It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.
Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
21–30 of 148 posts
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#22More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem t…
Me too; I guess it's nice not to be alone. I thought I was shifting into Baroque A=415 mode.
Alas even this mutant absolute pitch is still troublesome in one way: sometimes some folks I played and sang with said "OK, the music is written in X, but we want to do it in Y." I couldn't do it without learning it as written and then playing or singing it in Y without looking at the music.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#23In my first class in college for a music theory course, the first assignment was "memorize A" (440Hz). Surprisingly, after several weeks of playing the tone and matching it verbally, I did learn A. Everything else from there is knowing intervals relative to A (like, C is a minor 3rd above A, or 3 half steps). Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfec…
I had a choir teacher who told us a story about cheating that assignment by learning the pitch of the hum of the fluorescent lights in their classroom.
Yes! 60 Hz is pretty darned close to Bb.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#24How would you ever know if you "have" perfect pitch without training? I don't even know what a C or B is[0]. Are there any tests online that don't require prior knowledge? [0] I do realize they denote some frequencies
Musical notes are a base-7 system denoted with the letters A-F repeating. Given that it is not a numerical system, different A's or B's (ect) are marked with numbers rather then continuing like hex. i.e. A3, E5 (etc) with lower tones being lower numbers.
To answer your question, you won't. Perfect pitch usually develops in people who have had musical training since very young childhood. Just like you can't really remember learning your native language, they can't remember learning this skill. But like everyone, they did learn it at some point.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#25The way I do it is I keep a memory of a song with a known reference frequency in my head. Usually it's the Super Mario Bros. theme, whose root is middle C. I know how the other notes on the scale sound relative to middle C. Sharps and flats are trickier, but if they sound unusual I can go half a step up or down and see if they match some other note. Usually I can identify a tone within half a step or so. Or at least…
I have a similar method. It's certainly not perfect, but 99% of the time I'll be within two semitones, 80% within 1 semitone, and 50% of the time I'll be exactly right (percentages are approximate).
Smoke On The Water gives me a G, Call Me The Breeze gives me an A, and so on. These are songs I've heard so many times they are just burned into my head.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#26More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem t…
Supposedly the ability to guess how long a minute is also goes that way as you get older, e.g. older participants think a minutes is over after 62s or more. So if your internal clock slows down a B would sound like a C.
Wow that's a fascinating possible explanation
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#27It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.
Great catch, this is probably a huge detail.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#28Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It's occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other. Also, trained…
Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are.
First, someone with "untrained" AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn't be in a position where they'd be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there's only rhythm to figure out.
While it can be momentarily distracting when music doesn't match its normal key due to transposition or tuning issues, I can move past it without too much effort, although I am continually aware of the discrepancy. It's like the visual illusion where the ballerina can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise depending on your perspective.
The biggest benefit is being able to identify the key without having to do the initial hunt for the tonic by testing notes. This is very useful in an accompaniment situation.
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#29More interesting to me is the fact that many people with absolute pitch start to lose it in their 40s and 50s. This has happened to me too. What happens is that your pitch assessment often starts going sharp, so what you thought was a C was actually a B, say. For me the pitch assessment accuracy differs depending on the harmonic content of the sound: guitars and harmonicas are awful, but pianos and flutes etc. seem t…
Since birth I've been susceptible to otitis, and one day I was having a bad one, with eardrum penetration in right ear, as I was at the edge of teenage. I always have been listening to some music, and happened to notice that tone in the sore right ear is 1/2 tone up. But when I plugged left headphone into healthy left ear, music somehow had synchronized and I heard no difference then. I was terrified with thought that it would keep pitch shifted forever, but thank god it's okay now.
I wonder what biologists say, but I guess than final pitch/hue we perceive is a result of altogether three factors: liquid pressure inside ear (physics), unconditional neural reflexes (developed as genetically encoded), and chronobiology (there are structures inside our brain that play the same role as clock impulse generator in electronic devices[1]).
Re: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
#30It seems all participants in the study were recruited from within Hong Kong. I wonder if being speakers of tonal languages has any effect. I'd be interested in seeing if the study could be reproduced with speakers of non-tonal languages.
There's definitely some research that suggests that tonal languages have some relation to ability to distinguish absolute pitch.
http://deutsch.ucsd.edu/pdf/MP-2004-21_339-356.pdf
> The findings from these three experiments are in accordance with the hypothesis that speakers of tone language employ absolute pitch as a feature of speech and that they refer to precise and stable absolute pitch templates in enunciating words.
> The present study does not address the question of whether absolute pitch, when acquired as a feature of speech, later generalizes to music.