Perfect pitch study: Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors?
news.uchicago.edu
news.uchicago.edu
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.
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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.
I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and the batteries last longer.
Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally a last resort since implanting them will usually remove any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies. Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf.
Hope that helps.
I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.
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.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-...
https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch...
Valproic acid is used as an anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer, thought to enhance brain plasticity, and (unfortunately) can cause big problems in livers.
When there is greater understanding of the pathways affected there could be safer options for re-entering the critical period after the window has closed.
(edit: age of critical window discussed in the study here - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...)
Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
I've forgotten most of them now but the Jaws theme "duh-duh-duh-duh" is a minor 2nd, Twinkle Twinkle little star is a perfect 5th, and "my bon-" of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th
It's also common to have a library of songs in your head that start off with each interval. Everything from "Für Elise" for the minor second, to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for an octave.
If you are interested in transcribing I would recommend a teacher. My girlfriend can arrange live on piano and has insanely good absolute pitch and she helped me on moments of extreme confusion and frustration that I wouldn't have gotten out of on my own. Also I have a tuner app on iOS that plays a reference pitch and also tells you what interval you sang, it's called TonalEnergy Tuner. I didn't need to sing until I got into learning downwards intervals, and I think I would never would be able to learn those without being able to sing do re mi in tune. Singing for some reason really helps you "imagine" and remember tunes.
On the same amount of time I am now very seldom but sometimes able to transcribe very simple synth lead melodies to my synthesizer, as I was also learning basic sound design in parallel to this.
One year ago I didn't even know you could learn absolute pitch as an adult, I'm 37. I'm completely mind blown by the fact I learnt what I learnt so far and sometimes I just don't believe it happened and am scared it will just like completely go away or something because it's like a very alien thing for me to be able to do. I don't even know what my objective is but it's probably being able to musicalize things in my mind and being able to jam with friends.
This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
AFAIK, in most audio/visual software tools used by professionals, this is baked in and so you'd have to purposefully pitch-shift it up and make it noticeable for this to happen.
IE, when I mess around in REAPER, and my song is set to 110BPM, listening to/dragging in a 170BPM loop keeps the exact same pitch (nearly, it's quite amazing) as the original it's just stretch/compressed to fit into 110BPM.
The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.
See also: "The Levitin Effect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI
Not just highly skilled ones. I just checked, and I still have my A-flat 2 reference note that I've been carrying around since 2013, having not used it for at least 5 years and barely doing any singing/piano these days.
I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me" for D, E.
as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune?
For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice approximating it.
The only thing "in my head" is my voice. So no images, smell, touch, music, and such.
For context, I think I have aphantasia [1], altough not tested in a clinical setting (MRI or something like that)
Of course I am willing to answer any questions you have, hopefully in a timely manner this time.
The nice thing about the Nashville Number System and guitar is once you have this information and know what your 1 is it's a set of patterns. You can put my 1 anywhere on the fretboard and I know what to play. Makes transposing super simple too.
Bottom line - I think in intervals, not notes. When playing a song by ear, which is how I mostly play, I could be off by a semitone or two but it doesn't matter: point our where the 1 really is and I'm still good to go.
Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
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.
There is a similar thing about music theory where people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all that much about a particular piece of theory until they need it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the theory behind it.
Theory offers some shortcuts, like circle of fifth, chords, composition, rhythmic patterns etc. which one could of course discover personally, but if there's any focus on a particular style of music, then there's a respective theory package for learning that, just like with any craft.
In any way, practice and really doing it, while it's still fun, makes the real difference!
Btw, perfect pitch is a nifty shortcut too. I can imagine an excitement of being able to read store signs easily for the first time, it probably could be that liberating with the perfect pitch (guessing here).
...Just to eventually find oneself drowning in the sea of meaningless text around our lives, just as a miriad of music sources may turn into a meaningless yet pervasive cacophony.
The people you are comparing, though, are mostly people with at least a moderate 'knack' for music; those without it are unlikely ever to make it into the 'after practice' category, because it will be too frustrating and unrewarding to continue for the long haul.
