51–60 of 148 posts
My understanding is that you can train people to recognize few/certain tones, but if you have a perfect pitch you are able to do it for every tone, which is something that cannot be learned.
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.
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…
The other is a bandmate of mine, a woman in her late 20s/early 30s when i saw hers fail. She's genetically predisposed - both her father and her brother have perfect pitch; plus her father is a professional musician, she has a degree in music performance, and has had a violin in her hand since she was old enough to hold one. One day, we were recording, with her overdubbing parts onto some previously recorded work. She complained that a B flat played at the start of a guitar riff was out of tune. I said "No, that's a B". She insisted it was a B flat. I told her I had also played the part on keyboards, and it's a B.
She panicked.
It was extremely difficult for her to play for the rest of the session. Her playing relies so heavily on her perfect pitch that she's always had, that when she can't trust it, anxiety takes over.
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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.
Is there some sort of online test to figure out if you’re tone deaf. Every time people talk about B, C, etc. and then reproduce the sound with another instrument, I have no idea what it’s supposed to be...
I've been playing music for thirty-odd years, and I couldn't name pitches by ear most of the time, certainly not without thinking about it. I often hand-tune guitars (relatively!) if I'm playing by myself, and after a few days of that, it's not unusual to be more than a half-step out of whack. I don't notice, because it's in tune with itself.
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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…
Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch should be recognized as a disability? Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch should prevent someone from certain licensed professions? Do you believe that lack of perfect pitch is a safety concern in some circumstances? Because the answer is "yes" for colorblindness. It's just a wildly overstated comparison. I mean, even tone-deaf people don't experience the kind of diffic…
I think it's overly simplistic to group people into those who have perfect pitch and those who don't. Of course, I don't know if the article makes this claim, but I think a lot of people tend to view perfect pitch as a binary ability -- either you have it or you don't. But speaking personally, I have "sort of" perfect pitch (imperfect pitch? semi-perfect pitch?), by which I mean that I can sing and/or recognize the p…
On the other hand, I completely agree that relative pitch has to be on point. I don't see how it's possible to be an effective musician without it. Being able to intuitively know intervals, certainly if you're a singer, is indispensable.
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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.
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…
I'm not sure, but I think I tend toward absolute pitch. Individual notes out of context often make me recall specific songs. I'm not that accurate with my AP when I try to test it though, which is why I wouldn't claim to have perfect pitch.
However, I did take formal ear training in grad school, I found it really difficult. Perfect 5ths with different base notes don't "sound alike" to me. I had to rely on a lot of tricks to get by. I can transpose melodies in my head, so I could pattern-match a test interval to, say, the Superman melody (P5) or the Taps melody (P4). Or, if I were transcribing a melody or harmony, I could figure it out by function (chordal, stepwise, or chromatic motion). For leaps and intervals beyond an octave, I'm useless.
I'd also say that when I learn a song for voice, I'm mostly memorizing how to produce the right tones in-key, as opposed to moving by interval. I don't know how other people experience singing, but I suspect it might also be due to my bias toward AP.
I think it's overly simplistic to group people into those who have perfect pitch and those who don't. Of course, I don't know if the article makes this claim, but I think a lot of people tend to view perfect pitch as a binary ability -- either you have it or you don't. But speaking personally, I have "sort of" perfect pitch (imperfect pitch? semi-perfect pitch?), by which I mean that I can sing and/or recognize the p…
I think it's probably more likely that absolute and relative pitch are different capabilities, with most people innately biased one way or the other. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive. And I'm pretty certain some people have low capability in both.
I find the obsession with perfect pitch to be pretty overwrought. Much like I often find some people to be overly obsessed with synesthesia as a mystical source of artistic creativity.
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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.