I had the “misfortune” of having a friend in high school who was preternaturally gifted in being able to not only identify pitches, but be able to pick out individual pitches in a complex arrangement. One time, at band camp (no, that time), he was sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a pencil, pad of manuscript paper and portable cassette deck. He was transcribing the “Get Away” break from Chicago's “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” by playing a few seconds, writing down all the parts, and then repeating the process.
My take away from this was that this was something that either you could or couldn’t do and there was no in-between.
Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7 days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for rehearsals.¹ By the end of the process, I was transcribing straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head.
So, it is a learnable experience.
But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case with a CI.
———
1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music at rehearsal.
What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch. While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones.
In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as people get older and because it works better in ensembles since A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard. Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment). Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments since it feels wrong.
That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always people who didn't really put any time into music that would talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100% accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff all the time.
Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it.
In general, I would say that people who don't really do music are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please.
And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the character of the sound.
What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment of music.
I can relate to this as something I never thought possible either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr) I've made progress that almost feels magical.
I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some prior music education as a child) but never had a solid grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out of thin air at all.
For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them.
Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms. It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks. It absolutely can be a learned skill.
Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book covers they are anything but that.
I had an experience where for a couple weeks I could playback symphonic music in my head and be able to control the loudness of individual sections, repeat passages, etc. with the same fidelity as a lived experience. I knew it was meme-erex but it sounded live.
It was a transformative experience and it gave me a small glimpse of what it would be like to have another order of magnitude of brain capability. The brain can be a wonderful place.
How much of you seeing your friend transcribe music with such ease, enabled you to achieve the same thing? I was thinking the other day about people being "first" at something and how once that happens, hundreds of others follow, almost as if they needed permission by the person being first. When know something is possible, that often removes the biggest barrier for doing a thing.
I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it, and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes.
Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
Thanks for this information, I’ve been recently going through some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what they are able to pick out.
Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ?
Also which implant model do you feel is best for music listenability?
My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She’s still getting used to the new way of listening post-implantation.
I'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty badass
Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly opened my eyes, pun intended.
As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the skill unfold.
Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as distinct as different people's voices.
The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...)
I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another level.
I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even imagine until one begins to acquire them.
I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I can sort of see what that must be like.
We don’t really. We have three receptors that respond to different wavelengths (plus black and white) and our brains stitch together a composite image.
Animals can have fewer or more receptors, and see more or fewer colours. Just like a person who is red-green colourblind, and sees them as the ‘same’, some animals and even rare people can see different colours where we see only one. We are all effectively colourblind to some extent.
We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics).
We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put them side by side, you generally find that they are totally different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all directions.
When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch, but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves. Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also, regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man, woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered. Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a" versus a slightly lower "a".
Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as long as they fall on the cones similarly.
Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not. Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4 is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are constructed culturally.
The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different purposes.
I'll agree and add one example: from a repeated sequence of played notes, and a repeated sequence of flashing colors - I can readily identify a modified note, however not a modified color. For context imagagine 10 seconds of a song VS 10 seconds of flashing lights... If on the 3rd repetition of the pattern, one random note was changed and one random color was changed, which change would be most immediately obvious?
> We may be able to point at a red object and call it red
That's still better than most people's pitch recognition. Play any note in the C scale to a random person (even someone who plays an instrument and has some musical skills) and their note identification will be barely a guess.
>We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics).
Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
We can’t identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in isolation is just as difficult.
(Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs. color identification, because the physical mechanisms and resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)
Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. It's when you start mixing these that naming them is harder because there are many more variations than there are notes on our 'regular' Western scales, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.
Brightness is not related to colours, and while colours are "relative" in the sense that colour perception is influenced by context, it's still the case that you can accurately identify lots of colours in an absolute sense, given a specific context.
I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any random note. So identification without some kind of extra mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to develop that skill because it would be very useful.
* The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our ears is absolute.
* Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to calculate relative pitch.
* Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical" skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the musical quality of music.
Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as an "amazing" skill.
But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should be amazed by is relative pitch perception.
My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical function.
It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a deep rumbling sound.
The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to determine exact rgb values of a color.
What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is something deeper there.
Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities, each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other, filtering out effects due to changing light sources and qualities.
That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at filtering out common timbres.
I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.
Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer).
Your characterization is not in line with how things actually work.
> I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.
