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Your mileage may vary. BTW, is 10,000 hours not considered pseudoscience?
It's simplification of real research on expertise in a sound bite.
Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
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Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#12Or you could just take depakote[0]. [0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
Honestly fascinating.
Any first-hand experience?
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#13[flagged]
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Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#14> By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences; I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch. > Don’t learn a non-C instr…
Yeah, this advice doesn't hold up--even the OP mentions learning the clarinet, which is a B-flat instrument. I also play the clarinet and developed the same ability to detect each note by its timbre. I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates, the back-pressure or resistance you feel while playing, that becomes associated with the timbre the longer you play.
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#15Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :)
A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.
It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#16Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :) A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were…
I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard somehow fades, or something...
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#17This is more common than people thought. I don't remember who said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of All Star - Smash Mouth for example.
Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#18Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.
As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.
One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.
Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#19I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than not:
* aurally identify key signatures
* aurally identify chords
* sing a given note on command
Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:
* Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor
* The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor
* Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A
* Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat
* Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor
* etc.
A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years
#20Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :) A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were…
This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear" after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in perfect clarity in the proper key.
I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)