | Interval training is much more common, where you train on the | differences between notes (maj 3rd, minor 6th etc.). Good | interval skills make improvisation and composition much easier. | If you know the key you're in having absolute pitch doesn't | really add anything, and if you're lacking in understanding | intervals it won't make up for it. | BearOso wrote: | Most kids achieve level, upright pitch at ages 2-3. It's the yaw | and roll you have to worry about. Those are literally all over | the place. | racedude wrote: | Wrong kind of pitch. Read the article. | jpgvm wrote: | [flagged] | tomcam wrote: | I think you may have missed a little humor being committed | jvm___ wrote: | Maybe your missed the tone of their comment? | tinco wrote: | If your kid can achieve absolute pitch in geometric space, | like.. epsg:4978? That would be epic. Your kid could always | tell you what coordinates you're at if you're standing at a | known angle. | windowshopping wrote: | What does "epsg:4978" mean? | rightbyte wrote: | A longer name for WGS 84. | tinco wrote: | Sort of but not exactly. The way I'd explain it as | someone who's had to deal with a lot but has not been | formally trained in it is that WGS 84 is a system for | reasoning about the earth spatially. EPSG:4978 and its | more commonly used sister EPSG:4326 are standardized ways | of writing down coordinates relative to the WGS84 model | of the earth. | | The "joke" in my comment is that EPSG:4978 coordinates | are written down in distance in meters from the center of | the earth, as a sort of absolute position that's nice to | use in maths. In contrast to EPSG:4326 where coordinates | are written down (usually in degrees) relative to the | equator and a line through some place in England over an | idealized representation of the surface of the earth. | 8bitsrule wrote: | Interval-training is a lot more useful. Regardless of what key | you're in, particularly if you're not playing (or don't know how | to play) from sheet music. E.g. given two notes, what is the | distance between them in semitones. | | Once you can recognize any interval then, given a pitch, you can | identify the other notes in any chord (major, minor, etc.) it's a | part of. Useful for tuning instruments (e.g. guitar). Useful for | understanding chord notation (charts), and what chords are being | used (progressions). Useful for quickly figuring out all the | notes in a melody. (Especially one you want to remember.) Useful | for deciding what -scale- is being used (dorian, phrygian, | pentatonic, etc.) | adamgordonbell wrote: | Many people have absolute pitch for certain well known sounds. | | Who can't tell if a sine wave sound is higher or lower than the | emergency broadcast tone. That tone is 1000 hz. | | So, that is absolute pitch, just low resolution. I'm assuming if | you can add in a lot of reference points that you know well, you | could get better resolution. | irq wrote: | Can we get a (2012) added to the headline here? | slmjkdbtl wrote: | I was forced to learn piano when I was 6, really hated it and | ended in 2 years. When I really got into music in high school and | started playing guitar it's an amazing feeling to discover I | actually have perfect pitch. However the perfect pitch I have is | an inferior one, I sometimes even miss a note by a half step, | curious if someone is the same. | KerrAvon wrote: | A summary of the teaching method, which dates back to apparently | 1991 | | https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html | tomcam wrote: | My theory and composition teacher in college went through this | same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and | asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the | kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize | pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, | because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, | whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening to an exhaust | pipe. | | I also had a classmate who could identify any pitch to the exact | frequency, so A443 versus A440, for example. Of course we tested | him. | dekhn wrote: | In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to | click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86 | code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office | mate that I could make my computer play A440. | | He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I | checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying | long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said | he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost | everything was out of tune. | birdyrooster wrote: | I remember watching a documentary about this savant and his | ability was perfect pitch and now you are totally ruining the | story. | tomcam wrote: | Lol I hate myself! But I'm sure the doc will be more | interesting to you than my teacher's 1920s kindergarten | tales. I found her fascinating though. | joanne123 wrote: | [flagged] | crispinb wrote: | I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of | decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with | music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and | reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names | and sound. | | But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort | of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, | I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick | intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further | off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear | I'll nearly always start on the right note. | | What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect | it could be developed it were a priority. | raincole wrote: | While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually | "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) | capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute | notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though. | wrs wrote: | As an amateur musician and composer who doesn't have it, seems | like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I | don't know what else. You must still be able to "switch modes" | to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn't even hear musical | structures the same way, because aside from timbre they're all | relative. | nrook wrote: | As an amateur who does have it, yes, it's super awesome for | transcription. However, I don't think it's very useful for | anything