I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
The summary says that the timbre plays an important role in recognizing the notes. I partially agree with this observation, but on the piano, there might be something else than the timbre.
Some years ago, I played the "perfect pitch" flash game (http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.sw... , still playable if you download the swf and then submit it to https://ruffle.rs/demo/ as a local file). Even though I am not a musician, I quickly learned to identify the notes on the medium difficulty level, and often guessed the first note in the session correctly. BUT, I did not only use the pitch to guess the note.
In that particular game, the pre-recorded sounds of the piano notes show some non-even volume envelope, or some other way they change their sound over time, unique for each note. So I learned that a "meow-meow-meow" must be an E, and a note that acquires some rattle at the end must be a D. I even reported that as a bug - only to get an email that a piano does sound like that. Of course this knowledge is useless for pure tones, or short-enough notes that are not given a chance to "meow" or to rattle, or, in fact, for anything else than this game.
The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think you'd see very similar performance.
Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
>They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have: Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum.
Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article.
I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes.
I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative pitch and chord theory.
I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords.
The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me - it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate relative color, not absolute color. Learning to look at an apple and see warmer/cooler bits of red, for example. As the article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in between.
There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson, mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.
We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled conditions.
No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers, commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such - minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.
Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite seeing them all your life.
Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just know what the interval is.
Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by, you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc. Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to hear.
I recently learnt to differentiate notes in a scale using an app[1]. Basically, you listen to a few chords for musical context and then you hear a note and have to choose which note it as. When I started I couldn't do it at all. After a few weeks I was able to tell which note I was hearing pretty reliably.
I think the analogy to colours is absolutely correct. There's no calculation in my brain when I hear one these notes. I just hear it and think "That's a third". It feels exactly looking at a colour and thinking "That's red".
The fact that the identification is not a conscious thought leads me to believe that learning notes by relating them songs and musical phrases you know is probably not the best way to do it.
Note: this is not learning absolute pitch/perfect pitch. It's 'just' relative pitch, but having gone from not having that ability the change was quite large and quick.
I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer. It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.
Harmonics and base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed string have a completely different shape, the first is going to decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes of vibration.
I know an artist who has worked on creating colour palettes (for a living, through commissions and art works) and creating light art works, who claims that most people are very poor at precieving colours because our brains so quickly adapt to changing lightning conditions. His conclusion is that there is no such thing as absolute colour perception.
The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other drawbacks.
[+] [-] dhosek|4 years ago|reply
My take away from this was that this was something that either you could or couldn’t do and there was no in-between.
Fast forward 18 years and I found myself doing transcriptions of demos for a musical that a friend had written which was being produced locally. I was spending about 8 hours a day on this 7 days a week, trying to stay ahead of the need for sheet music for rehearsals.¹ By the end of the process, I was transcribing straight into Finale without first checking the notes with a piano or guitar at hand. In the wake of that, I discovered that I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song that I was writing that I had only ever heard in my head.
So, it is a learnable experience.
But not necessarily for everyone. Now that I'm older, I'm slowly losing my hearing and will eventually have to have cochlear implants. One of the things I've learned from this is that my ability to hear pitches will be diminished with the CI. In researching this and learning it, I've also found that tone deafness as a real phenomenon exists in that for some people, the hair cells in their inner ear are deficient for being able to recognize pitches, although not as dramatically as is the case with a CI.
———
1. For the final batch of songs, someone picked up printouts from my apartment, took them to Office Depot to make copies and brought them to the singers and accompanist waiting for the music at rehearsal.
[+] [-] slaymaker1907|4 years ago|reply
In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as people get older and because it works better in ensembles since A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard. Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment). Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments since it feels wrong.
[+] [-] asimpletune|4 years ago|reply
Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it.
In general, I would say that people who don't really do music are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please.
And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the character of the sound.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davidjade|4 years ago|reply
I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some prior music education as a child) but never had a solid grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out of thin air at all.
For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them.
Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms. It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks. It absolutely can be a learned skill.
Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book covers they are anything but that.
https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-train...
There are 5 books in the series.
[+] [-] seg_lol|4 years ago|reply
It was a transformative experience and it gave me a small glimpse of what it would be like to have another order of magnitude of brain capability. The brain can be a wonderful place.
