Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible
biorxiv.org
biorxiv.org
It's a very frustrating and difficult to explain phenomenon. I hate to use the oft-used but inaccurate color analogy, but it might be valid in this context. Imagine that everyone around you is fully color-blind, but not yourself. People are amazed that you can tell something is blue just by looking at it. You've had this ability your whole life. But then one day you look at something and report that it's blue, and someone uses their color-analyzer and tells you that it's not blue, it's in fact yellow. And they're right! But it still looks BLUE to you. Something has broken, and you can't explain it to others easily because they can only see gray.
Having absolute pitch would then make it easier to realize when your hearing's going, because you're used to it being more precise?
I'm out of my depth here, but wouldn't that process still require some kind of 'clock' (albeit not necessarily the one used for conscious time perception) in order to resolve the signal into absolute, rather than relative, frequencies?
There are links other possible theories on that page, namely the temporal theory, which does propose we rely on neuronal clocks. It seems likely to me that both theories play a role in pitch perception.
I've been playing music for thirty-odd years, and I couldn't name pitches by ear most of the time, certainly not without thinking about it. I often hand-tune guitars (relatively!) if I'm playing by myself, and after a few days of that, it's not unusual to be more than a half-step out of whack. I don't notice, because it's in tune with itself.
You can still hear and appreciate music, but you can't whistle or hum along to a tune.
I don't get it!
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.
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]).
https://www.erowid.org/library/books_online/tihkal/tihkal04....
"Most psychedelic drugs affect, primarily, the visual sense, but here is one that shows its effects primarily in the auditory system. And it screws it up in a most unlinear manner, in that there in not just a simple decrease in pitch which would be as if someone had his thumb against the LP record and made everything come out at a 3/4 speed text, or a 1/2 speed text. Actual [p]roportionality is lost, so there is complete harmonic distortion."
Playing for ten years in a Balinese gamelan that was not remotely tuned to a Western scale probably didn't help.
Absolute pitch is still a really useful skill to have, in my opinion, and I don't understand it when people say it's just a parlor trick or actually diminishes your ability to appreciate music; being able to spell doesn't diminish my appreciation of language. It is occasionally slightly distressing to realize in retrospect that I've been off by a half step, like thinking you're walking north and then looking at a map and realizing you've been walking west.
Or, you could have a string stop pulled, which is purposefully slightly out-of-tune to produce a "string" sound when paired with an in-tune stop.
A typical "pipe organ" sound on a digital keyboard will often have mixtures and other mutations. I've found that settings with names like "church organ" tend to be purer, perhaps only some flutes and principals.
However for those of us that drift, I think it's likely that we recognized notes by both timbre and pitch, but although now that our pitch recognition has started drifting, we can still identify by timbre.
Absolute pitch is often described as a disadvantage for aural skills as it's often used as a crutch in place of properly identifying intervals and function. I know that when I went through aural skills, I would identify the notes before identifying the interval and draw a conclusion on the interval based on what notes they are rather than hearing them for what they are. Which makes it very difficult for me to pick out vocal harmonies, I'm terrible at picking out vocal pitch and as a result I have to deconstruct notes in my head to figure out intervals when people sing in harmony.
Using your language metaphor, it would be like if you immediately knew what a word in Russian meant in English but didn't actually understand Russian. You'd be linking together words to infer meaning but grammar might not make any sense and you wouldn't be able to speak Russian. (Bad analogy, but hey, that's how analogies are right? :P)
Definitely sympathize on the drift though. It's annoying when I assume I still recognize notes properly but then realize I'm off.
I'd also think that those people would be very sensitive to the make of piano.
True, it is just like saying: being able to name colors diminishes your ability to appreciate colors. That would be a ridiculous statement. However, having absolute pitch does make some music more predictable, I think it affected my taste in music.
It is a weird phenomenon and I think songwriting is too .. like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?
At the simplest there's 2 components in enjoying somebody sing:
- They have a pretty-ish voice that they master. Absolute pitch doesn't help for that, just like it doesn't help for any other instrument.
- They sing on tune. Absolute pitch doesn't help either, anybody can tune themselves on a background music. Even if a capella, everybody without an absolute pitch won't know if you don't start on the right note
> like why do Melodies and lyrics (usually somewhat jumbled) I never heard before pop in my head? Where does that come from?
Pattern matching, which the brain is extremely good at
Some people with absolute pitch are irritated to no end that tons of music isn't tuned to their idea of absolute pitch.
Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch which describes how orchestras have tuned to different pitches historically.
The other is a bandmate of mine, a woman in her late 20s/early 30s when i saw hers fail. She's genetically predisposed - both her father and her brother have perfect pitch; plus her father is a professional musician, she has a degree in music performance, and has had a violin in her hand since she was old enough to hold one. One day, we were recording, with her overdubbing parts onto some previously recorded work. She complained that a B flat played at the start of a guitar riff was out of tune. I said "No, that's a B". She insisted it was a B flat. I told her I had also played the part on keyboards, and it's a B.
She panicked.
It was extremely difficult for her to play for the rest of the session. Her playing relies so heavily on her perfect pitch that she's always had, that when she can't trust it, anxiety takes over.
it goes away after 30 mins or so but the first time I had a brief moment of panic that this was some kind of permanent effect I had woken up with.
if my memory has any accuracy (dubious) then I was suffering from fairly heavy head colds every time this happened, so - applying totally uneducated guesswork - I put it down to something like uneven pressure buildup from a stuffy nasal cavity dampening the vibrations inside the ear.
You could correct your perception using this knowledge then. Just add the half step. As long as the measurement device is still working, you can always re-calibrate (in this case cognitively) the base.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-...
Like any measuring tool, you need to calibrate it from time to time.
It is common for musicians with relative pitch skills to be better at it with their own instrument(s) than others. For example, I hear guitar parts better than most other instruments, and I've played guitar for three decades. I can do pitch recognition with other sounds, but the further from the range and timbre of guitar it gets the trickier it becomes.
I think absolute pitch is fascinating and confusing...because pitch is arbitrary. We've all mostly agreed on A=440Hz, and it's become more common with time and electronic instruments and tuners and such for recordings and live performances to be A=440Hz. But, I still find myself retuning sometimes when learning new pieces by ear, because the recording is a little sharp or flat. And, it's arbitrary that we have 12 notes to an octave; we could have 17 or whatever (based on closely matching the ratios, so it's not completely arbitrary).
So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill. The wild thing about it is that it is a learned skill that is mostly only obtainable when very young. This is similar to some language nuances and why someone may speak a second language with an accent even after decades of speaking it fluently, if they learned it as an adult. There aren't a lot of skills like that, however...I can't think of any others, and it seems to be because pitch/music/language are all closely related in the brain.
I wonder if in your case, you could retune your absolute pitch with practice? Perhaps you don't play or listen to as much music as you did in your youth when it was "in tune".
> So, absolute pitch is clearly a learned skill.
Being able to name a note as an A or a B or whatever must be learned, because those labels are arbitrary -- but isn't that just a matter of translation? It seems that the fundamental ability (perceiving and identifying absolute frequencies) could still be innate.
I guess it could be that there are people who have the fundamental ability, without ever learning the labels to apply to them. Like the fact that humans took a while to name a bunch of the colors, and even now there are cultures where blue and green are not distinct colors. Maybe there are people with absolute pitch who just never learned the names of the notes they're hearing. Heck, maybe those folks are some of the ones who are "learning" absolute pitch as adults in these trials.
Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - if I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn't be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it's useful for is recognizing what key it's in. If I hadn't been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later.
I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn't important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it's all relative.
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.
Ooh, that is such an intriguing analogy. I think it's wrong.
The analogy should be a colorblind person complaining that the ability to guess html hex color values is overrated for the purpose of measuring, analyzing, and describing how a combination of colors affects the mise en scene in a given film still.
We must also add the complication that most televisions and places where people look at scenes the colors tend to gradually ramp down in frequency as the lights get tired.
Of course, there is a lot of subtle stuff going with color design in TV and movies that generally passes me right by, so maybe I should be spending more time trying to appreciate that and less time getting excited about identifying Gs in atonal music...
Give me a controlled example where the return of the prominence of pitch class G lets you understand the structure of a section of music.
Controlled example would mean:
* the orchestration used for the G is different at moment A and moment B, OR the piece is for a solo instrument. Otherwise you could be hearing a timbral connection and confusing it for a pitch class connection.
* the G at moment B is in a different octave. Otherwise you could be hearing a pitch connection and confusing it for a pitch class connection. (Esp. if you have perfect pitch.)
* the musical texture at moment A is different from moment B. Otherwise you could just be hearing a textural connection (e.g., big orchestral hit, moment where the woodwinds return, etc.) and confusing it for a pitch class connection.
