How my children (n=2) acquired absolute pitch
furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com
furiouslyrotatingshapes.substack.com
I’m a pianist and lack absolute pitch. My violinist daughter has infallibly accurate absolute pitch; but even with bowed instruments where it would seem to be an incredible asset, it’s less useful than one would think because you’re still always playing into the ensemble. You’re matching a consensus pitch within a changing harmonic context. That’s without getting into tuning systems, etc…
There’s also something just a little reductionist about the whole enterprise of teaching your kids to have absolute pitch somewhat in isolation. (Yes, there’s something about playing Chopin etc. It just reads like an experiment in trying to develop musicianship by isolating one of a thousand parts rather than developing it holistically and organically.)
The thing is this doesn't mean you no longer have absolute pitch. You can still identify the pitches but they feel different, which can affect the enjoyment of music. All the sensations you get from familiar music are now permanently altered, which can take a lot of getting used to.
I added this to a short list of reasons I tend to be rather glad I don't have absolute pitch.
This affects me—probably from wearing loud headphones too long and too loud. Absolute pitch, except I now interpret everything one semitone sharp. (Opposite direction of your acquaintance, assuming neither of us got things backwards).
AP helps improvisation (mostly keyboard and strings, less so brass, and even less so woodwinds, I can explain later). Also, ease/speed of composition, allowing you to focus on the creative aspect of composing, or just simply composing more.
You can become a great improviser with relative pitch, but it is much harder, as you have to calculate the intervals between notes in real time, whereas AP spits out the exact note automatically for you.
You should ask your daughter if she would be interested in Jazz improvisation! That is where her AP would actually shine. We need another Stephane Grappelli! :D
I am a violinist myself, and although I can play every scale and arpeggio in the books, I still can't play freely what I hear in my head vs my fingers even after years of working on my real time relative pitch.
Playing a single note confers no meaning. It's only when subsequent notes are played that a context emerges, and music gains its emotional qualities.
I would say it makes sense - perfect pitch or not - every key has a different relationship to your own voice, which makes it feel different.
In most jazz music you will have the lead sheet so you don't really need to know anyway. Besides that, you don't really need to calculate anything if you have relative pitch. If you practice enough it's instant. If I hear a note or chord followed by another note or chord I can tell you their relationship in real time. Anyone who has done enough ear training can. In fact, it's one of those things where you either know instantly or you haven't practiced enough. I was never really in an in between state.
I've never experienced any correlation between pitch sensitivity and improvisation skill in groups of trained musicians.
I play a lot of improv and normally it takes no more than 2 notes playing along to determine the key of the piece and relative pitches are very learnable.
Losing some high pitch hearing is bad enough.
Not necessarily the intervals between any two notes, but the note of interest in relation to the tonic. But still may require the relative position to be mapped (offset) to a specific note.
Not at all. You just hear the interval.
I met a Chinese couple last week coaching their young daughter in the pool. She's doing 2km daily, and is shaping up to be a pretty good swimmer. The article indulges more in this 5 minutes of tone practice than they ever have.
Asian families (at least the ones who immigrate) tend to have 1 or 2 kids, and focus hard on them achieving material success in a safe profession. They also tend to micromanage to reach that goal.
It's not a new stereotype, and it's not incorrect. I'm really sick of people thinking mentioning race or personal attributes is offensive. To me, real racism is about people not being welcome or safe. I don't know how that extended to "You have to pretend everyone is a soul without a body".
This article was a fascinatingly uneducated take on what it means to learn music mixed in with a classic dose of American "my child is better than you." Like many piano students who started early, I too played some easy Chopin music at ~6, and I bet most later starters also play some Chopin within 1-2 years of starting (in fact, I bet they reach the Chopin sooner).
Perfect pitch is very much not required to be a professional musician, and seems to help only in a few areas, and only by accelerating your musical education a bit. I'm sure it makes things like the Suzuki method easier for young children, but you arguably shouldn't use the Suzuki method to teach music to your kids anyway since it tends to guide them to a local maximum by emphasizing ear training over reading. Learning pieces by listening rather than reading works for easy pieces, but I bet nobody has learned the Hammerklavier Sonata or a Paganini Caprice by ear.
I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.
That, and actually digging music through forces coming out of your own soul (and not for the sake of meeting your parent's expectations ... or worse, serving as fodder for their half-baked education experiments) might have something to do with it.
Don't see why your comment should be downvoted, BTW.
Agree. Art is art, and why do we make art? Well...?
Technical skill helps with the nuance of the creation, but not with the "why."
I think graduating from endless analysis and “lots of notes” playing is a part of the journey.
