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

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

journals.sagepub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 257 posts

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

#141

Post by kqr »

There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch".

After the first note is known, the two are mostly indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can, once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch don't even need to be told what that first note is.

(This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance, whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the same.)

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

#142

Post by Tade0 »

tomcam wrote: post #135
Tade0 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wa…

> apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response. OK I can come out of the closet. These sounds provoke a kind of panic inside me, but I never connected it to fight or flight. Feels very right to me.

I see red. I'm surprised I had any friends in school, because I was just awful to people.

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

#143

Post by 1letterunixname »

tomcam wrote: post #40
1letterunixname wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, confirmed by tuning fork. From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number of engines it had without looking. My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, an…

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…

The only known condition for hearing one's eyeball move is a 3rd window somewhere in the inner ear, so there's no meaningful differential diagnosis. I received a formal diagnosis by an otolaryngologist (via high-resolution CT of the superior canal) and audiology but I already knew the conclusion.

I could get brain surgery and I'm "a good candidate" for it, but do I really want a surgeon cutting a large hole in the side of my head, jacking up my brain, and then packing my superior canal with my spare tissue*?

* I flatly refuse to have tissue implanted that isn't my own.

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

#144

Post by ska »

freedomben wrote: post #85
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…

How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about it not being possible)

There is some good evidence that children whose first language is tonal (e.g. chinese) develop perfect pitch at much higher rates than those whose is not (e.g. english). This strongly suggests that at least if you catch it at the right developmental stage, it is learnable.

I haven't seen anything equivalent for learning later in life though, although ear-training exercises clearly make your estimation better if you are disciplined about it, but that is relative, not absolute.

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

#145

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

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…

> ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold.

> had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it.

This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting curves — I wonder what would happen if you tried to train with the specific goal of extending that window, rather than just noting what your window is during other training. Maybe it's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect pitch in this way?

Especially in your case, since you already have data that your window of 5-10 minutes could extend to 1.5 hours, it seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you'd spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this — e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week, then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc...

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

#146

Post by musicale »

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.

I hadn't actually heard of the Chicago work before, but this is interesting:

"These results suggest that the acquisition of intermediate absolute pitch ability (significantly above chance but below ‘‘true’’ AP performance) depends on an individual’s general auditory working memory ability" [1]

Apparently learned absolute pitch wasn't as accurate as "true" perfect pitch.

[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/52277554/Auditory_working_...

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

#147

Post by nostrademons »

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote: post #145
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…

> ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. > had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it.…

We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to developing better relative pitch and being able to name intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch, because you'll almost always have a reference note available.

It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the psych and music departments got together though. If I were still in college I'd suggest it. :-)

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

#148

Post by pb060 »

intrasight wrote: post #82

Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which I'm hearing all the fucking time.

Why do you hear a persistent 60hz sound? Could it be linked to the AC frequency? I couldn't find anything about it online.

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

#149

Post by blindriver »

My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect pitch.

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

#150

Post by freedomben »

mhh__ wrote: post #43
vajrabum wrote: post #41

Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit…

Dylan is very impressive but I find there to be something disturbing in that dynamic

What do you find disturbing in that dynamic?
Post reply on HN