* it's not a tonal piece of music. Otherwise you could be hearing the same or similar harmonic progression and confusing it with a pitch class connection.
* moment A is melodically dissimilar from moment B. Otherwise you could be hearing a melodic connection and confusing it with a pitch class connection.
I can't think of any musical moments that meet those constraints.
I am definitely talking about non-tonal music in general, yes. Elliott Carter is a good example of a composer where I feel that absolute pitch helps me understand what is going on more than I would otherwise. But again I'm not going to dig out some particular measure of music that perfectly proves my point.
If this reply was insufficient for your needs (I fear it is) I apologize. I'm not trying to win some debate, just to elucidate a little how I feel that absolute pitch aids my music appreciation.
In that analogy, suppose a "mise en scene" teacher gives the students an assignment to analyze the use of color in a picture. Using music dictation classes as a guide here, what would happen is that the person with "perfect color" immediately labels all the colors in the scene with the correct crayon name. This intimidates all the "relative color" people because they can't do the mappings without reference to the crayon box. Thus, the "relative color" people assume they are at a lower skill level in their analysis than the "perfect color" person. (This is exaggerated by the fact that the "perfect color" student has the word "perfect" in their name.)
Once the students finish their mappings the teacher asks the "perfect color" student, "How would you describe the use of colors here?" The "perfect color" student shrugs-- it is a collection of all the colors which they correctly named. As a kid they got praise from the teacher for their amazing ability to effortlessly map colors to names. No one ever asked them about the relationship among colors. (Or, if they did, the student nodded along and then correctly mapped colors to names as necessary to do an end-run around the question.)
On the other hand, "relative color" students grew up getting color names wrong. Every color class teacher would come up with a different ad hoc color theory and ad hoc color exercise to explain to the student how to correctly map colors to names. Most of them were wrong, but the student noticed weird little successes in identifying the relationship among colors. In their quest to stop failing all the time, they started to inarticulately ask themselves about the meaning of color, enumerating all the relationships among colors that could identify to help them narrow down the possible right answers to perhaps only a handful of names.
Back to the mise en scene class. One of these "relative color" student pipes in. "It looks like a bunch of pastels." The teacher praises the "relative color" student and moves on to other exercises.
After class the "perfect color" student asks the "relative color" student how they knew to say the word "pastels." The "relative color" student starts to talk about different famous scenes that have pastels, a childhood memory they have of a pastel drawing that won a prize at school, etc. But none of that connects at all with the "perfect color" student, because they've only ever had to map colors to names. They've never considered the relationship among colors.
So now the "perfect color" student dreads going to class for fear of the teacher discovering the profundity of their inability to say anything of substance about color relationships. And the "relative color" students dread the same class because they have no idea that their lifelong work to that point considering the relationships among colors constitutes a kind of knowledge.
Finally, there are no "perfect color" students who-- through sheer curiosity and discipline-- took it upon themselves to systematically investigate the relationships among colors. The people who did that would have placed out of this mise en scene class.
Without a doubt, relative pitch and learning theory are important skills too, but they aren't mutually exclusive.
And this is the situation in music; keys are chosen based on the technical details of the musician rather than a design language. Meanwhile, we do have a design language based on relative pitch (e.g. a 5/7 chord "leads" to the tonic). Of course you can see that the same way you can see a purple stop sign, but you may lack some of the pattern-matching intuition of your peers.
As a musician with relative pitch and the child of a musician with perfect pitch, I have watched them get puzzled a lot navigating a design language that is very obvious to me. Perhaps you are a better musician than they are, or perhaps you avoid areas where the design language dominates. Either way, I would not trade places with you, unless the rest of society did also.
That's speaking to the value in communication/collaboration.
The sensory experience itself would still have its own qualities even if other people are unable to appreciate them.
I went through a weird period of a few months in college when tones had a... character. I use that term rather than color because for some reason some of them were tied in with associations I had with the sound of people's voices. Not every pitch had this association, but recognizing the character let me identify the pitch.
The utility of this was certainly nothing astounding, but it was interesting to say the least. And it probably wasn't even absolute pitch.
And then, of course, there's the matter of utility that doesn't come from communication. Color vision doesn't just provide a field of aesthetic exploration, it actually lets people distinguish certain things more easily.
Because the answer is "yes" for colorblindness. It's just a wildly overstated comparison. I mean, even tone-deaf people don't experience the kind of difficulties that people with colorblindness experience. You could just say that I could never entirely understand the benefits of having perfect pitch since I don't have it, and maybe that would be true, but I have literally never experienced a professional musical situation where I felt or thought, "Oh man, if only I had perfect pitch - I would have succeeded where I just failed." And this includes directing gigs, accompanying gigs, performance gigs, etc.
I'm occasionally wistful I don't have synesthesia just because that sounds actually expansive, but I don't pine for perfect pitch at all.
[1] Example I found: https://cms-assets.tutsplus.com/uploads/users/1251/posts/259...
I'm not sure, but I think I tend toward absolute pitch. Individual notes out of context often make me recall specific songs. I'm not that accurate with my AP when I try to test it though, which is why I wouldn't claim to have perfect pitch.
However, I did take formal ear training in grad school, I found it really difficult. Perfect 5ths with different base notes don't "sound alike" to me. I had to rely on a lot of tricks to get by. I can transpose melodies in my head, so I could pattern-match a test interval to, say, the Superman melody (P5) or the Taps melody (P4). Or, if I were transcribing a melody or harmony, I could figure it out by function (chordal, stepwise, or chromatic motion). For leaps and intervals beyond an octave, I'm useless.
I'd also say that when I learn a song for voice, I'm mostly memorizing how to produce the right tones in-key, as opposed to moving by interval. I don't know how other people experience singing, but I suspect it might also be due to my bias toward AP.
Likewise, some reds and some greens are interchangeable to me.
I imagine the different colouring of intervals that you hear in different keys is due to tempering. I don't have anything close to AP, but I tell chord progression in C# from the same in C. But purple is pretty much just a shade of blue to me.
I studied Indian classical music for quite a few years, which involved a lot of listening to and repeating phrases. I was fine with the longer stuff, but eventually found out I had some sort of deficit with interval recognition and struggled with replicating standalone 2 note phrases.
I have good harmony and rhythm instincts in practice, but am almost 'dyslexic' when trying to describe them formally.
I'm slightly wondering if this collection of deficits and compensatory mechanisms is what has led me to a fascination with flamenco. (Albeit with a little frustration at some of the more puritanical traditionalism.)
Also, Miles rules.
Yet, most purples are really close to blue to me, unless they're basically pink.
This discussion doesn't seem to be acknowledging how many pitch standards there are that are still in common use, and even in increasingly-common use due to the original-instruments movement.
In short, it was competition for the performance to seem more "bright" and exciting. It's arbitrary, but for performers to reach higher pitches was viewed as more challenging (and it is, for singers).
The wiki article is cited, so you can read up in as much depth as you like. But, it mostly boils down to, "That's just what people liked during important periods of musical development. And, then we stopped because technology advanced to the point where we could very accurately determine pitch and for the past 50+ years the majority of recorded and performed music has been A=440, or very close to it."
I think it's more like learning new words as an adult rather than a cage. But, maybe I'm wrong? I've heard anecdotally of people with perfect pitch complaining about some music being "out of tune", but I somehow doubt musicians are saying that, since as you note, music comes in all sorts of tunings (and the more interesting the music is, the more likely it is to go in weird directions, in terms of tuning, scales, etc.).
Anyway, since he does have absolute pitch, I think he is very strong evidence that it doesn't limit you to A=440 and 12 tone equal temperament, because he is frequently wildly divergent from that, exploring microtonal music, harmonic series tunings, etc. It seems to be freeing rather than limiting (I understand some of that stuff on a theoretical level, but not on a level where I could improvise or compose in those languages without a lot of work and a whole new approach to ear training...musical concepts he studies and seems to grok in days or weeks would take me months or years).
Another problem with absolute pitch, in a cappella singing: hearing another section of the choir go flat and either having to follow along or vainly try to prop the pitch up.
My other choir (a semiprofessional chamber choir) sharps occasionally (especially with songs in the key of F), but never flats.
All that being said, while having true perfect pitch would probably open up new ways to appreciate and understand the music I'm listening to, I think that relative pitch is a far more useful skill -- nigh essential for many genres.
On the other hand, I completely agree that relative pitch has to be on point. I don't see how it's possible to be an effective musician without it. Being able to intuitively know intervals, certainly if you're a singer, is indispensable.
I think it's probably more likely that absolute and relative pitch are different capabilities, with most people innately biased one way or the other. But I don't think they're mutually exclusive. And I'm pretty certain some people have low capability in both.
I find the obsession with perfect pitch to be pretty overwrought. Much like I often find some people to be overly obsessed with synesthesia as a mystical source of artistic creativity.
But I can always recognize intervals just fine.