> 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.
I don't think this is necessarily very distinct from talent. Skills that come relatively naturally to us are usually more fun to practice than skills we can only make slow, halting, unimpressive progress at.
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'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.
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.
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.
What I personally experienced is there are some individuals who can identify specific notes down to the unit frequency (I played a 439Hz tone, the person said "Uh you're a hertz short" and I fixed the bug in my program). That level of ability is generally believed to be not learnable after the brain loses a certain amount of plasticicity.
Continuing from my own experience, people who do not have absolute pitch at that level can improve their skills in pitch detection including: identifying intervals, identifying octave, identifying common notes in an octave, and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes can improve their pitch detection somewhat.
Whta is rarely or never observed it people with relative pitch gaining perfect absolute pitch after growing up, regardless of the amount of training.
This seems like hair splitting to me. You even refute yourself by including the word _rarely_.
And a musician probably couldn't tell the difference between = vs == or & vs &&. If you don't recognize that someone that spends all of their time doing something will be better at that something compared to someone else, then there's just a large disconnect. Also, the concept of "practice" yielding improvement is not a new concept, and I'm surprised it seems to be so shocking of a concept.
The link below is a study which shows that the distribution of pitch recognition among the general populace is bimodal (you have to scroll down a bit). This matches with my experience that, irrespective of practice, people either have it or they don't.
This is an issue in the interminable debate over Frank Jackson's "Mary the color scientist" thought experiment, where anti-materialists seem to think that if you cannot learn what it is like to learn what seeing colors is like from a science book, then materialism must be false. Presumably they would hold the same position over learning perfect pitch.
Except, I think every dev on here knows from "learning" the diff between =/== yet has had the typo error in an if test where == was meant, but ended with a single =. Yes, it gets much easier to know why things are misbehaving after experiencing it enough, but it did require that experience to really "learn" it.
Same with any skilled trade. You can learn it by watching or reading, but the real learning comes from the doing repetitively. Some might call this practice. Pilots call it hours on stick. Devs with enough of this are called senior. Of course there are people that are naturally gifted with skills that will excel more than highly practiced people, but that doesn't mean practiced people can't get to the same levels.
What makes a pilot or dev 'senior' is mostly a combination of a sense of what is normal (and which deviations are significant), and good judgement. While these are skills learned by experience, they still can, to a degree, be communicated in language, but skills like perfect pitch can only be described in language - if you get it wrong, no-one can explain what you could have done to get a better outcome.
My experience with one kind of "magical skill" that software engineers have is: someone reports strange problems with some application (that you did not write). You watch them reproduce the buggy behavior and you see one step which seems "off" - not what you would have done. You try the same process but with the step you think seems right and it works. Person goes off happy that their problem is "fixed".
Now of course this is "learned" but in a whole-systems way that just looks like magic for someone from the outside. It's not an exact parallel, but I think it's an interesting one.
(Sorry I don't have a concrete example, but it happens with some regularity. Like "I think you should let the cable modem power up before turning on the other devices" or "That screen seems to be flickering a lot, have you tried swapping the power cord to the other side." or "I don't think you should be crossing those cables, try running them all parallel." All little by themselves, magic together.)
It seems you really wish to believe anything can be mastered at any level, but it's just not true - no matter how disturbing that might sound. In pretty much any kind of mastery you can improve to some point and then your learning curve starts getting into the saturation due to your various genetical and psychological limitations. Your gains start getting smaller and smaller, and since life is limited it also limits what can be accomplished during it. People who were born with certain talent/predisposition will always win in that race (presuming they also work as hard as you), simply as they start off from a better starting position. You can't just decide as an adult to become a new Usain Bolt or Jordan or Novak Djokovic. If you haven't already started training hard as a kid it's just too late for you, no matter how much you wish it. And perfect pitch is just another extreme example of that as it seems to be closely related to the phase of speech development in kids, which ends when we're 8-11 years old. Try to pick up some foreign language that you know nothing of, just by listening and watching people use it, without any other help. And then compare your progress to a 2 or 3 years old kid who does the same seemingly effortlessly, even with the most complex languages in the world. Rick Beato has an interesting theory that kids can be directed to develop the perfect pitch by exposing them to a lot of advanced music with complex harmonies and scales, as the brain - he believes - treats music same as speech and recognizes the pitch of a sound as encoded information. But again it works only with kids. From what I've read about it there's no a single case known that someone beyond doubt proved to have had trained themselves a perfect pitch hearing as an adult.