How much of you seeing your friend transcribe music with such ease, enabled you to achieve the same thing? I was thinking the other day about people being "first" at something and how once that happens, hundreds of others follow, almost as if they needed permission by the person being first. When know something is possible, that often removes the biggest barrier for doing a thing.
[+] [-] dylan604|4 years ago|reply
Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
[+] [-] jeffwass|4 years ago|reply
Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ?
Also which implant model do you feel is best for music listenability?
My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She’s still getting used to the new way of listening post-implantation.
[+] [-] ackbar03|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lhorie|4 years ago|reply
I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.
[+] [-] gerbilly|4 years ago|reply
Try learning to paint and you'll perhaps see that your perception of colour isn't as good as you think. I did and it certainly opened my eyes, pun intended.
As for recognizing pitches, it's a trainable skill. I learned to play guitar a while back and it was interesting to watch the skill unfold.
Some of the open chords started to appear to me almost as distinct as different people's voices.
The first time it happened I was listening to Paul McCartney's "band on the Run" and just knowing that he was playing C then FMaj7 (Well, the rain exploded with a mighty crash...)
I'm just ok at learning parts by ear, some people are on another level.
I think the most interesting thing that this points to is that there is probably a whole world of skills that one cannot even imagine until one begins to acquire them.
I remember wondering how my guitar teacher could transcribe songs so easily, but now that I am a 'stream enterer' for that skill, I can sort of see what that must be like.
[+] [-] mr_toad|4 years ago|reply
We don’t really. We have three receptors that respond to different wavelengths (plus black and white) and our brains stitch together a composite image.
Animals can have fewer or more receptors, and see more or fewer colours. Just like a person who is red-green colourblind, and sees them as the ‘same’, some animals and even rare people can see different colours where we see only one. We are all effectively colourblind to some extent.
[+] [-] ThomPete|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|4 years ago|reply
The eye is receptive to three colors, that's it.
We cannot tell the difference between a color which is a mixture of two (or more) frequencies of light, and a pure color, whereas we can tell chords from notes. (In spite of notes having harmonics).
We may be able to point at a red object and call it red. But there are are so many hues of red that this is about as accurate as being able to identify which octave a note is in. When you think that two objects are about the same hue of red, and the put them side by side, you generally find that they are totally different. Color also changes with lighting. A uniformly colored surface does not appear to be the same color if it is not uniformly illuminated, or does not uniformly scatter light in all directions.
When it comes to sound, we may be poor at identifying a pitch, but it seems we are fairly good at identifying EQ curves. Firstly, we can recognize people by their voices, which are the result of a tone's profile being shaped by the vocal tract. In relation to this, we can tell an AAAAH from an IIII, also, regardless of the speaker's pitch: whether the speaker is a man, woman or child. Or even whether the vowel is being whispered. Speakers of languages that have certain vowels that are very near to each other can distinguish those vowels, like some higher "a" versus a slightly lower "a".
[+] [-] twelvechairs|4 years ago|reply
Aurally we are incredibly good at understanding ratios, which the fundamental basis of music, in a way that the eye is not. Whether we can hear and state the difference between F4 and F#4 is simply not a priority of the body as these scales are constructed culturally.
The eye and ear are simply built very differently for different purposes.
[+] [-] vgb2k18|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] khazhoux|4 years ago|reply
That's still better than most people's pitch recognition. Play any note in the C scale to a random person (even someone who plays an instrument and has some musical skills) and their note identification will be barely a guess.
[+] [-] utexaspunk|4 years ago|reply
Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
[+] [-] jacobolus|4 years ago|reply
(Note: there is no way to make a perfect analogy about sound vs. color identification, because the physical mechanisms and resulting perceptual spaces are completely different.)
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roberto|4 years ago|reply
Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
There are some interesting websites for this:
https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
[+] [-] a9h74j|4 years ago|reply
Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
[+] [-] pjdorrell|4 years ago|reply
* The "raw" pitch information coming into our brains from our ears is absolute.
* Sophisticated processing inside the brain is required to calculate relative pitch.
* Although absolute pitch perception is considered a "musical" skill, only relative pitch is relevant to the perception of the musical quality of music.
Because of its rarity, absolute pitch perception is regarded as an "amazing" skill.
But when you consider the technical aspects, the thing we should be amazed by is relative pitch perception.
My conclusion would be that relative pitch perception exists because it serves a critical biological function, and absolute pitch perception is rare because it does not serve any critical function.
