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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)

#111

Post by vnorilo »

nostrademons wrote: post #101
bjoli wrote: post #50

I 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 took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of thi…

I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch.

I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears.

Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it lose focus by a semitone or three.

Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just shrug and accept the new A4.

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

#112

Post by Tade0 »

aphexcx wrote: post #60
Tade0 wrote: 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…

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…

I think it was three years before it stopped being unpleasant and another three that made it largely go away.

I remember designing an amplifier circuit for a college project, listening to the output sine wave while looking at the frequency domain and thinking "that unpleasant feeling is just the THD being over 0,5%".

Fingers crossed for your recovery!

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

#113

Post by klipt »

vnorilo wrote: post #111
nostrademons wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of thi…

I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least m…

> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them

Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediately after but also months later.

https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...

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

#114

Post by coliveira »

hluska wrote: post #108
helaoban wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a certain age (at least that's layman my understanding). Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a new language?).

The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago’s study is most famous but results have been replicated at many other schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine. The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as artists they’re better off spending their time elsewhere.

Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is relatively the same. Things would be different if every key had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought about different keys having different moods.

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

#115

Post by samstave »

hluska wrote: post #107
samstave wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'

Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command. If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch fo…

thank you for the 'perfect pitch' response <3

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

#116

Post by Tade0 »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #69
tomcam wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

Oh, this is a fun (deep-fried sarcasm here) thing to have, ask me how I know.

It's not well researched, but apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response.

I started using it to gauge whether I'm upset with a particular person over something, because it would intensify in such cases, and reflect on that.

Also helped my friend manually remove breath and lip sounds from a recording he was doing for an indie mod for a game because, well, with enough compression it was painful to listen to for me.

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

#118

Post by coliveira »

samstave wrote: post #104
bjoli wrote: post #50

I 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…

May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'

Perfect pitch means that you can identify (give the name of) different pitches without the help of instruments. This is a rare ability even for trained musicians.

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

#120

Post by nostrademons »

vnorilo wrote: post #111
nostrademons wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of thi…

I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least m…

I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.)

I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I don't have perfect pitch.)

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