So I'm not arguing someone can train themselves to be perfect pitch, but in all practical purposes it's close enough. If you can pin point the specific player in a group that is off pitch, it is still impressive. Does the person that can detect the 1Hz difference bring any more benefit than the person that says 439Hz and 440Hz is the same note? If it does and you're depending on a human for that level of accuracy, I'd suggest you're barking up the wrong tree and should be using intstrumentation for that.
This is just argument by assertion.
For whatever it's worth, I heard about this like a decade ago, and nothing more has come from it, so perhaps you are correct in that the connection is speculative (the study only had 24 participants and more research needs to be conducted with large samples), but it's an interesting study none the less.
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.
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".
Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
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.
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.
(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.)
It’s when you start trying to distinguish the same type of sound to the nearest semitone that it gets hard (unless trained, ideally from a young age).
https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-staff/2020/1/30/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres...
There is no exact equivalent to reflected light with its own color illuminating a colored drawing. Though it would be interesting to see if such a thing could be constructed somehow artificially using a device that receives sounds and then somehow frequency shifts them before emitting them again. That would be a fun experiment!
Wat?
Everyone who observed that optical illusion did so by observing it on an emitted light panel.
Color perception is entirely relative. There are countless images that demonstrate this. For example: http://www.optical-illusionist.com/illusions/same-color-illu...
When we perceive emitted light color we’re also perceiving RGB emissions that are blended. I love giant LED panels that when you get close you can clearly see the individual colors. It’s a trip.
Humans are horrible (incapable?) at evaluating absolute color. It’s entirely relative.
Both work on the perception of waves with a certain periodic repetition but there the equivalence ends, there is no such thing as 'timbre' in vision, we simply don't work with harmonics there and the shape of the wave in sound is very important and non existent in vision (you can see a single photon in sufficiently dark adapted conditions, your eye as a fundamental particle detector!).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_illusion
As well as the 'missing fundamental' I linked to in another comment in this thread.
If you pick some Jazz piece apart it isn't rare at all to come across a chord that sounds absolutely awful. But then you play the piece as intended and it all makes sense within the larger context of the notes/chords/intervals around that chord. This never ceases to surprise me.
The difficulty of both problems is understated.
At the same time: even if people can't tune a piano they can usually fairly reliably tell when one is out of tune.
But more impressive than absolute pitch to me is to be able to identify a four-note chord at once.
Can most people tell when a guitar is out of tune? A guitar so badly out of tune it plays different notes is recognizable by almost everyone, but a guitar only a little out of tune would not be noticed by most, IME.
If you're not deaf you should be able to distinguish between wide swaths of the scale too. Especially once you give the swaths names and get used to that.
> 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
Not if you stick to pure single wavelengths. You could divide that into a mere 50 colors and I doubt people would have a chance at naming them reliably.
But if you had to identify colors with the same precision that you expect someone to identify pitches to be considered to have "perfect pitch", it would be very difficult for almost everyone. If you took random chips from the Farnsworth–Munsell 100 hue test, one at a time, and had to give the correct numerical code for each hue, you would not be able to do it. (Which is why the test itself only requires that people put the hues in order when comparing them side by side, not identify each one absolutely.)
Ordering things in relative order isn't very relevant to this discussion I think, since the point was about the difficulty in detecting absolute sound frequencies. And of course, anyone can put all the notes on a piano in relative order.
