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Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

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Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#81
post #77

Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying te…

That's interesting. Do you know why pitch varied so much at those periods and why have we settled on A=440 being considered orchestral pitch these days? I'd think having to sing at these different pitches must be difficult since you can't tune your voice like a instrument can.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#82
From the evolutionary perspective, what advantage does having perfect pitch "built-in" give a person or society? Being able to identify the pitch of some game you might be hunting wouldn't seem to make you a better hunter thus being able to survive hard times so you're able to pass your genes along better than one without it.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#83
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…

"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 to do better."

It is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes.

I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary).

So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain.

I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#84
post #77

Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying te…

That's interesting. Do you know why pitch varied so much at those periods and why have we settled on A=440 being considered orchestral pitch these days? I'd think having to sing at these different pitches must be difficult since you can't tune your voice like a instrument can.

There's a pretty good/brief Wikipedia article about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch (see specifically "Pitch Inflation"

In short, it was competition for the performance to seem more "bright" and exciting. It's arbitrary, but for performers to reach higher pitches was viewed as more challenging (and it is, for singers).

The wiki article is cited, so you can read up in as much depth as you like. But, it mostly boils down to, "That's just what people liked during important periods of musical development. And, then we stopped because technology advanced to the point where we could very accurately determine pitch and for the past 50+ years the majority of recorded and performed music has been A=440, or very close to it."

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#85

From the evolutionary perspective, what advantage does having perfect pitch "built-in" give a person or society? Being able to identify the pitch of some game you might be hunting wouldn't seem to make you a better hunter thus being able to survive hard times so you're able to pass your genes along better than one without it.

It's closely related to language skills, which also have nothing to do with hunting, but have a lot to do with being an attractive mate and having leadership abilities. So...it is not a survival skill, rather it is a mating skill.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#86

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…

"an app that plays a sound and asks to name it doesn't qualify"

I don't think any ear training app works that way. Any app that is based on good pedagogical practice would be training relative pitch recognition, not note naming. An app like that would only be usable by people who already have perfect pitch. Relative pitch, which is the skill most musicians cultivate, is based on recognizing the difference between pitches as well as the sound of combinations of pitches (i.e. recognizing major/minor chords), and only much later do note names come into play. Someone with a very refined sense of relative pitch can name notes, if they have a reference pitch in their head that they can compare to (and some people take that one step further by making the top or bottom of their vocal range their "reference note", or they "memorize" the first note of some piece of music they know well, so they can figure out other pitches based on where it is relative to a known note, but that can drift).

Anyway, I've tried a bunch of ear training apps and I really like Perfect Ear. It is, by far, the best ear training app I've found, and it covers tons of ground. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...)

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#87
post #77

Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying te…

It's my understanding that perfect pitch can be tuned, and also trained to deal with microtonal harmonies, etc. I don't think it is a straight jacket. Jacob Collier, I think(?), has perfect pitch, but going outside of western harmony is his schtick.

I think it's more like learning new words as an adult rather than a cage. But, maybe I'm wrong? I've heard anecdotally of people with perfect pitch complaining about some music being "out of tune", but I somehow doubt musicians are saying that, since as you note, music comes in all sorts of tunings (and the more interesting the music is, the more likely it is to go in weird directions, in terms of tuning, scales, etc.).

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#88

There are supplements/nootropics that make such a thing possible.

lol, the entire nootropic industry is just one step above pseudoscience. Nobody I know who has started taking nootropics has seen any measurable benefit from them aside from side effects, assuming we are excluding normal stimulants from "nootropics" and mostly referring to *racetams. Additionally, most studies on nootropics that show promising results focus on things like NGF rather than actual changes in intelligence, and only test one potential nootropic at a time, while most people who take them do complex stacks / take much higher doses, which makes me question their safety regarding long-term use

Given that, to my knowledge, there isn't any evidence that increasing neurotropic growth factor will cause significant neuron growth/regeneration in regular adults, it seems the only nootropics that actually work are stimulants and semi-stimulants, which at the end of the day just make you more alert and focused

It's one of those "life hacks" that gives such marginal, if any, benefits that it's not even a productive use of your time to think about them/order them/etc. when you could do more productive life hacks with your time instead

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#89
post #77

Professional classical singer here. I'm personally glad that I don't have absolute pitch, or at least not any version that is mostly focused on A=440 Hz, because as an early-music performer, I regularly have to sing at A=415 (for Bach and other Baroque composers), A=430 (for Mozart on classical-period instruments), A=440, and even A=465 (for Monteverdi) at times. And occasionally at other pitches. And with varying te…

You make a good point. I have absolute pitch, or at least something very close. When I was 16, we sang several of the songs from Handel's Messiah in my high school choir. A couple of times, our teacher played a recording. And I, knowing nothing about the history, criticized it for being flat. I'm pretty sure it was A=410. We did our performances at A=440 though.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#90

There are supplements/nootropics that make such a thing possible.

There are supplements/nootropics that people claim to make all sorts of things possible. The research is often lightly corroborated. But, there has been discussion here about the subject a few times over the years. Valproate, a mood stabilizer, is one such drug, but the study size was small.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-...

I'd be curious what supplements you have in mind, since you included it in your comment.

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