else. | vlovich123 wrote: | My mom says it's helpful for her as a music teacher. It was | annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she'd be | cooking in the kitchen and I'd be playing in the other room | and she'd call out when I made a mistake. But that's probably | just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a | fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in | competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I'm sure | perfect pitch is only a small part of it but it helps. | sidibe wrote: | It seems like hearing someone make a mistake, especially on | a piano (vs a trombone or violin), isn't related at all to | perfect pitch... unless the mistake is playing the whole | piece in the wrong key | pclmulqdq wrote: | I used to moonlight as a harpsichord tuner, and I didn't know | anyone in the field or any piano tuners with perfect pitch. | As I understand it, it doesn't help at all because perfect | pitch is not precise enough to tell 440 Hz from 440.1 Hz for | example, while you can do that easily with a tuning fork | (once you learn how to listen for the beats). On the | flipside, unequal temperaments - which are frequently used if | you are a harpsichord tuner - are hell for people with | perfect pitch who listen to only equally-tempered music. When | you "merely" have relative pitch, unequal temperaments can | actually be nice. | TheRealPomax wrote: | Equal temperament strikes again. | slmjkdbtl wrote: | Not that useful if you have very good relative pitch. One | advantage is you can walk in a jam and start playing from bar | 1, instead of having to figure out which key they're in. | However if you have good relative pitch you can also figure it | out within 10 seconds. | SoftTalker wrote: | It can be useful, but it's not necessary to have perfect pitch | to be a musician. Relative pitch (the ability to identify notes | relative to each other) can be learned and is good enough. | 49531 wrote: | Nah you're right, intervals ear training will always give you | more bang for your buck than absolute pitch, and even though | absolute pitch is trainable, I don't know any serious musicians | who have put effort into it. This is why I think folks think | absolute pitch is innate (it isn't): some folks just have a | knack for it, and those who don't quickly learn that the effort | to build the skill isn't worth the payoff. | canjobear wrote: | My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is | that it's more an annoyance than anything. They're always | hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch. | slmjkdbtl wrote: | Have you really met people with perfect pitch with that level | of resolution, like can tell 440hz from 432hz? I always | thought that was a myth. | raincole wrote: | How much "resolution" do their ears have? Like can someone | with absolute pitch tell whether an instrument is in 12-ET or | just intonation without a reference? | pclmulqdq wrote: | I have very good relative pitch and used to moonlight as a | harpsichord tuner. I can tell you if an instrument is in | equal temperament - an equal-tempered fifth and an equal- | tempered third have very distinctive sounds. With enough | time, I can also identify most of the common baroque | temperaments: Just Intonation and quarter-comma meantone | stick out like a sore thumb, but tunings like Werckmeister | and the others that attempt to be close to equally tempered | are harder to pick out by ear since you really need to hear | a lot of the circle of fifths to identify which one is | used. | | However, this skill isn't due to hearing a precise gap | between the two notes, but listening to the beating of the | overtones of the notes. It's a very different skill than | what you learn in school to identify intervals. | | Also, professional string players can often tune equal | tempered fifths (~2 cents flat of a pure fifth) precisely | on their instruments. | giraffe_lady wrote: | Perfect pitch is a simplification, it's not really binary | like you either have it or don't. People have varying | ability, practice, and speed at identifying a note relative | to a reference, and "perfect" is how we describe being past | some threshold. | | When we talk about perfect pitch we're usually assuming | 12-tet tuned to A440 but you correctly homed in on the | "problem" with perfect pitch. Is that C a little sharp, or | did they just tune to A446 for some reason? Just | intonation, microtonal scales, there are a lot of notes out | there. How do you know they're "wrong" and not just trying | to play the note that sounds out of tune to your ear. | "Perfect" has to be established against some intention, we | just usually assume 12-tet A440. | | Anyway the ability is at least somewhat a matter of | practice and training, so you can develop it against any | consistent reference, regardless of the tuning or | intonation system. | iainmerrick wrote: | That's a question about relative pitches, not absolute - | you can definitely hear if e.g. the third is a little sharp | or flat even if you don't have perfect absolute pitch. | | More generally, I think the answer is "pretty high- | resolution". Lots of people can definitely hear the | difference between equal and just temperament. | | IIRC most people's hearing is accurate to around 10 cents | (a tenth of a semitone). Wikipedia suggests musicians | generally tune to within 12 cents, and the "just noticeable | difference" is 5-6. | | You'd only need absolute accuracy better than 50 cents to | be able to correctly name a note on the piano. I'd guess | most people with perfect pitch are more accurate than that, | likely around the same ~10 cents mark. | | Anecdotally, I have a musician friend with perfect pitch | who finds it annoying sometime, as they find it unsettling | when music is tuned slightly sharp or flat; so I think | their sensitivity is much finer than a semitone. | hammyhavoc wrote: | Microtonality is a rabbit hole you'll likely enjoy. | colanderman wrote: | Intonation is a matter of relative pitch. I have good | relative pitch, and can distinguish intonation to a degree. | | People with absolute pitch can nonetheless distinguish | pitch with better than semitone accuracy. This is why it's | often a hindrance, because if an ensemble is tuned to a | slightly different reference, it is quite noticeable to | them. | anonymouskimmer wrote: | I've wondered if it's possible to train exact, frequency- | based pitch, instead of this relative tuning-based | absolute pitch. I wonder if that would be as discordant | to the trained ear when switching to another tuning. | troupe wrote: | I sincerely doubt that if you ask a professional musician | with perfect pitch if they would "turn it off" they would say | yes. | psychoslave wrote: | Is it necessarily something like "turned on h24 in every | single sound"? I would be rather surprised that it would be | the case in general. | zuminator wrote: | A person with perfect pitch can no more turn off knowing | the pitch of a sound than a person with relative pitch | can turn off knowing if one sound is a higher pitch than | another. | crabkin wrote: | I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more | "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open | minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I | love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any | problem appreciating what they like. | florbo wrote: | Heh, I'm that friend in my circle. I certainly don't bash | anyone's music preferences but everyone has to know _why_ a | song /artist "just isn't my thing," and I get the "snob" | label. Ah well. | | But I get where your friend is coming from. When I hear | something off pitch, for whatever reason, it's just | distracting and pure cacophony. | recursive wrote: | It's very useful for a session musician. You could pick up a | song without hunting for the key. | SeanLuke wrote: | I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in | certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time. | wrs wrote: | Ah, this answers my question above about "switching modes" | to relative. Sounds like that's not a thing. But can you | hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you're | not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing | interval math all the time! | SeanLuke wrote: | I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good | as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music | majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the | professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's | a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and | people learn to write down the chords based on relative | position. But I and another student with perfect pitch | would ace the class by just writing down the chords based | on what they actually were. This went on until he started | playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#. | Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and | everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone | except for us two, who were totally hosed. | | When I went to my parent's church, the organist would | spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a | half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for | me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't | match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank | just between us two, and he knew that I was the only | other person in the room who knew what he had done to me. | UnnoTed wrote: | Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing | songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part | of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't | sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians | from the church try to find the song key and chords in real | time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good | ear. | | In this video you can see an example of how it is: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF4onowI1xw | | [1]: https://pt-m-wikipedia- | org.translate.goog/wiki/Harpa_Crist%C... | chimpanzee wrote: | Thanks for the video link! Very cool. The poor singing | combined with the on-the-fly guitar tuning gave the piece | a grungy punk-like feel, at least to my ears. I rather | enjoyed it. | | A cute (translated) comment from the video: "To sing with | this guitarist is easy! Just praise the Lord and he does | the rest!" | 123pie123 wrote: | I'm really impressed by the guitarist making her sound | better and her pitch was all over the place | slmjkdbtl wrote: | Why do you need to transpose? You mean when playing a | transposed instrument like woodwinds / brass? | SeanLuke wrote: | Jazz. Jazz is all about transposition. | vlovich123 wrote: | Yeah my mom is a piano teacher and described the same | difficulty. In university (USSR) they would play the same | song twice. The first time she got all the notes and the | second time she'd fill in the melody. Other students | without perfect pitch would be able to transcribe the | entire thing the first time and just use the second time to | correct any mistakes they made. | Doctor_Fegg wrote: | It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune | instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone | flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a | mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the | sound that's coming out. | dwringer wrote: | With good enough sense of relative pitch it's almost a non- | issue as one is usually only a half step away from in-key and | that can be played off as deliberate. | SoftTalker wrote: | If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a | lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, | not just what's on the top 40 radio. | | Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They | are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to | understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can | be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes | if we had a language codified that way. | hgsgm wrote: | Most kids are exposed to language a lot in their childhood, | they don't automatically learn to produce "perfect words". | pclmulqdq wrote: | This is more like learning phonemes. It significantly helps | language acquisition to expose your children to a lot of | different word sounds. Similarly, if you only play top 40 pop | music or baroque music, your child likely won't be able to | acquire perfect pitch. | SoftTalker wrote: | They do, most kids learn to say words perfectly imitating | what they hear, including regional accents. Of course some | people have speech impediments but it's a minority. | medler wrote: | I am very skeptical that a child can learn perfect pitch merely | by listening to classical music. | [deleted] | ouid wrote: | I have tinnitus, so i only need perfect relative pitch. | kqr wrote: | There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse | "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch". | | After the first note is known, the two are