Except for border or overlapping notes of course. Giving them one of those would be like expecting cyan to be consistently labelled as blue or green.
Play a note and ask someone to reproduce it after ten seconds or so. How close would people come? Then show them a card with a certain pure colour and then ask them to reproduce that with a hue slider.
Don't you think people would come much closer with the colours?
Don't confuse language and perception, we are not talking about labels such as "cyan" here, that's not directly relevant.
I discovered relatively recently that I simply cannot remember colors. My vision is fine, and my short-term memory for colors is also fine. If I'm in a room and you ask me to close my eyes and say what color the walls are, I can do it. But if you ask me the color of the wall of my bedroom, where I go every night, then I will only be able to tell you if we recently painted it and verbally discussed paint colors. (I think it's a shade of blue? Or maybe green. Possibly gray. My family likes to pester me with this question, so you'd think I would memorize the answer at some point, but I haven't.)
I'm kind of curious how common this is. But since I lived several decades without noticing it in myself, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't very well recognized.
Reproducing visual properties is much harder then you think.
And of light conditions and context affecting your perception. And so on.
Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
C 380
B 402.595975856532 ~violet
- 426.535578357562
A 451.898703701034 ~blue
- 478.769998960052
G 507.239144584613 ~green
- 537.401153701776
F 569.356689213139 ~yellow
E 603.212399747916
- 639.081275592823
D 677.083025786658 ~red
- 717.344477638087
C 760 infrared
With 760 being one "octave" below 380, though the visual spectrum ends at around 740, which means the visual light spectrum is a bit less than one octave.
Instead, the human cochlea contains thousands of little pitch detectors spread over 10 octaves, and the perceptual architecture and typical training built around it is designed to detect relative pitches (e.g. noticing the difference between two different people’s voices more strongly than the absolute frequency of the fundamental pitch of either voice).
Eyes and ears just have fundamentally different physical mechanisms and we make sense of visual and auditory stimuli in fundamentally different ways. They are not really directly comparable.
In both cases, however, our perception is strongly context-relative.
There are some interesting websites for this:
Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
Being able to recognize chord progressions saves a lot of work in transcription because unless the piece is doing something weird, you can reconstruct the voicing or an equivalent voicing pretty easily. For the weird stuff, you just need to pick out a few elements and even then the rest of it can usually be inferred.
* 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.
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.
That's about timbre, not pitch.
The most interesting case of this is the missing fundamental, which we apparently re-create in our heads to hear it even when it isn't really present!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
This really threw my for a loop while building my mp3->midi convertor.
Red vs Blue is ~700 nm vs ~475 nm (about because they are ranges rather than specific frequencies where most people who are not vision impaired will agree something is either red or blue).
Violin vs voice is more like 'triangular wave form with f, 2f, 3f, 4f, etc as the harmonics and voice would be 'mostly sinusoidal waveform with a bunch of vocal 'chords' acting as strings each of them with a sligthly different base pitch, with those same harmonics.
But if you were to compare for instance to a reed instrument the harmonics would look completely different.
Some singers by the way are capable of controlling their vocal chords in such a way that they can create rising and falling pitches at the same time.
One. Almost all instruments have different timbre depending on the pitch. At least at large scales, your voice's deepest note does not have the same timbre as your midrange, or your highest note. Similarly with pianos. I wonder if this is also true on a micro level between A and B on a piano?
Two. As I mentioned above, perfect pitch folks _don't recognize sine waves as well as piano notes_. Why? That's very curious.
In any case, I was also going to mention that musical notes are interesting because they loop. A is 440Hz and 880Hz. I was expecting to find something like 2x blue frequency = yellow, which would highlight a difference between color and sound. However, interestingly, that is not the case. The entire visible spectrum of light is within one "octave" of frequency. Fascinating... :)
"The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus.
A more practical solution is a separate device, I mean organ, that works like our ear but for em waves: just one "pixel" but with lots of sensors and complex postprocessing to detect harmonics. This way we could hear em waves.
Such a device can be built, actually.
