Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B' instead.
Not necessarily. In Germany and probably also other parts of the world B is called H and B flat is called B.
Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
161–170 of 257 posts
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch. I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears. Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least m…
I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.) I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cau…
When I played in a youth orchestra our music director told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many recordings with such tuning.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#163Rick 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…
In another video Rick Beato said he facilitated development of his son's perfect pitch by exposing him to a lot of complex music in early age.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM&t=598s
His hypothesis, based on some studies, is that children in ealy age have ability for perfect pitch but later loose it, if it's not utilized. The same way as young children are able to percieve any phoneme of any language, but later loose this ability and only recognise phonemes of the language spoken in the family (that's a known scientific fact).
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#164Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B' instead.
For funny historical reasons, the english tone B is called H in some countries, especially northern and central europe. (English B-flat is called B there)
Wherever that figure is from.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'
Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command. If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch fo…
>I have never read or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly useful
Allegedly, Mozart transcribed Allegri's Miserere after hearing it performed once in the Vatican: https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-all....
Perhaps apocryphal, but sounds pretty useful to me.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
Ah, this answers my question above about “switching modes” to relative. Sounds like that’s not a thing. But can you hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you’re not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing interval math all the time!
I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and people learn to write down the chords based on relative position. But I and another student with perfect pitch would ace the class by just writing down the chords based on what they actually were. This went on until he started playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#. Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone except for us two, who were totally hosed.
When I went to my parent's church, the organist would spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank just between us two, and he knew that I was the only other person in the room who knew what he had done to me.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.
Why do you need to transpose? You mean when playing a transposed instrument like woodwinds / brass?
Jazz. Jazz is all about transposition.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#168I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names and sound.
But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear I'll nearly always start on the right note.
What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect it could be developed it were a priority.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#169If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, not just what's on the top 40 radio. Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes i…
Most kids are exposed to language a lot in their childhood, they don't automatically learn to produce "perfect words".
They do, most kids learn to say words perfectly imitating what they hear, including regional accents. Of course some people have speech impediments but it's a minority.
Re: Children aged 2-6 successfully trained to acquire absolute pitch (2012)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is relatively the same. Things would be different if every key had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought about different keys having different moods.
That statement is not true of Western music in general, only of most (not all) classical and poular music since roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became popular.[1]
Much Western music, such as that written during the the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. use a variety of other systems such as some form of just intonation[2], where different keys sound very different as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same interval.
Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American music.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation