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Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

biorxiv.org

11–20 of 148 posts

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#11
post #4

More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem t…

Supposedly the ability to guess how long a minute is also goes that way as you get older, e.g. older participants think a minutes is over after 62s or more. So if your internal clock slows down a B would sound like a C.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#12
post #10

I found the entire PDF on ResearchGate. I've played the piano for 50 years (I'm 55), and I do a lot of ear-training practice with software (Ear Master, etc) to keep myself sharp. I still don't have perfect pitch. Without hearing a reference note, I won't get it. In some ways, it's good. I keep my Bosendorfer tuned to A=443 and occasionally someone comes over whose used to the American A=440 and it bothers them. It do…

440 is actually an international standard, not American. >In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439…

When I shopped for my piano, in Vienna, it was tuned to 443 which was the custom there. It was crated up at the factory and shipped to California where it's been holding its tune.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_...

A lot of continental Europe uses A=443 today

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#13

In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was "memorize A" (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps). Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfec…

I had a choir teacher who told us a story about cheating that assignment by learning the pitch of the hum of the fluorescent lights in their classroom.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#14
My pitch recognition isn't bad but not particularly good either. When I play my mandolin, though, I can pick up small pitch differences on certain frets because I'm so used to associating finger position with frequency.

Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#15
The way I do it is I keep a memory of a song with a known reference frequency in my head. Usually it's the Super Mario Bros. theme, whose root is middle C. I know how the other notes on the scale sound relative to middle C. Sharps and flats are trickier, but if they sound unusual I can go half a step up or down and see if they match some other note. Usually I can identify a tone within half a step or so. Or at least I could, using this method, when I was a kid. Haven't tried it much lately.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#16

My pitch recognition isn't bad but not particularly good either. When I play my mandolin, though, I can pick up small pitch differences on certain frets because I'm so used to associating finger position with frequency. Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.

[deleted]

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#17
Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It's occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other.

Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - if I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn't be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it's useful for is recognizing what key it's in. If I hadn't been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later.

I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn't important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it's all relative.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#18
(Disclosure/Disclaimer: I don't have perfect pitch nor do I aspire to acquire it. I am, however, fascinated that some people do have perfect pitch.)

Rick Beato provides a lot of (too much) context before explaining "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch". [0] (Timecode link to Beato's point.)

Beato's video was featured on MetaFilter a couple of months ago. [1]

[0] https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364

[1] https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Pe...

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#19
One strange phenomenon I've noticed (while trying to teach myself perfect pitch) is that, when trying to reproduce (say) middle C, if I'm off, I'm only ever off by multiples of a half-step. That is to say, I'm singing exactly a B or C# (or on a bad day, Bb or D). My ear is sharp enough to detect if I were, say, a quarter step off.

This ability seems to fall somewhere in between relative and absolute pitch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one it is true for.

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