Interestingly I get asked about my musical background a lot, because of my daughter's ability, whose conversations with her teachers have been beyond my comprehension for years now. While she also lacks perfect pitch, there seems to certainly be something going on. Her Mandarin teacher asked if she was raised around Chinese speakers from an early age because her ability to hear and match tones is something you generally can't just pick up the way she did.
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.
Because all the authors appear to be Chinese, probably all the test subjects were too. But because the Chinese language requires substantial awareness of subtle changes in prosody (esp. pitch), it's likely that speakers of other languages will not perform as well on their absolute pitch tests.
I suspect native speakers of Chinese have developed a subtle ear (and voice) for pitch during that critical period of language acquisition in childhood that makes them more able to acquire perfect pitch in adulthood than speakers of other languages, especially western ones.
But tonal languages use relative rather than absolute pitch (because different people have different vocal ranges), and all participants in the study improved their performance over time.
So speaking a tonal language or being a musician (also the case for the subjects in the study) can give an advantage, but I'd be surprised if deliberate training of pitch perception had absolutely no effect for people without such an advantage.
Music conservatory students in the U.S. and China were tested. The Chinese subjects spoke the tone language Mandarin, in which pitch is involved in conveying the meaning of words. The American subjects were nontone language speakers. The earlier the age of onset of musical training, the greater the prevalence of absolute pitch; however, its prevalence was far greater among the Chinese than the U.S. students for each level of age of onset of musical training.
This sounds like good relative pitch, with a memorized reference tone. Absolute pitch doesn't fade in 12 to 40 hours. Many musicians have relative pitch abilities that look, to observers, like absolute pitch, because they've memorized a reference tone sometime in the recent past and can find any other note relative to that reference (some folks also use their own voice as a reference tone, because they know the top and/or bottom of their range, or how a specific note feels when they sing it).
I only have the summary to go by, but this sounds quite different from absolute pitch and quite similar to relative pitch. We've always known people can acquire very good relative pitch recognition skills as an adult. That isn't new or groundbreaking (though if they have a training regimen that works fast enough for a study like this, that would be great news, since ear training for very good relative pitch recognition is a months or years long process for most people).
Rick Beato provides a lot of (too much) context before explaining "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch". [0] (Timecode link to Beato's point.)
Beato's video was featured on MetaFilter a couple of months ago. [1]
[0] https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM?t=364
[1] https://www.metafilter.com/175853/Why-Adults-Cant-Develop-Pe...
Think of all of the musicians who do ear training for years and never develop perfect pitch (but develop very good relative pitch). That's a tremendous amount of evidence that developing perfect pitch as an adult is vanishingly rare. I'm not sure why a couple of tiny studies with somewhat inconclusive results would be considered enough to ignore thousands of musician's experience.
I'd love it if perfect pitch could be acquired as an adult, but I've mostly accepted that pretty good relative pitch is the best I'll ever have, and a couple of small studies don't really convince me otherwise. It's interesting how "amazing new cancer cure" studies are brutally beaten down with "this is a small study, don't get your hopes up too high yet" here, but this tiny study has everybody convinced perfect pitch is totally do-able for everyone.
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.
I have always found absolute (or "perfect" pitch) to be misinterpreted in popular culture. I have not actually met a musician with perfect pitch. However, perhaps my definition is too narrow.
Would a person with perfect pitch be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 432 Hz A? Would they be able to tell the difference between 440 Hz A and 438 Hz A?
If the definition is to be able to tell that a note is only slightly off within some pre-decided tuning system, then I know many people that can do this. The question to me is whether absolute pitch is as it says in the name, "absolute", or is it always limited by some measure of uncertainty? Is there a physical limitation? (Is it 1 Hz, or is it 5 Hz?)
Hope someone can explain this.
Edit: In the paper, they seem to stick to a pre-decided tuning system. Probably the standard one that we have now (equal spacing based on 13th root of 2 with 440 Hz A).
Not sure if you can reach AP (which is not clearly defined anyway) but you can dramatically improve pitch recognition in general by practice.
There has been a lot of studies that have tried to teach recognizing the audible difference of R and L to Japanese English learners. I don't know of a single study has been able to produce robust results. (There's a primary and secondary acoustic cues to the difference; some Japanese have had success recognizing the difference using secondary acoustic cues, but recognizing the primary cue which is the most robust one and which the natives use preferentially escapes treatment.)
