Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
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Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#2Don't need to look far to find claims of some fairly serious side effects of the drug in many contexts, but it's interesting to hear that it's possible to tamper with neuroplasticity artificially.
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#3I never figured I'd need to hack my vocal cords... or that I'd see a post like this on HN...
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#4For reference, valproic acid (and/or its salt) is sold under the trade name Depakote. This is not a drug you should consider taking lightly, whatever neuroplasticity benefits it might confer.
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#5I'd really love to have perfect pitch but I always thought it was genetic until just a few months ago. Does anyone know any adults who were able to teach themselves perfect pitch, without the aid of mind altering chemicals, and if so how'd they do it?
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#6If there's a pill that allows me to learn stuff as readily as a child, perfect pitch is kinda low on my list of to-do's.
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#7For reference, valproic acid (and/or its salt) is sold under the trade name Depakote . This is not a drug you should consider taking lightly, whatever neuroplasticity benefits it might confer.
Cosmetic neuropharmacology seems to have a miracle drug for everything and the side-effects to match: ie armodafinil, adderall, on and on.
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#8This has been covered on HN a few times, and I should point out that the sample size on this is in the low tens, so don't get too excited.
But every time I see it, I remember a really odd side effect that I had while on a mood stabilizer (not sure which -- could well have been valproic acid, the same drug referenced in the article). A few days into taking the drug, I found that music that I knew well sounded different; specifically, it sounded like it was being played back too fast, as if you were playing 44.1khz audio at 48khz. I initially figured I screwed something up on my machine, but tested myself with various other songs on other devices, and every one of them was too sharp.
This continued for several days and was the primary reason I ended up switching to a different medication; I don't have absolute pitch but I have very finely tuned relative pitch and that's not something I would be happy about giving up. Discontinuing the meds fixed it within a day, but I've always wondered exactly why that happened. Very odd.
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#9This is very interesting to me. A while back I was fascinated with the concept of absolute pitch (some people have a qualitatively different, categorical perception of pitch) and did quite a bit of research on the topic. One resource that I invite anyone that is interested to read is the research done by this guy:
http://aruffo.com/eartraining/
Ignore the fact that he has a "learn AP here!" link - usually that is a signal that it's a scam of some kind, but in this case he has quite a bit of interesting material to back his theories if you go to "AP Research".
Re: Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That
#10There's a strange preoccupation with perfect pitch. It's not very useful today since there are inexpensive electronic and mechanical tools to give you absolute pitch. It wasn't even that useful previously.
I believe that people confuse it with relative pitch which usually translates to the skill of transcribing and memorizing melodies. This is very useful as a musician or even in daily life sometimes. There are people who have an innate talent for that too, but it's unrelated to perfect pitch.