I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.)
Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
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Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#52Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are).
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very useful for a session musician. You could pick up a song without hunting for the key.
I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians from the church try to find the song key and chords in real time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good ear.
In this video you can see an example of how it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF4onowI1xw
[1]: https://pt-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Harpa_Crist%C...
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#54While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any problem appreciating what they like.
Heh, I'm that friend in my circle. I certainly don't bash anyone's music preferences but everyone has to know why a song/artist "just isn't my thing," and I get the "snob" label. Ah well.
But I get where your friend is coming from. When I hear something off pitch, for whatever reason, it's just distracting and pure cacophony.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#55I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately.
For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do.
Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#56If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, not just what's on the top 40 radio. Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes i…
Most kids are exposed to language a lot in their childhood, they don't automatically learn to produce "perfect words".
This is more like learning phonemes. It significantly helps language acquisition to expose your children to a lot of different word sounds. Similarly, if you only play top 40 pop music or baroque music, your child likely won't be able to acquire perfect pitch.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#57I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
I’m curious how much initial effort it took you to get decent at it
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#58I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinct…
Interesting, I didn’t know perfect pitch was something you could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His teachers always told us it was something you’re born with.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#59My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening t…
I remember watching a documentary about this savant and his ability was perfect pitch and now you are totally ruining the story.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#60I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern? When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand. It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in id…
What you heard is likely a rare hearing disorder called Diplacusis or Polyacusis - aka hearing additional erroneous pitches: https://www.neilsperlingmd.com/blog/2018/05/everything-you-n...
I've had it in my right ear ever since being exposed to a loud engine for 9+ hours in 2021. It gets noticeable for loud sounds, especially in the 3700-5200hz range; in my right ear, I'll hear a high-pitched ringing overtone on top of whatever external I'm hearing. It's quite frustrating, but seems to come and go. Nice to hear that it faded over time for you - gives me hope!