Anecdata: my piano teacher was one of a class in the 1920s who were all explicitly trained into absolute pitch during kindergarten . Every person in the class learned it and retained it until at least late middle age. Some were better than others: my teacher’s sister, for example, could give you the pitch of anything from knocking a piece of wood to the sound of a car exhaust.
Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
111–120 of 148 posts
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...). 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 fa…
Late 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's rea…
That sounds like a tiny horror story to me. Losing my hearing would be much more difficult to me than losing my site. My sympathies are definitely with you
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#113Earlier 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’d argue that you are either at synesthetic or are somewhat pre-disposed to absolute pitch. I have heard others describe it the way you do but I do not hear tones that way.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#114My 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.
This could also be simply be physics, because up there on the fingerboard there is no way to get good tuning.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...). 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 fa…
Late 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's rea…
Yup, singing at 415 fucked up my pitch for a while. Still, it's a good excuse for human lapses. And at least it's not singing at 430, which is uniformly terrible for everyone.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#116More 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…
loved your analogy ;)
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...). 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 fa…
Late 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's rea…
funny thing, I've noticed actual detuning happening in one ear only two or three times since I've passed my mid 20s. the second time, I tested it with earbuds - I had my PC play a sine wave at 440, sounded fine in the left but was very flat in the right, by easily 10 to 15 Hz. listening to anything with any kind of harmonic content with both ears was, obviously, terrible. nausea inducing, actually.
it goes away after 30 mins or so but the first time I had a brief moment of panic that this was some kind of permanent effect I had woken up with.
if my memory has any accuracy (dubious) then I was suffering from fairly heavy head colds every time this happened, so - applying totally uneducated guesswork - I put it down to something like uneven pressure buildup from a stuffy nasal cavity dampening the vibrations inside the ear.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 backgr…
Relative is far more important than absolute pitch. As long as the notes are precise distances apart, you'll get the harmonies you need.
Some people with absolute pitch are irritated to no end that tons of music isn't tuned to their idea of absolute pitch.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch which describes how orchestras have tuned to different pitches historically.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#119Musician here with terrible pitch guessing ability (but semi-decent composition skillz and good harmony sense).
I have always found absolute (or "perfect" pitch) to be misinterpreted in popular culture. I have not actually met a musician with perfect pitch. However, perhaps my definition is too narrow.
Would a person with perfect pitch be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 432 Hz A? Would they be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 438 Hz A?
If the definition is to be able to tell that a note is only slightly off within some pre-decided tuning system, then I know many people that can do this. The question to me is whether absolute pitch is as it says in the name, "absolute", or is it always limited by some measure of uncertainty? Is there a physical limitation? (Is it 1 Hz, or is it 5 Hz?)
Hope someone can explain this.
Edit: In the paper, they seem to stick to a pre-decided tuning system. Probably the standard one that we have now (equal spacing based on 13th root of 2 with 440 Hz A).
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#120I've studied cello from age 5 to conservatory degree; the pitches of the open strings are burned in my memory. I can also often tell which key an orchestra plays by timbral cues. However, I do not have "real" perfect pitch, although the topic study might find that I do. True perfect pitch is like the anecdotes in the thread: discomfort with "wrong" transpositions or tunings, learning melodies by real rather than relative pitch, internal references that can go out of tune with age. All these are completely alien to me.