mostly | indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can, | once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify | everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect | pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch | don't even need to be told what that first note is. | | (This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and | tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance, | whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need | to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or | minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the | same.) | Engineering-MD wrote: | Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up | during a critical period in early life. However, there was a | fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug | (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill! | | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/ | [deleted] | pachico wrote: | Aged 2-6? | | Am I the only one thinking "leave them kids alone!"? | hansoolo wrote: | No, you aren't alone. It sounds so weird and elitist... | rahimnathwani wrote: | It sounds like the system is based on a few mins of audio | flashcards each day. | | Has anyone here tried this? | blindriver wrote: | My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me | and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch | is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times | he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes | from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale | the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all | fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect | pitch. | vajrabum wrote: | Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the | viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently | unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters | with very high accuracy. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI | | For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a | difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed | instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. Also, | conductors frequently have perfect pitch, probably because a | strong musical memory and being able to sight sing on pitch from | a score are valuable and depend to a certain extent on perfect | pitch. See here for a lot more. | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory | | Perfect pitch is also apparently more common in people who speak | tonal languages like Mandarin. | tylerhou wrote: | There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral | singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning | if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen | naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.) | | Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch | lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an | accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as | blue-ish green instead of green. It might be difficult to | adjust to no longer being able to see the world in color. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 | freedomben wrote: | > _Another downside is that almost all people with perfect | pitch lose it when they hit a certain age._ | | What age (or age range) is that? | dwdz wrote: | 50-60 years old, according to Rick Beato | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rx08qWtFak | ojosilva wrote: | Absolute pitch is a curse for musicians. It's not even an asset | unless you are a piano tuner or a transcription professional of | some sort. Not many conductors have it. Only a handful of the | great musicians in history, from classical to jazz to pop | happened to have AP. It's a parlor trick. And many musicians | thought to have perfect pitch actually were just great | recognizing pitches - pitch memory - which is different from | perfect pitch. I can recognize pitches with a ~50% accuracy | just because I can either recall the note, or bend my vocal | chords as if I would start singing the note and, from pure | muscle memory, say "this is probably an E". | | Absolute pitch basically spoils the musician's ability to deal | with varying pitch and musical temperament[1] situations and | instruments. It can drive them nuts, ie if given a C to sing | but actually have to detune or transpose it on the fly. It's | also detrimental for anyone's ability to purely enjoy music. | _Relative pitch_ on the other hand is so much more important. | Absolute pitch in fact can mess with your relative pitch, as C | and Ab are just that C and Ab, not a minor 6th. | | Also, a good sense of being in tune when playing with others | is, obviously, fundamental but also a relative, not absolute, | in essence. Knowing you are playing in tune, not perfectly | pitched, is the asset needed by bowed string players. Relative | pitch, not AP, is an asset for someone who needs to sight sing | on pitch - just listen to your tuning fork and find that C or | Ab. | | Music is not a perfect craft, it's not about being digitally | precise. Making music is not about frequencies, or hitting | absolute hertz. Even pitch itself is not "perfect", it's a | flawed system that people, in part for the sake of | standardization, settled upon. Pitch is a size that does not | fit all. So why would anyone be proud of have frequencies | memorized? | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament | 2pEXgD0fZ5cF wrote: | > For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed | instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. | | The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for | professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch | looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a | professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There | is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained | musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone | (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people | that do not have it). | | It is more like a "shortcut" when it comes to ear training, but | ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a | professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically | the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal | when it comes to the things a musician actually does. | | Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that | makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the | real world. | | Also noteworthy