Isn't it (like with most things) to get laid?
I disagree. I did 10 years of Suzuki as a kid, then switched to an intermediate/advanced teacher for another 10 years. I had to shore up a bit of reading for, let's say 9 months, but I read at a professional level and played a big chunk of the cello repertoire. My mom teaches Suzuki and many of her students followed the same teacher path as I did and excelled.
Imo Suzuki is very suited for kids, and anyone with that skill foundation can backfill things like reading skills relatively easy. I don't see a local maximum here.
It's certainly hard to see how it's useful in musical performance.
Hand - eye coordination, hand dexterity and to a lesser degree span, which btw up to an extent are as genetic as AP is -no matter how many grifters occasionally come up with Get AP as an adult with only 10 courses! scams, are going to be much valuable traits to possess when it comes to playing the piano.
I am not a professional musician but this feels a bit reductionist to me, in that it assumes the goal of any musical endeavor is to faithfully reproduce the music that was written down hundreds of years ago.
Some of the most celebrated musicians could not read music -- indeed some were blind -- but I would challenge you to find any musician who created anything worthwhile without having a trained ear.
It seems backwards to me to focus on the skill of reading over listening for what is fundamentally an auditory art form.
Especially, of course, music that involves voices. (Or at least most of it.) Reading a language and a musical text is a very big part of all this.
I will also point out that the best baroque violinist I know is blind, and there's a braille system of music notation that blind musicians work with.
At the same time, exclusive use of reading is a problem too. I believe having both skills is best.
Also, there are degrees of reading skill, and a need for maintenance. I'm an amateur jazz bassist, but started on classical music and then maintained my reading chops by gravitating to gigs that require it, including the large ensemble that I've played with for 14 years. At this point, I'm a better reader than some of the degreed professional bassists who are better musicians overall but have let their reading chops atrophy. I get calls for gigs because of it.
Being a better reader can involve being quicker at it, dealing with more complex material, or letting it occupy less of your attention so you can focus on other aspects of musicianship.
Off topic, but to me (an asian) this is an asian stereotype.
Seems like it's actually a stereotype for everyone. I wonder if people from an european country think "my child is better than you" is their stereotype too.
That said, I would acknowledge this dynamic does fit into particular other stereotypes of Asian (and Jewish) subcultures within the broader American context. You aren’t wrong that that could be in play. I’m just saying it’s not a “dog whistle” of Asian stereotyping without some additional Asian-signaling context. At least in my view/world.
I completely disagree. Firstly, the entire value system of believing that one ought to play the Hammerklavier sonata exactly as played before is questionable.
I was trained to read music (and very little ear training) and honestly made to feel pretty terrible as a piano student due to my inability to do so without fidgeting and being a general 'problem' student. Funnily enough, for the ear training we were made to do, I was even 'ranked' bottom of the barrel. My brother was ranked high in all the categories
Except... here's the thing. Throughout my experience, I have been able to basically play anything by ear. In fact I can pretty much hear a song and play it on the piano (of course the classical training helps in terms of technique). I also produce tunes on the fly, and generally am entertaining. My brother (by his own admission) does not. He is a very good player for sure, but he has no interest in music. Yet, our 'classical' musical education ranked him higher. Thus, I really question the entire value system of forcing kids to 'read' music and only judging them on their ability to replicate, which seems to me to be the bulk of music education.
We must ask ourselves... what is the goal of musical education? To produce automatons that can replicate any musical piece written or to create a musician?
Playing pieces from sheet music has nothing to do with "exact" replication. It has to do with understanding a work and faithfully interpreting it in your own style. New interpretations of the Hammerklavier and the Paganini caprices come out rather frequently.
Once a piece gets to a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do that without musical notation. Picking up each note by listening to the piece over and over just becomes intractable.
It also has nothing to do with how old a piece is - modern composers also use written notation as the primary communication medium of their musical intent (new music often comes with a MIDI mockup which is a poor replacement for a past recording).
Finally, I would suggest that the point of music education is to give you the tools to express your musical ideas. Some people want to play Liszt and Paganini - those pieces are really fun.
I really have no idea where the ideas about "what to mean to learn music" or racing through it came about.
>>I really wish the idea of "racing" through your musical education with hacks like this would stop - the only real way to get to advanced levels quickly is with a shit load of practice. My friends who went to international competitions at 18-20 were all practicing 5+ hours a day by age 12, and several of them actually started their music education at age 7-9 rather than obscenely early like this.
So instead of playing with your children for a few minutes a day when they are very young, singing to them and naming sounds it's better to go about it in a proper way: wait till they are 7, be careful not to expose them to music too much as you can spoil the whole thing should they attain a perfect pitch. Then make them really practice a few hours a day once they are old enough. Only this way you avoid racing through your musical education!