And we are not talking about colour naming, we are talking about colour perception. So the situation would be "here's a particular green colour, please find a patch from this heap that has the same colour."
I mean, just because the word "green" is very broad doesn't mean we can't _see_ the difference.
And as for green, yes that is the best color to do that test with because we have the biggest discriminatory capability for green. And most people would be able to distinguish with a large degree of accuracy an increasingly high frequency shade of green given similar intensity. But once you start varying the intensity and the hue at the same time I think people will get confused quite rapidly as to which shade has the higher frequency hue.
Color is much more 'loose' than sound, that's why we 'tune' our instruments and why painters don't necessarily need to 'tune' their palettes so precisely to be able to make something that looks harmonious.
When it comes to sound though, even many musicians won't be able to find even a single absolute note, even if we fix the timbre, intensity etc.
So colour and sound are definitely fundamentally different, which I don't find very surprising, there are few situations in the wild where it would help us to be able to distinguish absolute frequencies, timbre is more important.
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.
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.
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.
But isn't the result a curve that can be expressed as the simple superposition of waves? That simply can't be done for vision. (edit: without breaking time by encoding scanlines - which is just serializing it.)
> I'd bet against you. In fact that is a lot harder than identifying the 12 base pitches on for instance a piano.
I'd take it. I'd imagine it'd be as easy to train somebody to recognize 12 pitches from a particular piano in a particular room as it would to train someone on sine waves. But my point was it'd be easier to train them on either than on pitch in general, from many different instruments with different timbres.
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.
Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
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.
> I can reliably tune an A440 to within 2 cents, but I doubt I could get some other arbitrary note to within 20.
But you can work your way up and down the keyboard from that initial A440 to check how the other As are and then expand from there until you have them all in tune. So you can't just pick a random note and tune it but you can for instance use your one reference to tune a whole keyboard eventually hitting on that one random note and getting it to within some tolerance.
> 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
That's the kind of skill to be very jealous of, at the same time these savants often seem to have to have given up something else.
There are so many different tunings it is quite amazing.
A great piece of open source software for anybody that is even remotely serious about this:
Counterexample: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Collier
True musical genius and child prodigy but also a skilled performer and composer.
History also tells of impressive feats by composers like Mozart and Rachmaninoff.
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.
I know there are some studies on this but it's far from conclusive enough to state this without any further qualifiers. I suppose you are indirectly referring to the study referenced in this article?
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.
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.
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.
Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome different limitations.
Every instrument only has so many notes it can play.
There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the neck on each string. Simple and not an actual musical exercise.
It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest beginners before they even have much musical material under their belt to even practice or rehearse.
If you are not already playing every note of your instrument every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have been missing.
They've been missing you.
"Absolute pitch is too fine a form of categorisation," she said. "If that is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear. If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we couldn't understand that 'happy birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man or a woman, is the same word."
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford (an article originally linked to by jacquesm.)
Also, perfect pitch is apparently much more common among native speakers of tonal languages.
If you're hearing a Cmaj7 chord, do you hear the "maj7" quality of it, or do you just "know" it's a maj7 from its notes? What I mean is, people without perfect pitch recognizes chords from how the chord sounds, as a unit (as a general rule). This needs some training of course, but those jazz musicians you mention are of course able to instantly identify chords, all those "jazzy" ones as well.. so what I'm asking is if you do the latter as well (imagine if you lost your PP tomorrow - what would change in that respect?)
Yeah, I'm sure people without pp can recognize chord qualities just as well. Hmm although if it's an extremely weird chord/collection of notes, I doubt they'd know what it is. The area I imagine[0] they'd have huge problems is in improvising free music, where often there's not familiar chords, and no predetermined harmonies. Playing in a group doing that, people are playing notes around you, and without perfect pitch, I don't think you'd have very precise an idea of whether what you are about to play will fit that or not. It seems they have to play a couple of notes first to 'test the waters'..
[0] They don't seem to. But it's gotta be like flying blind. Or at least, driving in a very very heavy rain!
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...
