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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)

#231

Post by Tor3 »

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…

What you describe sounds like pitch memory, which doesn't have the same qualities (and problems) as actual absolute ("perfect") pitch. I also remember pitch. I can grab my guitar after a week away from it, touch a string and know if it's out of tune. I can tune it without a tuner.

But what I'm actually doing is remembering the pitch with the help of the timbre of the guitar string (or harp string, for my wife's harp - I hear if a string is "off" even if it's the first single note I hear in the morning). I believe I would quickly be bewildered if I heard pure sine tones. And that's it. There's nothing more which is even close to what people with absolute pitch can do. I haven't run into that many of them, but it's like they see all the music in color, it's a different world (and they are often constantly bothered by out-of-tune sounds from life). Hit some random notes in parallel and they can tell you the notes instantly. And so on and so forth.

The other thing is what happens if they lose the perfect pitch.. which does happen, with age, for many, or at least it de-tunes a bit (drops a semitone, for example). Then, when it's gone, they don't even have relative pitch to rely on. Rick Beato interviewed a couple of people this happened to. I don't want to be there. My little ability to tune without a tuner is enough for me, and what it is is trained pitch memory - not absolute pitch. And it's relatively common, unlike absolute pitch.

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

#232

Post by Tor3 »

cormacrelf wrote: post #193
muxator wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility. I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.

It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.

There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano.

As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.

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

#233

Post by Tor3 »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #103
sparky_z wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.

I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.

That's simple pitch memory. I started playing guitar at 12 and at that time used a tuning fork - and I noticed that after a while I could hear the "right" note of the A string in my head and I didn't really need the fork anymore. That ability is just pitch memory (which can be thrown off) combined with learning the timbre of the instrument you play (in my case a guitar string).

And yes, that's not the same as perfect pitch, which typically includes much more than the above. I certainly don't have it, even if I can pick any string first time in the morning and hear if it's "off". Because that's all I can do. But then again I don't get annoyed by "out of tune" sounds in the world around me, unlike what people with perfect pitch sometimes tell about.

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

#234

Post by bjoli »

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…

On the bassoon this was (and is) the case for me. It even translates to instruments very close to the bassoon such as dulcian and the French basson. If I hear a baroque bassoon I know what note it is in 415.

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

#235

Post by Tor3 »

spaceman_2020 wrote: post #215
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…

Do you recommend any routine to help a young child learn absolute pitch? I’m talking under 3 years of age.

Rick Beato made a video or two about that. His son Dylan has perfect pitch. What he did when the boy was very little was to let him listen to various types of jazz music - he can't be certain, but his theory is that if the music is "interesting" in the sense that it's not always predictable then the brain automatically zooms in on that and gets interested - and that's what gave the boy perfect pitch (I believe this theory relies on an underlying theory - a quite common one - which is that babies are actually born with perfect pitch but lose it relatively early, just as all babies are born with the ability to hear every sound in every language, and that also gets filtered off as they get older. This last one is pretty certain, the other one is still debated).

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

#236

Post by someweirdperson »

Really slow (impossible) to train, if some understanding/training for realtive pitch is already present. Try with one single note, training session is over, because at that moment the brain switches to relative mode, and refuses to process absoltute information. A couple (max) of individual stimulations per day isn't sufficient to learn.

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

#237

Post by aoeusnth1 »

tomtom1337 wrote: post #220
aoeusnth1 wrote: post #218

I taught my son perfect pitch. AMA.

How did you do it? How old was he?

He was two. I used color stickers on a keyboard, using the We Hear and Play system: http://www.wehearandplay.com/

The Japanese method is based on chord identification, but I found that note identification worked directly. Play a note, point out a toy of that color. Kid brings a toy, play the note for the color. Kid plays a note, you bring a toy. Color association is the tool that lets you connect the music to everyday things and make up all kinds of natural games that interact with the kid’s interests.

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

#238

Post by AbsoluteCabbage »

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…

That’s not what perfect pitch is. Perfect pitch is “color hearing”- recognizing the unique sound properties of each not along the scale, much in the same way colors of the rainbow can be distinguished. It can also be trained for.
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