>>Just maybe don't be so proud of your kids for their achievements at age 6?
Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!
>>Life is long and even if you do treat it as a race, your "head start" means nothing in this area, except maybe as a party trick.
Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?
> Sure but idk how you came to the conclusion the author has a different view on it. She wanted to expose her children to sounds and music early to increase their chance of not being tone deaf and missing out on music because of it (her own experience). This worked, kids had fun, one of them practice for "max 30 minutes", the other doesn't as he doesn't feel like it. How is it race, fighting for headstart or anything like that?
There is a particular subtext in this piece that I'm pretty sure you haven't picked up on. I suggest re-reading it. I am certainly not the one who introduced the notion of giving kids a "leg up" at learning music.
> Interesting advice. I certainly wish my parents were proud of things I've learnt at the age of 6 or even earlier!
Sounds great, but if they want to brag publicly about it, it had better be actually impressive.
I certainly wish my parents cared even a little bit for music and sounds. I didn't encounter the idea that sounds have names or distances between them make melodies until primary school. Music wasn't playing in my home and no one sang to me. As you can imagine I am hopeless when it comes to music. I can't even sing a sound I've just heard. Not even close. Her children definitely have leg up in comparison to me.
If I wanted kids I would be happy to encounter the article. Maybe I could save my children from the fate of musical tone deafness.
Kogan learned the Waxman Carmen Fantasy by ear, off a vinyl record smuggled into the USSR due to not having the sheet music available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK51Awg9jR0
This is at Paganini level for sure.
What the post you're replying to is alluding to is all the ways that pitch is simply not absolute. That can be for boring reasons: you're playing with an organ, or some other instrument with fixed or temperature dependent pitch, or in a different city with different conventions; but also for the interesting reason that the "correct" pitch of a C, say, is the result of a mostly-unconscious negotiation that considers ones' place within a chord that's sounding and the melody you're playing. Even equal-tempered tuned keyboard instruments involves compromise wrt placement of the octaves, etc.
There’s a reason I specifically noted scoring high on subsets/subtests, Raven Progressive Matrices being the most popularized form online, of full IQ tests (latest WAIS revision). So no neither here, nor in the previous comment was there any dismissal of the existence of intelligence or its means of estimation.
Many like to brag about getting high on this subtype and therefore believe they’re on the far-right end of the distribution, however to get an accurate estimate of your position there, you need all the additional tests that measure processing speed, verbal reasoning, short-term memory, maybe other types of non-geometric abstract reasoning tests.
As I said I’m not a big fan of the way Americans obsess over the reliability of RPMs for an accurate score estimation, but I’d wager a test with the types of questions found on the SATs/GREs would help form a very robust intelligence population distribution.
Since even the vast majority of musicians employ relative pitch, entire choruses can move together off of the original key, for good reasons and bad, but those with perfect pitch will (sometimes stubbornly) maintain the original key, even when doing so is counterproductive to the performance.
Lead singer in the ensemble is a little under the weather and can’t hit the high notes? Normally, you’d consider starting the piece down a step or two, and get on with the show without much trouble. But if you have members with perfect pitch, that may not be an option without some significant rehearsal to familiarize them.
This also translates to musical appreciation – I know people who can’t stand when a singer covers a song in a modified key, saying it sounds “wrong” and “terrible” compared to the original. For the vast majority of the audience, the key doesn’t matter terribly much, but for those with perfect pitch, the key is a significant attribute of the original piece, and it’s just as major as changing the words might be.
In other contexts, perfect pitch can be very handy, but it’s not always quite as “perfect” as it’s sometimes portrayed.
My sister has perfect pitch, and she definitely had a leg up learning music, but she can't stand baroque music played in authentic pitch/tuning. Some modern music also uses effects to raise and lower the pitch of the song, and those annoy her too: think about the Janet Jackson song that breaks hard drives - it is in E, but the tuning is almost A=450 thanks to the use of varispeed. That one is pretty far, but many other songs have A=435-445 thanks to post-production.
Her orchestra plays at A=441, and I think she has basically learned that tuning or doesn't care - it's only about 5 cents sharp (1/20th of a half step).
I have to ask out of curiosity, does this mean you worked full-time tuning harpsichords or rather that you did a lot of e.g. piano tuning and also occasionally tuned harpsichords? I'm hoping the former but expecting the latter.
Essentially, instead of a fee for service (like piano tuning) product, harpsichord tuning is a subscription product. However, I think there were <10 other people who tuned harpsichords in the same major metro area, so the market is pretty tiny.