It's also worth noting that we all have _some_ degree of absolute pitch perception, but it is much less precise than our relative pitch perception. And of course it is biologically relevant to distinguish between, for example, a high-pitched scream and a deep rumbling sound.
[+] [-] srcreigh|4 years ago|reply
Being able to determine exact pitch is more like being able to determine exact rgb values of a color.
What is interesting about this study is that Perfect Pitch folks still only have 77% accuracy with pure sine waves. Compared to 98% accuracy with full-timbre piano notes. I have to wonder if this is just a matter of practice and exposure or if there is something deeper there.
[+] [-] Grustaf|4 years ago|reply
That's about timbre, not pitch.
[+] [-] jancsika|4 years ago|reply
Isn't naming CSS colors also beyond the visual expertise of most people?
Granted there are more CSS colors than there are keys on a piano.
Still-- give me a color scheme with 80 distinct colors and I'll give you poor scores of test subjects.
[+] [-] pessimizer|4 years ago|reply
That seems pretty consistent with this, which as far as I can tell is saying that people who perform perfect pitch get good at filtering out common timbres.
I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
Your characterization is not in line with how things actually work.
> I bet it'd be pretty easy to train people to identify 12 sine wave tones consistently, at the same volume and from the same position.
I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
[+] [-] patrakov|4 years ago|reply
Some years ago, I played the "perfect pitch" flash game (http://www.detrave.net/nblume/perfect-pitch/perfect-pitch.sw... , still playable if you download the swf and then submit it to https://ruffle.rs/demo/ as a local file). Even though I am not a musician, I quickly learned to identify the notes on the medium difficulty level, and often guessed the first note in the session correctly. BUT, I did not only use the pitch to guess the note.
In that particular game, the pre-recorded sounds of the piano notes show some non-even volume envelope, or some other way they change their sound over time, unique for each note. So I learned that a "meow-meow-meow" must be an E, and a note that acquires some rattle at the end must be a D. I even reported that as a bug - only to get an email that a piano does sound like that. Of course this knowledge is useless for pure tones, or short-enough notes that are not given a chance to "meow" or to rattle, or, in fact, for anything else than this game.
[+] [-] TaupeRanger|4 years ago|reply
Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
[+] [-] psychometry|4 years ago|reply
Yes, in more ways than is mentioned in an article.
I have no problem naming pitches (played on any instrument) for notes around the middle third of the piano, but I'd be as hopeless as anyone else for the most extreme notes.
I can immediately pick out two-note chords in my range, but three or more notes requires I rely on a bit of thinking about relative pitch and chord theory.
I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
There are AP possessors out there, though, who do all of the things I can't as effortlessly as I do the things I can. I've seen demonstrations of true, "one-in-a-billion" savants doing mind-boggling things like immediately naming every note in bizarre 15-note chords.
[+] [-] kqr|4 years ago|reply
We are born with perfect pitch but lose it when we don't use it. How our culture uses and names colour determines which we can perceive absolutely.
The point is they're more similar than they seem.
[+] [-] adyer07|4 years ago|reply
There's a whole school of painters - after Edwin Dickinson, mostly - who talk about "color notes" and "color pitch". I wonder what the analogous cognitive processing skills are for artists.
[+] [-] TheOtherHobbes|4 years ago|reply
http://brainden.com/color-illusions.htm
We don't have an absolute colour sense except under controlled conditions.
No-compromise colour professionals - high-end graphic designers, commercial photographers, photo libraries, printers and such - minimise contextual distortions with highly accurate colour-calibrated monitors set up in an environment with controlled ambient lighting and a neutral (usually grey) wall colour.
[+] [-] yesenadam|4 years ago|reply
Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just know what the interval is.
Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by, you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc. Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to hear.
[+] [-] laurieg|4 years ago|reply
I think the analogy to colours is absolutely correct. There's no calculation in my brain when I hear one these notes. I just hear it and think "That's a third". It feels exactly looking at a colour and thinking "That's red".
The fact that the identification is not a conscious thought leads me to believe that learning notes by relating them songs and musical phrases you know is probably not the best way to do it.
Note: this is not learning absolute pitch/perfect pitch. It's 'just' relative pitch, but having gone from not having that ability the change was quite large and quick.
[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kaizen9.fe...
[+] [-] akomtu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacquesm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fjfaase|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mkr-hn|4 years ago|reply
Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4