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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

#61
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cour…

> 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. Give me a controlled example where the return of the prominence of pitch class G lets you understand the structure of a section of music. Controlled example would mean: * the orchestration used for the G is different at moment…

Oh, geez, I'm not going to go find some specific section of music that perfectly meets all these constraints. Often the pitches are at the same octave, by the way; I don't think that makes the connection any smaller. And often the texture is similar; many aspects of the music may be "recapping" and one of them happens to be pitch. I'm not "confusing anything with a pitch class connection" just because another connections happen to exist; I'm hearing more connections than I otherwise might.

I am definitely talking about non-tonal music in general, yes. Elliott Carter is a good example of a composer where I feel that absolute pitch helps me understand what is going on more than I would otherwise. But again I'm not going to dig out some particular measure of music that perfectly proves my point.

If this reply was insufficient for your needs (I fear it is) I apologize. I'm not trying to win some debate, just to elucidate a little how I feel that absolute pitch aids my music appreciation.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#62
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…

So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)? It is a weird phenomenon and I think songwriting is too .. like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?

> So you have perfect pitch and does that equate to having a good quality singing voice (others enjoy listening to you)?

At the simplest there's 2 components in enjoying somebody sing:

- They have a pretty-ish voice that they master. Absolute pitch doesn't help for that, just like it doesn't help for any other instrument.

- They sing on tune. Absolute pitch doesn't help either, anybody can tune themselves on a background music. Even if a capella, everybody without an absolute pitch won't know if you don't start on the right note

> like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?

Pattern matching, which the brain is extremely good at

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#63

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.…

You're probably right about the subjects: "Ten adults were recruited at City University of Hong Kong and completed the training." So they'd likely be native Cantonese speakers.

But tonal languages use relative rather than absolute pitch (because different people have different vocal ranges), and all participants in the study improved their performance over time.

So speaking a tonal language or being a musician (also the case for the subjects in the study) can give an advantage, but I'd be surprised if deliberate training of pitch perception had absolutely no effect for people without such an advantage.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree, with the caveat that the person with relative pitch may not know that the particular color is "green", but does know that-- given two different colors-- both will have the adjective "dark" in their names.

In that analogy, suppose a "mise en scene" teacher gives the students an assignment to analyze the use of color in a picture. Using music dictation classes as a guide here, what would happen is that the person with "perfect color" immediately labels all the colors in the scene with the correct crayon name. This intimidates all the "relative color" people because they can't do the mappings without reference to the crayon box. Thus, the "relative color" people assume they are at a lower skill level in their analysis than the "perfect color" person. (This is exaggerated by the fact that the "perfect color" student has the word "perfect" in their name.)

Once the students finish their mappings the teacher asks the "perfect color" student, "How would you describe the use of colors here?" The "perfect color" student shrugs-- it is a collection of all the colors which they correctly named. As a kid they got praise from the teacher for their amazing ability to effortlessly map colors to names. No one ever asked them about the relationship among colors. (Or, if they did, the student nodded along and then correctly mapped colors to names as necessary to do an end-run around the question.)

On the other hand, "relative color" students grew up getting color names wrong. Every color class teacher would come up with a different ad hoc color theory and ad hoc color exercise to explain to the student how to correctly map colors to names. Most of them were wrong, but the student noticed weird little successes in identifying the relationship among colors. In their quest to stop failing all the time, they started to inarticulately ask themselves about the meaning of color, enumerating all the relationships among colors that could identify to help them narrow down the possible right answers to perhaps only a handful of names.

Back to the mise en scene class. One of these "relative color" student pipes in. "It looks like a bunch of pastels." The teacher praises the "relative color" student and moves on to other exercises.

After class the "perfect color" student asks the "relative color" student how they knew to say the word "pastels." The "relative color" student starts to talk about different famous scenes that have pastels, a childhood memory they have of a pastel drawing that won a prize at school, etc. But none of that connects at all with the "perfect color" student, because they've only ever had to map colors to names. They've never considered the relationship among colors.

So now the "perfect color" student dreads going to class for fear of the teacher discovering the profundity of their inability to say anything of substance about color relationships. And the "relative color" students dread the same class because they have no idea that their lifelong work to that point considering the relationships among colors constitutes a kind of knowledge.

Finally, there are no "perfect color" students who-- through sheer curiosity and discipline-- took it upon themselves to systematically investigate the relationships among colors. The people who did that would have placed out of this mise en scene class.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#66
Can somebody recommend an app for pitch recognition training for people who have the capacity to distinguish small differences in sound frequency but zero knowledge of music theory? E.g. an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify as I have no idea of how do musical notes and their varieties sound and am to be taught these from scratch. Of course I can find some examples and listen to them but that would take a fair amount of repetitions to memorize and I'd like the app to help with this too.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#67

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.…

This doesn't make sense to me. Everyone can distinguish relative pitch, that's how humans understand music. It was probably a crucial part of human evolution, somehow, as we all can do it. Tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute pitch. Everyone can learn Cantonese regardless whether they have AP or not. If you claim tonal languages train you for AP that's citation needed, I don't think that's true (we would expect tonal language speakers to be more likely to have AP, a trend we haven't observed).

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#68
post #52

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.

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...

Try searching for "amusia". A long time ago I took a test at http://www.delosis.com/listening/summary.html. It's been down for years now, but some of the results/discussion/links are still up.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#69
post #32
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,…

Piano has very distinct timbre for each note - there are many people that think they have perfect pitch but only really just learned the timbre for each note on piano and wouldn't be able to identify pitches of puretones for instance.

However for those of us that drift, I think it's likely that we recognized notes by both timbre and pitch, but although now that our pitch recognition has started drifting, we can still identify by timbre.

Absolute pitch is often described as a disadvantage for aural skills as it's often used as a crutch in place of properly identifying intervals and function. I know that when I went through aural skills, I would identify the notes before identifying the interval and draw a conclusion on the interval based on what notes they are rather than hearing them for what they are. Which makes it very difficult for me to pick out vocal harmonies, I'm terrible at picking out vocal pitch and as a result I have to deconstruct notes in my head to figure out intervals when people sing in harmony.

Using your language metaphor, it would be like if you immediately knew what a word in Russian meant in English but didn't actually understand Russian. You'd be linking together words to infer meaning but grammar might not make any sense and you wouldn't be able to speak Russian. (Bad analogy, but hey, that's how analogies are right? :P)

Definitely sympathize on the drift though. It's annoying when I assume I still recognize notes properly but then realize I'm off.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The other way around. There are 7 notes and the accidentals give us a 12-tone chromatic scale.

Is this a cultural thing?

I was always taught there are 12 notes, while any standard scale contains only 7 of them. (The chromatic scale obviously being the exception which contains all 12.)

Accidentals are just for notation -- obviously B-flat and A-sharp are the same "note", just as F-sharp-sharp and G are.

Our entire turning of equal temperament is based on 12 equal intervals, not 7. So I'd argue parent commenter is correct -- notes are base 12, not base 7.

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