Why do harpsichords need to be tuned so much more frequently? How long did they take to tune (and how does that compare to tuning a piano)? How was the pricing structured with such a regular need? Were most of the harpsichords you were tuning in academic institutions, arts institutions, private use, et cetera? And not a question but another thought, I'm surprised there were even a handful of people tuning them in your metro area!
An American maker, John Challis, developed a harpsichord using modern materials, that stays in tune for much longer.
They didn't take as long to tune, as mentioned above, because the historic temperaments were easier if you knew what you were doing, and there were no unisons (multiple strings per note) to get into agreement. Before the age of the modern piano, keyboard players had to tune their own instruments, so it was just part of learning to play.
Depending on the instrument and temperament, a tuning could be ~45 min or up to 90 min. Small instruments in the family (spinets and virginals) could have <4 octaves and one stop, meaning <50 strings to tune, and the biggest instrument had 5 stops and a 5-octave keyboard, meaning more strings than a piano (300 vs about 230). The "standard" instrument is ~4.5 octaves with 3 stops, meaning ~150 strings.
The customer picks the temperament generally, and that has some effect on how long it takes. Quarter-comma tunings (4 fifths flat by a quarter of a comma, the rest remaining pure) like Werckmeister are the quickest, and took under an hour on the standard instrument, but tunings like Kellner (1/5th comma, but harder from an A reference) and Valloti (1/6th comma) took me at least 2 passes to touch up, so over an hour. I also did equal temperament tunings with a tuner, which are quick. For reference, it takes me about 90 minutes to 2 hours to do a piano, so I am a little slow by professional piano tuner standards, but harpsichords are definitely quicker.
I also frequently adjusted the tuning based on what repertoire was being played, rotating it so that the near-pure thirds would be in the keys of the repertoire and possibly raising leading tones a bit. It was also not uncommon to have a modern woodwind in an ensemble, which often meant only doing a slightly spicy version of equal temperament rather than using a full-on baroque tuning.
The harpsichords were pretty much all at schools - I started by tuning my school's instruments and expanded from there.
I generally charged my hourly rate for 4 services/instrument/month + some padding, with extras (concerts) going at an hourly rate. This was a "work study" arrangement at my school (although I had 15 hours/week of work study for <3 hours of work, and still gave them a discount at the standard student rate) and contract work outside.
Anything you'd recommend, or is it a shit idea on piano?
Personally, I think Beethoven and Chopin sound great in Kellner, and I had my piano in Kellner for a very long time.
Definitely do it at least once.
Not to mention training for absolute pitch on the chromatic scale has a heavy bias towards typical western music.
I had always assumed they could still intuitively match pitch and just had an extra information overlay.
Do these people you know who dislike transposed covers also dislike genres of music with dissonant elements, such as certain types of jazz or microtonal music?
To give a basic gist, two of the most fundamental intervals in music are octave (2:1 frequency ratio) which is 1200 cents, and perfect fifth (3:2 frequency ratio) which is about 702 cents. You'll find that if you stack 12 of these perfect fifths you come back to the same note (seven octaves up) but 23.46 cents off. 23.46 cents off is very much audible by every human being who is not speech impaired, so it'll sound extremely jarring (dissonant). This makes musical composition within the tradition of Western art/church music challenging. So, to fix this, we use 700 cents as the interval of approximate perfect fifth and each semitones apart by 100 cents (so that perfect fifth is 7th note and octave the 12th). We call this system "12 tone equal temperement" which is standard in all genres of Western music (from classical to jazz to pop to rock... but other cultures have many other systems). Now your piano will be tuned to these notes (0, 100, 200, 300... cents) such that it's impossible to play other notes. When people learn absolute pitch, they learn these notes are C, C#, D, D# etc. But when an instrument with continuous pitch plays (such as violin, cello, human voice etc) you do not need to be bound by this tempering. So you can actually play a perfect fifth as 702 cents. As long as the piece is not so chromatic/atonal such that you need 12 perfect fifths to add up to seven octaves, it'll work out. But when someone with perfect pitch listens to this effect, it can feel jarring, particularly because music is "out of tune". This can make piano music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to just intonation (e.g. violinists) and violin music feel "out of tune" for people who are used to 12TET (e.g. pianists with perfect pitch).
[0] Note that relative pitch is required to understand spoken human language, so as long as you don't have a speech impediment, you can likely understand relative pitch just fine. Of course, ear training can help you label the intervals you hear and associate them with names, not something all laymen can do.
However, there are a lot of times when you can make music more interesting and exciting by adding some pure thirds (equal temperament is off by the most on thirds, and thirds are very harmonically important) at strategic places. You just can't do this on a keyboard instrument.
