Live data from Hacker News

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

journals.sagepub.com

171–180 of 257 posts

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

#171
post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This skill has absolutely nothing to do with whether one has perfect pitch, however.

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

#173

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…

Absolute pitch is a curse for musicians. It's not even an asset unless you are a piano tuner or a transcription professional of some sort. Not many conductors have it. Only a handful of the great musicians in history, from classical to jazz to pop happened to have AP. It's a parlor trick. And many musicians thought to have perfect pitch actually were just great recognizing pitches - pitch memory - which is different from perfect pitch. I can recognize pitches with a ~50% accuracy just because I can either recall the note, or bend my vocal chords as if I would start singing the note and, from pure muscle memory, say "this is probably an E".

Absolute pitch basically spoils the musician's ability to deal with varying pitch and musical temperament[1] situations and instruments. It can drive them nuts, ie if given a C to sing but actually have to detune or transpose it on the fly. It's also detrimental for anyone's ability to purely enjoy music. _Relative pitch_ on the other hand is so much more important. Absolute pitch in fact can mess with your relative pitch, as C and Ab are just that C and Ab, not a minor 6th.

Also, a good sense of being in tune when playing with others is, obviously, fundamental but also a relative, not absolute, in essence. Knowing you are playing in tune, not perfectly pitched, is the asset needed by bowed string players. Relative pitch, not AP, is an asset for someone who needs to sight sing on pitch - just listen to your tuning fork and find that C or Ab.

Music is not a perfect craft, it's not about being digitally precise. Making music is not about frequencies, or hitting absolute hertz. Even pitch itself is not "perfect", it's a flawed system that people, in part for the sake of standardization, settled upon. Pitch is a size that does not fit all. So why would anyone be proud of have frequencies memorized?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_temperament

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

#174
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

441+ is also very common in the US. Top-tier orchestras rarely use 440 at this point.

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

#175
Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up during a critical period in early life. However, there was a fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

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

#176
post #113

Earlier 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…

> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediatel…

Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch being detuned "months later."

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

#177
About this time I always "begin" to wonder how helpful would it really be for someone born with perfect pitch today at A=440 if they would have instead been born during a previous century when the recognized standard pitch was seldom A=440?

I would have to imagine it would drive some of them nuts.

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

#178
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 si…

Yeah no thanks!

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

#179
post #137
post #34

My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening t…

In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86 code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office mate that I could make my computer play A440. He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said he had…

Love that story!

> He said he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost everything was out of tune.

I very much feel I would share that feeling if I had it.

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

#180
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom says it’s helpful for her as a music teacher. It was annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she’d be cooking in the kitchen and I’d be playing in the other room and she’d call out when I made a mistake. But that’s probably just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I’m sure perfect…

It seems like hearing someone make a mistake, especially on a piano (vs a trombone or violin), isn't related at all to perfect pitch... unless the mistake is playing the whole piece in the wrong key

That’s fair. I could also play any note on the piano and she would play the exact same note back.
Post reply on HN