Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

moderndescartes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 153 posts

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#121

Post by lpnotes »

I grew up thinking I had perfect pitch, after a youth choir director identified it and realized I could name all the notes from a random key played on the piano.

Later in life, though, I realized that sometimes my perfect pitch was... half a step off? And like the writer of the article, I was better at identifying notes from my primary instruments (in my case violin and piano) rather than from an instrument that had a much lower or higher register.

Side note: last year my family and I coded and launched Perfect Pitch Puzzle, a wordle-esque game that helps people without perfect pitch practice identifying notes by guessing the first six notes of a melody at a time. https://www.perfectpitchpuzzle.com/ New songs are still being added daily. Enjoy!

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#122

Post by commandlinefan »

I've been doing directed ear training online for several years now - if you think you have perfect pitch, you can actually test it at tonedear.com (I don't). I've been working instead on the first lesson, interval training. It plays two tones next to each other and you're supposed to identify if they're a major third, perfect fifth, octave, etc. I've been doing it for over two years and I've definitely gotten better, although I'm still not even at 100% at interval recognition.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#123

Post by omnicognate »

bunderbunder wrote: post #119

Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That could be a challenging thing to have to…

As described to me by a couple of professional musicians who have absolute pitch (I don't) it's not so much that you lose it as that it shifts. For example the qualia you experienced for a B might now be felt in response to a slightly flat C, the whole sensation having shifted by a bit less than a semitone.

This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a blessing for musicians.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#124

Post by mrob »

tzs wrote: post #92

Careful what you wish for. • Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts. • Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because…

Also:

* "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal.

* 12 tone equal temperament is not universal.

* Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect speeds.

* Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the tuning will vary with temperature. Nobody is going to tune a pipe organ in a drafty church every time the weather changes.

* DJ mixes rely on playing tracks at different speeds to allow for smooth transitions between tracks of different tempo[0], which changes the tuning.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatmatching

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#125

Post by mrob »

bowsamic wrote: post #94
tzs wrote: post #92

Careful what you wish for. • Live music is often slightly out of tune. If the piano at a small club where you are playing a one night gig is slightly low your band is probably going to tune to that piano. I've read of vocalists with perfect pitch saying that this drove them nuts. • Perfect pitch often drifts as you age. I've read of people who had to stop listening to music when they got into their 50s or 60s because…

Yeah I've also heard that it's more of an annoyance than it's worth, in fact I'm not really sure of anyone who has said it's a benefit in any way. It's just not really an aspect of music that people usually enjoy anyway. Naturally, music is engineered more to be relatively pitched rather than absolute

It's useful if you're singing a song that starts a cappella and has instruments join later. Admittedly, this is not common. Only example I can think of is The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#126

Post by bluGill »

dhosek wrote: post #88
bluGill wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my city we tune to A=441 I have no idea why but when in Rome...

It’s very much a regional thing where Europeans tend to tune higher than Americans, as I recall. A lot is going to be dictated by the pitch of the local church organ. Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.

A440 was standardized in 1939. There was an earlier attempt to standardize on A435 in the late 1800s, but they specified a temperature uncomfortably cold, when you move something (I'm not sure what) tuned at A435 to a more comfortable room temperature you get close to A440, and from there a little rounding and we have A440. Before the 1850s every town had their own standard which was mostly based on whatever the A note of their organ was. Turning a pipe organ takes an expert hours and costs a lot of money so if it is in tune without you make everyone else tune their instrument to the organ. The tuning fork was invented in 1711, before then we didn't even have a way to move a tuning between downs - the act of transporting most instrument changes the tuning.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#127

Post by jsphweid »

dhruvrajvanshi wrote: post #110
jsphweid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not called "in-the-ballpark" pitch, it's called perfect/absolute pitch. Being up to a quarter tone off is a large error in music. Thinking of pitch in terms of 12 buckets is not musically useful. The vast majority of music is based off consonance where being even a few hertz off means unpleasant dissonance. TLDR: Thinking of pitch as 12 buckets is mostly irrelevant.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#128

Post by flyingcircus3 »

vunderba wrote: post #60
flyingcircus3 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe my claim of having perfect pitch stands on solid ground, and consists largely of what OP is describing. That's because I can demonstrate it. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the described method is a reasonable way to _acquire_ perfect pitch, but I do contend that what is described is a reasonable method of demonstrating and explaining one's perfect pitch. If you do have perfect pitch, that is reflected…

Yeah I would agree that with proper practice (assuming you have a "locked in" song for every semitone in a scale) - that this could probably be extrapolated to being able to hear a random note on an instrument and then naming that note, and vice versa singing a given note on command.

An even easier method, which I was taught is interval training. The jaws theme is a minor second. Do re mi starts with a major second, and so on. Interval training is easier, imo, and would then allow you to memorize fewer songs with absolute notes.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#129

Post by jsphweid »

w-m wrote: post #81
jsphweid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This criticism isn't compelling to me. The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love" played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he might just have picke…

xD Well I didn't expect it to go there. I don't know that song but I'll have to listen to it when I get home.

I don't have perfect pitch but it's not too hard to imagine what I could do with it. For me, it'd simply make a lot of tasks faster. I've spent a lot of time throughout my life transcribing music. I can do it relatively quickly but there's lots of moments where I have to confirm things, or poke around notes finding the matching notes, struggling to clarify shades of a chord based on the presence of notes.

Reading music will be easier for people with AP, especially in singing situations. Even if you're a pianist it will still be helpful. There are a few Marc-Andre Hamelin interviews out there where he describes some of the advantages. It's easier to read music if you know immediately what it's going to sound like. Again, this is possible with relative pitch, but it's just more work and slower.

Arranging and composing away from the keyboard will be much easier with perfect pitch.

As time goes on, it'll be less important, most likely. And yes, there are some downsides obviously. In my final aural training class in music school, we had a competition at the very end of the year for fun. It came down to a team of 3 I was on vs. a team of 3 that had a guy with AP. The final task was to sight-sing a musical 'round' (a composition where the melody repeats in the various voices at different points in different voices overlapping each other). The guy with AP actually ruined it for his team. They mistakenly chose him to finish the round instead of start it. Mid-way through their performance, the pitch on their team had drifted so heavily they were in-between notes on the piano when he took over. He tried to sing 'relative' to everyone else but it was so hard for him. It was so unnatural for him to sing out of key, he couldn't do it; it sounded really bad. Great guy though and a ridiculously good violinist.

Re: Learn perfect pitch in 15 years

#130

Post by vunderba »

dhruvrajvanshi wrote: post #108
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…

- 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.

I'm not saying that it is but MOST people when they think of perfect pitch - they think in terms of note identification (e.g. semitones), A, A#, etc.

My point was more about how everyone's ability falls along a "Hz Range Level".

Post reply on HN