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

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

#201

Post by muffles »

vnorilo wrote: post #55
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…

Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect…

> because, as you said, it is not that useful.

Having perfect pitch can be useful for a lot of musicians, or educators, or composers in various ways, including:

Improving accuracy in performance: Perfect pitch can identify and reproduce musical notes more accurately and quickly, which can help perform music with greater precision.

Improving music education: Perfect pitch can help people teach music theory and composition more effectively, as students with perfect pitch can better understand and apply the concepts.

Enhancing creativity in music composition: Composers with pitch can more easily hear and reproduce musical ideas in their heads, which can help them create more complex and interesting compositions.

Facilitating communication among musicians: Musicians with absolute pitch can communicate more effectively with each other by using a common standard for identifying notes.

Improving the ability to transcribe music: Musicians with perfect pitch can more easily transcribe music by ear, which can be useful for analyzing and studying music.... the list goes on

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

#202

Post by intrasight »

pb060 wrote: post #148
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.

I think I'm just too tuned into the background hum of our AC network.

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

#203

Post by wyager »

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…

(Neuro-)Physiologically, it's not clear to me why the sense of pitch should decohere. It's not like the cochlea is physically unstable, and the hartley-ish-transformed data the brain is pulling out of the cochlea should be quite repeatable. I wonder if the brain converts the cochlear data into some other representation that is not (inherently) stable, and those with perfect pitch have or develop a more stable version than most other people.

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

#204

Post by femto »

A member of my family is an interesting case, in that he technically doesn't have perfect pitch, but does for all practical purposes. He has a clear memory of a particular note that he heard as a child and can recount that memory. Years later he is able to identify the pitch of anything by comparing it with that memory. He might think about it for a second or hum a note to himself, but invariably can identify the pitch without have to hear a reference (apart from the one in his head).

He's got the best of both worlds, in that he doesn't get driven crazy by something being out of tune, but can accurately name a pitch without a reference. He's also been able to transpose on the fly from an early age.

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

#205

Post by dcsommer »

femto wrote: post #204

A member of my family is an interesting case, in that he technically doesn't have perfect pitch, but does for all practical purposes. He has a clear memory of a particular note that he heard as a child and can recount that memory. Years later he is able to identify the pitch of anything by comparing it with that memory. He might think about it for a second or hum a note to himself, but invariably can identify the pit…

The opening F# upward octave in Paganini's La Campanella is that pitch memory for me. It's fairly well seared in my brain from violin practice. It's very similar for me where I remember the F# pitch and then work out the relationship to the heard tone. However, I am worse with non-orchestral instruments. I think I "cheat" by remembering The timbre of the instrument in certain ranges. I'm most accurate with my own instrument (violin). The less I practice though, the harder it is getting to remember the pitch. I always figured I was somewhere between relative and perfect pitch. I'm curious what this training could do for adult musicians.

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

#206

Post by Psychlist »

vnorilo wrote: post #111
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…

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…

>the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty

Not least because the argument about "what note is this" and "what note do you think you're singing" starts basically day one of singing lessons. Trying to learn any practical music when you can hear the difference between close frequencies mean you're effectively learning colours from a group who insist that blue and green are the same colour.

One of my party tricks used to be saying the song and artist from the first 5 seconds of a track. These days with samplers and synthesisers that's almost impossible. I still get tripped when I hear some samples, like "that's the bass guitar from {song x} WTF" in the middle of some otherwise pleasant song.

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

#207

Post by Psychlist »

People can have absolute/exception memory for other things too. I dated a woman who could look at a bit of cloth and say "that's the same colour as..." and be right every time. Even when she hadn't seen the other item of clothing for months. It made shopping with her somewhat less painful because she wasn't constantly swapping things just to look at the colours.

Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.

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

#208

Post by bobsmooth »

freedomben wrote: post #150
mhh__ wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What do you find disturbing in that dynamic?

It's something you commonly see in videos with YouTubers showing off their kids. The adult is trying to make an engaging video and the kid just looks bored or shy around the camera.

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

#210

Post by muglug »

ojosilva wrote: post #173
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…

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…

> Absolute pitch is a curse for musicians.

I wouldn't go that far — it was occasionally advantageous for me as a singer, when sight-reading music with a ton of weird intervals (e.g. Poulenc's Quatre Motets).

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