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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)

#61
post #21

I 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…

Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other things. People learn to identify the pitches because they sound different and learn the names for them.

Nerd note: the name "Perfect pitch" is something of a misnomer because the frequencies the note names refer to is a social construct which has changed over time[1]. A=440 is the predominant concert pitch now but since "pitch taste" generally gets brighter/sharper over time A=443 is used now by the Berlin Philharmonic for example instead as a concert pitch. In the Baroque period we know (from looking at surviving fixed-pitch instruments like historical organs) that their reference A was generally a bit flatter than that but it's not consistent. Nowadays musicians playing historically-informed performances have settled on A=415 as a common baroque pitch standard because it's helpful for everyone to agree so they can have instruments made that play that pitch standard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#History_of_pitch...

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#62

Earlier 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.

Yeah my mom is a piano teacher and described the same difficulty. In university (USSR) they would play the same song twice. The first time she got all the notes and the second time she’d fill in the melody. Other students without perfect pitch would be able to transcribe the entire thing the first time and just use the second time to correct any mistakes they made.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#63
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your kid can achieve absolute pitch in geometric space, like.. epsg:4978? That would be epic. Your kid could always tell you what coordinates you're at if you're standing at a known angle.

What does "epsg:4978" mean?

A longer name for WGS 84.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#65
post #23

If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. They practice by associating a different colored flag with each chord.

Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have this same color, key association.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#66
post #22
post #8

While 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.

As an amateur musician and composer who doesn’t have it, seems like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I don’t know what else. You must still be able to “switch modes” to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn’t even hear musical structures the same way, because aside from timbre they’re all relative.

My mom says it’s helpful for her as a music teacher. It was annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she’d be cooking in the kitchen and I’d be playing in the other room and she’d call out when I made a mistake. But that’s probably just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I’m sure perfect pitch is only a small part of it but it helps.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#67

If 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…

I am very skeptical that a child can learn perfect pitch merely by listening to classical music.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#69
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, confirmed by tuning fork. From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number of engines it had without looking. My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, an…

That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and friends and it’s a hard thing to explain with no one else notices. For me however it’s a largely positive experience. I am hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed digi…

do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising) misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point where artifacts from music compression bother me that much. I don't have an official testing result to prove or define this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice things in the ambient sound environment that most others either don't notice or tune out, and this has at least as many downsides as benefits.

If someone is a loud chewer, or drink slurper, it's as if I can hear every single bit of muscle and conjunctiva flexing and saliva sloshing around inside their jaw, and the glorp glorp sound of their swallows, if we're both in an otherwise quiet room. Or if there is a car alarm going off or dog barking three blocks away, sounds other people appear to be completely unaware of or passively filter out can sometimes drive me into quiet boiling stress that is completely irrational yet impossible to reason myself out of, and i just have to leave.

Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)

#70
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.y…

Thanks for the video link! Very cool. The poor singing combined with the on-the-fly guitar tuning gave the piece a grungy punk-like feel, at least to my ears. I rather enjoyed it.

A cute (translated) comment from the video: “To sing with this guitarist is easy! Just praise the Lord and he does the rest!”

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