However, the testing protocols and time are limited, and we have increasingly knowledge about adult neuroplasticity. Results like this keep me hopeful that it's just that we don't know the good way to do that yet and we might see some results in the future.
Edit: there are tricks you can use for memorizing the intervals, too, like "Here Comes the Bride" is a perfect 4th, "My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th, and so on. There's a whole list at https://www.earmaster.com/products/free-tools/interval-song-....
France usually uses pure 440 Hz, and many countries use 425 Hz.
Of course, with cell phones, a lot of people don't even have a clue what dial tone is. :)
[0] I do realize they denote some frequencies
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.
I was always taught there are 12 notes, while any standard scale contains only 7 of them. (The chromatic scale obviously being the exception which contains all 12.)
Accidentals are just for notation -- obviously B-flat and A-sharp are the same "note", just as F-sharp-sharp and G are.
Our entire turning of equal temperament is based on 12 equal intervals, not 7. So I'd argue parent commenter is correct -- notes are base 12, not base 7.
So...one could argue for either or both interpretation and explanation. The note names, sharps and flats, is what is most arbitrary about it.
I don't think any ear training app works that way. Any app that is based on good pedagogical practice would be training relative pitch recognition, not note naming. An app like that would only be usable by people who already have perfect pitch. Relative pitch, which is the skill most musicians cultivate, is based on recognizing the difference between pitches as well as the sound of combinations of pitches (i.e. recognizing major/minor chords), and only much later do note names come into play. Someone with a very refined sense of relative pitch can name notes, if they have a reference pitch in their head that they can compare to (and some people take that one step further by making the top or bottom of their vocal range their "reference note", or they "memorize" the first note of some piece of music they know well, so they can figure out other pitches based on where it is relative to a known note, but that can drift).
Anyway, I've tried a bunch of ear training apps and I really like Perfect Ear. It is, by far, the best ear training app I've found, and it covers tons of ground. (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.evilduck.m...)
This ability seems to fall somewhere in between relative and absolute pitch, and I'm sure I'm not the only one it is true for.
I've played the piano for 50 years (I'm 55), and I do a lot of ear-training practice with software (Ear Master, etc) to keep myself sharp.
I still don't have perfect pitch. Without hearing a reference note, I won't get it.
In some ways, it's good. I keep my Bosendorfer tuned to A=443 and occasionally someone comes over whose used to the American A=440 and it bothers them. It doesn't bother me.
>In 1939, there was an international conference held in London that resulted in a recommendation to use A = 440 Hz, as a compromise between the various tuning systems used at the time, some of which reached beyond 450 Hz. This recommendation was further supported by the fact that the BBC required their orchestras to tune to 440 Hz instead of 439 Hz because 439 is a prime number, and the corresponding frequency was hard to generate electronically with standard electronic clocks. Eventually, in 1955, the standard A = 440 Hz was adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO).*
* https://jakubmarian.com/the-432-hz-vs-440-hz-conspiracy-theo...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_pitch#Current_concert_...
A lot of continental Europe uses A=443 today
https://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-...
You'll notice a rapid understanding of tones and keys. There are (even free) apps for Android and iOS as well.
Given that, to my knowledge, there isn't any evidence that increasing neurotropic growth factor will cause significant neuron growth/regeneration in regular adults, it seems the only nootropics that actually work are stimulants and semi-stimulants, which at the end of the day just make you more alert and focused
It's one of those "life hacks" that gives such marginal, if any, benefits that it's not even a productive use of your time to think about them/order them/etc. when you could do more productive life hacks with your time instead
Nootropics, if they have an effect, tend to improve aspects of cognition. For example, focus, creativity, mental energy, verbal fluidity, ability to multitask (ie, listen to music while reading), etc.
Not all benefits are perceivable without monitoring via sites like Cambridge Sciences.
A bunch of guys on the internet taking Lumosity tests doesn't replace a study
Sites like Cambridge Sciences are mentioned as another way to see if nootropics are having an effect. Even if studies claim benefits, some may experience nothing. That is, many things health-related tend to vary on a per-person basis.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24831-learning-drugs-...
I'd be curious what supplements you have in mind, since you included it in your comment.
The secret sauce is kinda a glissando between sections to try and throw off your pitch memory.
there are people working on recreating this in a web page. There are also people who argue this is not Perfect pitch, but just well trained relative pitch. It did fade after no training for 3 months IIRC.
There was a a different study that showed Depakote possibly aiding learning perfect pitch as an adult. Don't go find some Depakote and cram music theory, Depakote could kill you.