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Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

biorxiv.org

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Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#31

Post by randcraw »

This is one of those occasions when the research team definitely needs to test on more than the local population of subjects.

Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it's likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests.

I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#32

Post by dfan »

SeanLuke wrote: 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…

My pitch started to drift in middle age too. Like you, I do better or worse based on timbre; piano is great (it's my instrument, which must help), stringed instruments are pretty good in general, wind instruments are not so great, organs are the worst.

Playing for ten years in a Balinese gamelan that was not remotely tuned to a Western scale probably didn't help.

Absolute pitch is still a really useful skill to have, in my opinion, and I don't understand it when people say it's just a parlor trick or actually diminishes your ability to appreciate music; being able to spell doesn't diminish my appreciation of language. It is occasionally slightly distressing to realize in retrospect that I've been off by a half step, like thinking you're walking north and then looking at a map and realizing you've been walking west.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#33

Post by klipt »

notatcomputer68 wrote: post #26
zwieback wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow that's a fascinating possible explanation

Unlikely true though, you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#34

Post by jancsika »

psychometry wrote: post #28
tunesmith wrote: post #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…

Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily…

> Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are.

Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong.

The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still.

We must also add the complication that most televisions and places where people look at scenes the colors tend to gradually ramp down in frequency as the lights get tired.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#35

Post by aczerepinski »

psychometry wrote: post #28
tunesmith wrote: post #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…

Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily…

Agreed. I had a special ear training class at Berklee for all the incoming freshman who aced placements, and if I recall correctly everyone in the class had perfect pitch. Transcribing was trivial across the board. I transcribed solos for jazz magazines as a side gig, and filled notebooks with solos in my personal practice.

Without a doubt, relative pitch and learning theory are important skills too, but they aren't mutually exclusive.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#36

Post by torpidor »

psychometry wrote: post #28
tunesmith wrote: post #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…

Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily…

Color is overrated in a world where most are colorblind. Red means danger or stop because you have seen a lot of stop signs. In a world of colorblind people, stop sign colors are chosen by the colorblind, based on something like "is this a cheap metal" rather than design language (which no longer exists for color). Instead we would use reflectivity or something to indicate danger. As to whether or not the varying-colored stop signs leads to a statistically significant number of color-sighted people blowing through them it is hard to say, but does seem a legitimate safety concern.

And this is the situation in music; keys are chosen based on the technical details of the musician rather than a design language. Meanwhile, we do have a design language based on relative pitch (e.g. a 5/7 chord "leads" to the tonic). Of course you can see that the same way you can see a purple stop sign, but you may lack some of the pattern-matching intuition of your peers.

As a musician with relative pitch and the child of a musician with perfect pitch, I have watched them get puzzled a lot navigating a design language that is very obvious to me. Perhaps you are a better musician than they are, or perhaps you avoid areas where the design language dominates. Either way, I would not trade places with you, unless the rest of society did also.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#37

Post by dfan »

jancsika wrote: post #34
psychometry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily…

> Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong. The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still. We must al…

In a lot of classical music, especially since 1900, pitch classes play a really fundamental role. When, say, G is a prominent pitch class for a while, and then I hear it come back a few minutes later, that lets me understand the structure of the piece better than if I didn't recognize it. So absolute pitch has a real use, and I don't think it's quite fair to put it on the level of "absolute hex color values".

Of course, there is a lot of subtle stuff going with color design in TV and movies that generally passes me right by, so maybe I should be spending more time trying to appreciate that and less time getting excited about identifying Gs in atonal music...

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#38

Post by aczerepinski »

dfan wrote: post #32
SeanLuke wrote: 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…

My pitch started to drift in middle age too. Like you, I do better or worse based on timbre; piano is great (it's my instrument, which must help), stringed instruments are pretty good in general, wind instruments are not so great, organs are the worst. Playing for ten years in a Balinese gamelan that was not remotely tuned to a Western scale probably didn't help. Absolute pitch is still a really useful skill to have,…

Same. My instruments piano and trumpet are never-miss (though I hear the trumpet in Bb), and organs are more difficult for me too. I think organ overtones might be off pitch or something? just a wild guess.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#39

Post by aczerepinski »

jancsika wrote: post #34
psychometry wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out. While it can be momentarily…

> Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are. Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong. The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still. We must al…

I'd argue that knowing that a note is a "C" is equivalent to knowing that a color is "dark green" without needing to reference a box of crayons.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#40

Post by justtopost »

tbirrell wrote: post #24
auganov wrote: post #20

How would you ever know if you "have" perfect pitch without training? I don't even know what a C or B is[0]. Are there any tests online that don't require prior knowledge? [0] I do realize they denote some frequencies

Musical notes are a base-7 system denoted with the letters A-F repeating. Given that it is not a numerical system, different A's or B's (ect) are marked with numbers rather then continuing like hex. i.e. A3, E5 (etc) with lower tones being lower numbers. To answer your question, you won't. Perfect pitch usually develops in people who have had musical training since very young childhood. Just like you can't really rem…

Notes are Base 12. A scale may be base 7.
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