that there _are_ disadvantages to perfect pitch | (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and | interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already | linked. | | [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 | avodonosov wrote: | In another video Rick Beato said he facilitated development of | his son's perfect pitch by exposing him to a lot of complex | music in early age. | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM&t=598s | | His hypothesis, based on some studies, is that children in ealy | age have ability for perfect pitch but later loose it, if it's | not utilized. The same way as young children are able to | percieve any phoneme of any language, but later loose this | ability and only recognise phonemes of the language spoken in | the family (that's a known scientific fact). | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgFdics3uKo&t=783s | mhh__ wrote: | Dylan is very impressive but I find there to be something | disturbing in that dynamic | freedomben wrote: | What do you find disturbing in that dynamic? | vnorilo wrote: | Perfect pitch is by no means a requirement for musicians, | although it is more common than in the general population, even | more so for conductors. | | But intonation is equally easy/hard for absolute and relative | ears. Some tasks, like transposition, can require _more_ | practice for people with perfect pitch. | | Source: lived experience from my doctorate in music from | Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. | amelius wrote: | Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute | pitch? | | And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a | color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? | | Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup? | flappyeagle wrote: | We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at | something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or | "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it". | eternauta3k wrote: | Kind of, your eyes are doing automatic white balance. | stefncb wrote: | We can tell if something is red or blue, but red and blue are | huge spectra. That's like telling the first third of a piano | keyboard from the second. Even I can do it. Absolute pitch is | more like telling exactly what wavelength it is (to a certain | degree of course). Most people can't do that. | OscarCunningham wrote: | I can hear a note and say whether it's high, low, or in the | middle. But perfect pitch further requires a resolution of 1 | semitone. | opan wrote: | Have you never argued over colors before? I wouldn't trust | eyes to be that accurate or objective. | Paianni wrote: | It makes composition easier. By that I mean, I can mentally | simulate music and pick out the sequence of tones to write it | down in sheet music or a DAW piano roll, and I don't need to | 'calibrate' my pitch beforehand. | Hoasi wrote: | Not that helpful. It's a bit akin to being able to tell which | individual letters are in a word spoken. It might make some | genres of music less enjoyable as they sound too predictable. | It does help to play improvisation with other musicians. | schrectacular wrote: | As far as I know there is a similar but probably not exactly | the same, "super sellers" - perfume companies hire those with | the skill to be their perfumers or "noses". | canadianwriter wrote: | Even in music it is not that helpful to be honest. Eg. most | live shows you tune the instruments to the piano. If the piano | is slightly out of tune, someone with perfect pitch will be | annoyed the entire time trying to deal with that while everyone | else hears a perfectly good concert. | | having good relative pitch is way more useful. | | Many musicians with perfect pitch have also been really | obsessed with tuning in their recordings and it sets off a lot | of anxiety for them cause they can hear themselves the smallest | amount off, when no one else can and the performance makes it a | perfect take to use in the song. | | It can be helpful I guess for composing, but as someone who | does composing, it's not hard to just tinker with a piano to | get the notes I want, no need to be able to perfectly hum them | when I think of them. | dbalatero wrote: | Relative pitch is quite helpful to have. However, I have | absolute pitch and I find it quite helpful as well. | | - I can hear things in my head and play them directly on the | instrument more or less on the first try | | - I can improvise with others and catch what key/etc they are | in quickly | | - As we practice, we get a sort of kinetic/physical memory for | remembering music, but also this can feedback into that "hear | things in head, play them on the instrument" - so I feel like | memorizing things can be assisted by absolute pitch | | - I can remember music I heard and play it back easier | | There's a lot of people saying it's not helpful, but I have to | wonder if they have experienced having it or not? If they have | it and find it unhelpful that's fine... but I've experienced it | as nothing _but_ helpful to me. | b800h wrote: | You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one | of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the | starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ | in our church is a quarter-tone sharp. | | The goal should be very very very good relative pitch. | tpmx wrote: | Electronic frequency counters are pretty accurate and cheap these | days; I don't think we necessarily need to use human children for | this task. | AlbertCory wrote: | To me, the ultimate test of perfect pitch is: "can you whistle | (or hum) an F# below middle C?" (or some other random note) | analog31 wrote: | Just tested myself. Pass. | | However, I played a rehearsal and two concerts this week. I | know that my pitch dissipates after a period of time. As a kid, | I could tune my cello by ear, but I noticed after coming back | from a long family vacation, I had lost that ability. It came | back quickly, but still, it means that I don't really have | perfect pitch. | elecush wrote: | Lately I have a theory about perfect pitch training as an 18+ | year old human, I think we will achieve it (my friend and I) via | the following: Using Tuesdays to practice E chord songs, using | Thursdays to practice C# minor chord songs. One day play only E | songs, one day play only C#m songs, do this several weeks, pick 2 | new chords for 2 fresh days, repeat. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2023-04-29 23:00 UTC)