A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
As far as I understand it, we evolved to be able to perceive distinct colors because it's relevant to distinguish surfaces from another visually.
For auditory sensations on the other hand rough pitch estimations sufficed but relations between pitches (think of hearing 2 pitches. you probably won't know the exact note or frequency but have learned to recognize patterns in the relations between them - e.g. musical intervals) which comes down to periodicities in the signal turned out to be a lot more relevant or helpful.
As to why we needed to be able to relate pitches to one another: Without looking up literature on the topic I hypothezise that it might be a byproduct of the way we calculate a single perceived pitch out of a harmonic frequency spectrum.
When hearing a note that is not a sinus wave in the frequency spectrum there are at least parts of the multiples of the base frequency.
Since we do something like frequency analysis by detecting periodicities our brain tries to determine a single pitch for the signal, which it does by calculating the base frequency of harmonic spectrum (this works even of only part of the harmonics are availabe.).
In order to do that the processing needs to treat the base frequency differently than the overtones.
Since overtones roughly correlate with western musical intervals and we needed the processing to get extract them. We might have gotten relative pitch perception and part od what is music as a byproduct.
Anecdata for this: Try determining the existence and intervals of notes when the higher note is an octave or an octave and a fifth above the first one (1st and 2nd overtone). Depending on the instrument this can be quite hard.
Disclaimer: These are my interpretations / theories, but since I'm not working in this field, the literature might tell a different story.
I never expected that one could process music so effortlessly, until I saw some of his videos. E.g., in some of his videos, he listens to a melody once and can then immediately play it on guitar or piano. If you want to dip your toes, I recommend starting with videos of the "What makes this song great" series.
Sure, but most people can reliably and predictably name some dozen colours.
> That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians.
If people in general had had perfect pitch, music might have looked different from today. Absolute pitch would probably have been an important feature. The reason it isn't important is precisely because most people can't perceive it.
Heck, even people from the same cultures will disagree on the classification of the same color experienced in the same situation. Remember the dress controversy a while back? People couldn't agree whether or not it was black & blue or white & gold.
Perfect pitch is the one thing that really makes me jealous in music. Unless you have a lot of tuition, technique requires a certain amount of luck in terms of finding the right habits and obsessions, but I can work out how I would improve - pitch however is totally off the table unless you have from an early age.
Gray can become black or white depending on what is around, and so other colors can change.
Photography is my hobby and I have a small project with idea of making photos interesting solely by manipulating context to change meaning of color in the photo.
- We have several chemicals in our retina's that respond to specific frequencies of light according to some curve. They are calibrated. There is no such calibrated mechanism for how you detect sounds.
- We actually suck at identifying colors. Every 5 year old has seen the 'shadow' optical illusion where two parts of a picture are exactly the same color and they look totally different.
Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds with some exposure.
If you want to test yourself against it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM
Enjoy :)
This resolution differs from person to person, mostly based on how they use it. I had a piano tuner visit my house yesterday as it so happens and his resolution was to about 10 cents. It was amazing.
Actually I'm now in my 50s and perfect pitch starts going south as you get older, at least for me and a number of others I know. I easily get locked into thinking things are a half-step lower than they really are.
Is this a studied aspect of perfect pitch? I've never read about it but, talking to friends, it seems like a common experience.
I have a pretty decent relative pitch but not perfect pitch... to me these tunings sound interesting but I can't say I derive any more pleasure from them. Sometimes they give me the feeling of not quite having my footing underneath myself. They're more of an oddity.
We usually don't actually perceive stuff. Sights, sounds, thoughts, smells.
What we perceive is a reaction to the actual perception. Or a reaction to a reaction to a reaction. Down that chain a bit. Ending, more or less, with an idea.
Those reactions are like a fog between you and the actual perception.
When we concentrate, or meditate, or otherwise get a clearer, closer look at the perception, we see it in an uncommon way.
We see the "truer" form. And much that was hidden becomes evident.
This is the main power of the artist, musician, athlete, scientist.