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Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

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Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#101

Post by laurieg »

wodenokoto wrote: post #75
laurieg wrote: post #18

Not 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 care…

In my experience the Japanese don’t refer to this as a change in pitch, but as you say, they consider it an emphasis. The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it “Accent for Japanese dialects“. That is to say, I don’t think this is pitch as in musical pitch perfect.

It is not referred to as a change in pitch, usually people call it intonation or accent, but the actual change in sounds is a change in pitch.

The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.

The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#102

Post by dghf »

Slow_Hand wrote: post #73
smitelli wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated by this discussion because of how imprecise the terms "perfect," "absolute," "pseudo-absolute," etc. are. It's doubly interesting because we're describing things that happen in our own minds, with each of us having potentially different abilities and training and no common reference to what a "typical" person can do. For me, sometimes, I can hear the opening note or chord of one song and it will immedi…

The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch. If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two. Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if y…

> The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch.

How does that work with variations in concert pitch? As I understand it, although the most common standard is to tune the A above middle C to 440 Hz, it's not universal.

Are the differences too small to matter? Or does music played on instruments tuned to a different standard sound "off"? Or are the other standards sufficiently rare that most musicians will never encounter them?

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#103

Post by ithkuil »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #84
Slow_Hand wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch. If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two. Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if y…

The definition of relative pitch is unfortunately ambiguous, however--I've heard it defined as being able to pick out one note or several note, but having to rely on that reference note from memory to determine the pitch of other notes. I have A flat and E flat burned into my mind from playing Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf rag so many times as a teenager, so if I think hard I can figure out what any note is based on that…

You have a slow perfect pitch

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#104

Post by criddell »

slmjkdbtl wrote: post #80

I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2 years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2 years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.

My kids somehow have perfect pitch. They hear a microwave beep and can say "that's b-flat". They say it's the same as looking at some shoes and naming the color.

From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#105

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

dghf wrote: post #102
Slow_Hand wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch. If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two. Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if y…

> The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch. How does that work with variations in concert pitch? As I understand it, although the most common standard is to tune the A above middle C to 440 Hz, it's not universal. Are the differences too small to matter? Or does music played…

Perfect pitch means that you can identify 440 Hz. Whether you call it A or slightly flat A is a matter of convention.

It's like saying water melts at 0 degrees Celcius vs 33 Fahrenheit. As long as you're talking about the same temperature, it doesn't matter.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#106

Post by Rochus »

criddell wrote: post #100
Rochus wrote: post #4

> I learned perfect pitch as an adult. Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect pitch would be good for.

Or both. You don't have to choose one or the other and I think the two skills could be very complementary.

With perfect pitch, you save yourself the five dollars for a tuning fork. In my forty years of experience as a musician, I have yet to encounter any other benefit.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#107

Post by ithkuil »

bennettnate5 wrote: post #85
vunderba wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, there is an interesting historical anecdote about polish-american pianistic prodigy Josef Hofmann related to absolute pitch: "Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was." This is incredibly impressive for two reasons: - It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solel…

I imagine the gold standard of perfect pitch would be identifying exactly how many cents sharp or flat a given sound is--you could tune a piano by ear if you had that.

You can tune a piano by ear by listening to the beating. You need one note to be tuned according to a given reference but that reference doesn't have to be 440 hz

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#108

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

vunderba wrote: post #63
lyricaljoke wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the responses to this comment imply that this is something fundamentally different than perfect pitch and give it some different name ("pseudo absolute pitch", "perfect relative pitch", etc.). While I concede that most people think of perfect pitch as something that is instilled in some way in early childhood rather than achievable through practice, I guess I would ask those commenters... why do you think the…

In fact, there is an interesting historical anecdote about polish-american pianistic prodigy Josef Hofmann related to absolute pitch: "Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was." This is incredibly impressive for two reasons: - It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solel…

- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification

Why would it be? There's nothing fundamental about a semitone. It's an arbitrary division that varies across different musical systems.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#109

Post by Rochus »

dhosek wrote: post #90
Rochus wrote: post #4

> I learned perfect pitch as an adult. Better learn to play an instrument; I don't know what a perfect pitch would be good for.

I had a friend in high school who had amazing pitch recognition. I still remember being at band camp and watching him with a cassette player and a stack of manuscript paper transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago a measure or two at a time. He’d play a bar of music, then write down all the parts. It really ruined me because I assumed this was a binary thing, you either had it or you didn’t and didn’t realize i…

Perfect pitch is in no way necessary for this. Interval listening is sufficient. The additional benefit of perfect pitch would be, that your friend would know the basic key of the tune without first playing one note on the piano. For example, I don't have perfect pitch, but I can play along with any pop song immediately, without sheet music and without knowing the piece. I just have to press a few keys on the keyboard to find the root note.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#110

Post by dhruvrajvanshi »

jsphweid wrote: post #69
w-m wrote: post #15

Absolute 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 post isn't compelling to me. > a completely useless skill It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task, but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly anyone who studies music at the university level or above would find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly incorrect. > Random chance would be 8.3%. A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magica…

> A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).

Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the correct pitch.

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