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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

#141

Post by gugagore »

maaark wrote: post #134
beat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unlikely that you're tone deaf. It's quite rare. Truly tone deaf people can't really hear music, because they can't hear the relative relationships of pitches properly. It's the relative pitches, not the absolute pitches, that create the ebb and flow of music. 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-t…

There's a lesser form of tone-deafness (perhaps that's not the right word for it) where you can't tell with certainly or consistency the direction or extent of a change in pitch. You can still hear and appreciate music, but you can't whistle or hum along to a tune.

I know someone who can sing to match a melody from memory very accurately. They sing on key. But they have a hard time singing to match a single pitch, and they have a very hard time naming whether two consecutive pitches are ascending or descending.

I don't get it!

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#142

Post by gugagore »

dTal wrote: post #133
retsibsi wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform. I'm out of my depth here, but wouldn't that process still require some kind of 'clock' (albeit not necessarily the one used for conscious time perception) in order to resolve the signal into absolute, rather than relative, frequencies?

Nope - the transform is analog. You have a tube, and the sound propagates down the tube; higher frequencies get absorbed first, while lower frequencies make it further. The tube is lined with little hairs that just sense amplitude; each hair thus measures the amplitude of the signal convolved by the frequency response of that spot in the tube (actually pulling a pure tone out of that is a remarkable feat of signal pr…

If I may emphasize your point, the frequency reference doesn't come from a neurological time-keeping mechanism. Instead it comes from physical resonance. So it is definitely still a "clock". It's like having many pendulum clocks in your ear. However it is unlikely that whatever you use to count by seconds has to do with the little pendulums (pendula) in your ear.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#143

Post by gugagore »

retsibsi wrote: post #99
klipt wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> you don't analyze pitches using an internal clock, rather you cochlea acts like an analog fourier transform. I'm out of my depth here, but wouldn't that process still require some kind of 'clock' (albeit not necessarily the one used for conscious time perception) in order to resolve the signal into absolute, rather than relative, frequencies?

It does require a kind of clock, in my opinion. I responded to a sibling comment with my thoughts.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#144

Post by gugagore »

klipt wrote: post #33
notatcomputer68 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Note that you're putting forth "the place theory of hearing perception". https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Place_theory_(hearing)

There are links other possible theories on that page, namely the temporal theory, which does propose we rely on neuronal clocks. It seems likely to me that both theories play a role in pitch perception.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#145

Post by mrob »

gugagore wrote: post #139
kskbng wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm interested in this idea that a piano has a distinct timbre per note. Surely the most distinct thing between two notes is their pitch. But you're saying people pick up on the harmonic signature more readily? I can here the difference in timbre across different sections of the piano, but I really cannot imagine distinguishing the timbre of two consecutive notes within the same "section" (by section I mean that the…

Additionally, piano timbre changes depending on how hard you press the keys.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#146

Post by dfan »

gugagore wrote: post #140
dfan wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly I feel like the timbre of an organ note is very consistent from pitch to pitch, whereas, say, an A on a piano sounds buzzy to me while a Bb sounds more smooth and a B natural is kind of liquid. (Of course the timbre probably isn't really changing much but that's how my brain perceives it.)

I just read a comment above that discussed this timbre sensitivity. In any octave the A sounds buzzy? What about on any piano? Do all 88 keys produce a kind of unique timbre signature for you?

A just has a kind of a buzzy feel to it. It's not something I can really quantify or prove, just a sort of synaesthetic sense. I would say that I feel it the strongest in the two octaves below middle C. It is basically true for any piano. I don't have a mapping for all 88 notes on a piano, and it's not like you could hand me a timbre and I could identify the corresponding pitch. The whole thing is shifty enough that I assume something else is actually going on and this is just the way that my conscious brain makes sense of it. But it is part of the way that I perceive pitch.

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#147

Post by monort »

gnulinux wrote: post #67
randcraw wrote: post #31

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…

Here is one paper about that:

Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training.

http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/JASA-2006_119_719-722.pdf

Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

#148

Post by Bud »

mwcampbell wrote: post #89
Bud wrote: 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.

(Very very unlikely to have been A=410. A=415 is very likely.)
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