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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)

#221

Post by wirrbel »

canjobear wrote: post #11
raincole wrote: post #8

While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.

My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is that it’s more an annoyance than anything. They’re always hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch.

I think there is also perfect pitch and Perfect Pitch. identifying which note is played is different from what is essentially a frequency inference.

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

#223

Post by AlecSchueler »

Gunax wrote: post #154
hluska wrote: 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…

But how accurate does it have to be to be considered perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to the frequency?

Within less than half a semitone seems more likely. The frequencies of the notes don't matter as the relationship between the pitch classes are unchanged.

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

#224

Post by kaba0 »

echelon wrote: post #191
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…

> It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent. This is a function of time, not age. Adults can (though seldom) learn language…

The brain’s ability to learn does change by age, as an extreme example people who didn’t learn to speak until like 8, will never be able to.

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

#225

Post by kaba0 »

wyager wrote: post #203
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…

(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…

Absolute data points rarely make sense, they are rigid and inflexible, which is not good against an always changing environment.

You should be able to recognize the same scene both with a clear sky and a partly cloudy one, and it’s hardly important that this tiger had a deeper voice, the important part to recognize is the fact that there is a tiger. But even something as trivial as movement coordination is constantly updated by feedback mechanisms, like training with weights and dropping them in the end will temporarily make the movements “weird”.

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

#226

Post by kaba0 »

muffles wrote: post #201
vnorilo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 composi…

Many of your points are unsubstantiated.

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

#227

Post by kaba0 »

h0h0h0h0111 wrote: post #165
hluska wrote: 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.

I don’t think that it is attributable to absolute pitch, that might not even be required.

It’s “just” insanely good memory for music.

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

#228

Post by jongjong »

I'm in my 30s and have had almost 0 experience in music before. I bought my toddler a xylophone a few months ago and I started playing random keys (just trying to improvise a melody on the spot) every day or so for less than an hour each time... Then after about a month, I found that I could teach myself to play pretty much any piece of music from memory in only a few minutes (national anthem level complexity). My improvised melodies have been getting better as well.

The xylophone helps a lot because each note has a different color and so I now associate each color with a particular sound. I tend to think of notes as (left to right) going from sad to happy. There are 2 notes I use as a reference which are 'emotionally stable'; one on the left (sad) side and one on the right (happy) side. On the left side, there is a blue note which I consider to be the last one in the 'sad' spectrum just before it gets happy... And on the right side, there is a yellow note which is at the end of the 'happy' spectrum just before the mood goes into a kind of mania.

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

#229

Post by GuB-42 »

flappyeagle wrote: post #80
amelius wrote: post #76

Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch? And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ? Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?

We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".

There was once a meme called "the dress" that shows that color perception is very relative. Some people see it black and blue, others see it white and gold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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