Otherwise the hard part must be choosing just the right pitch vs the other instruments.
For cadenzas or solo, do what you want I guess
Excepting split sharp/flat keys (as seen in some non-equal-tempered harpsichords and organs), or some electronic instruments/plugins which can dynamically vary the pitch of each note.
However, AP would be advantage in vocal sight reading. With AP, you will never sing a wrong note, whereas a non-AP could make some mistakes, depending on how strong there musical ability/relative pitch is.
I am not sure shifting keys in singing would be hard for people with AP. Of course they would be aware of the exact new notes they would be singing whereas nonAP would simply thing "everything is X steps up/down" but relatively the same.
I don't think AP has an effect on tolerance to listening to a song in a different key, it is more your personal taste. I don't have AP, but I can tell when a song is in a different key from the original. I find it acceptable, so long as it is in tune. But I vastly prefer the original key simply due to familiarity. Also, some songs really do sound better in certain keys than others.
This is not even close to being true.
Fretless sting instruments allow for continuous pitch modulation - that includes the violin family as well as others like pedal steel guitars, the Japanese shamisen, etc. Certain wind instruments like slide trombones and slide whistles do the same. There are also electronic instruments like the theremin or any synthesizer with a pitch bend wheel.
More often than not it is:
The voice is the only instrument where you think you "play" (sing) what note you are thinking of.
With other instruments it is much easier to notice to be wrong.
Being able to "think it, play it" is absolutely central to what I do when I improvise.
Ever since, I have never wished that I had perfect pitch.
Some (non equal-tempered) keyboard instruments have split sharp/flat keys so you can play more in tune in certain keys/scales.
Being able to distinguish these all of these tunings accurately and switch between them as needed seems like it would be a nice skill to have.
I should have mentioned that I was a teenager in the early 1970s, and the only pianos I had access to then had strings and could not be retuned on the fly. In retrospect, I came to feel sorry for my teacher, as being conditioned to the arbitrary standard of A=440 prevented her from enjoying playing music on many of the pianos she would have happened to come across.
See especially the comments made by professional tuners (which matches what my own piano tuner tells me).
(Maybe that's less true for true perfect pitch, though.)
Imagine if, someone showed you a two and you just saw in your head what 2 + 1, 2+2, 2+3, 2+4 were intuitively. This would give you a leg up in elementary math (And beyond). This is similar to what relative pitched people experience. An absolute pitched person often just sees the two and if they see a three, the relationship between the two has to be learned.
There has to be a better way to brag about your children.
(And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
> (And actually, even more time than that; it'd be more fun so I'd probably practice more.)
That’s the circular dependency there—if you practice enough, you develop the skills to make it easier to learn songs, which makes it more fun to practice, so you practice more. I really think there are just two things you gotta do—“push through” and get the practice work done anyway, and make sure that you are practicing effectively.
My older boy is also taking a few online music classes in his two non-dominant languages. (My kids are trilingual and I always look for ways to increase their non-dominant language exposure.)
(I am not the author, my family member is. I find the comments about bragging just silly. It's a lot of work to keep the family connections across cultures and languages).
Don't know what to tell you, other than that the whole piece just reeks of compulsive status signalling. And why would one throw their "just look at our little prodigies-in-bloom" story up on the internet -- except to have people comment on it? Or is it only fawning and applauding comments they were expecting?
- Tiger parenting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_parenting
some cultures expect status signaling, a parent who does not do it is thought to be ashamed of the kids, and so the kids must not be very good. Some other cultures use it as a "language of love" to their children, encouraging them further. Some other cultures don't speak positively or much at all (ever hear about the old Swedish farmer who loved his wife soooo much he almost told her?) And even in those cultures there is a way to express pride or not express it, it's calibration.
Culture needs translation just like language. You can still read between the lines of the pride and learn something about what the parent is doing and how it's working. We don't have to like everybody we work with, everybody who teaches us, etc. in order to learn from them.
When people share stories like that they don't necessary expect applause or criticism. Honestly it's not your place to express it and against the site guidelines as well. If you want to learn about commenting just read what most of others have done in this thread - they commented about the topic at hand which is perfect pitch, early exposure to music and various ways to approach it.
I certainly have learnt something from those and got to read some interesting related stories.
Obviously not, and I don't see how what I said could be read that way.
It's taking the trouble to write stuff like the original article (in such gushing, self-congratulatory tones) and throwing it up on the internet that reeks of you-know-what.
Especially since these don't sound like self-driven accomplishments on the part of these kids. Or even remotely near it.
We already live in a modern world. I have seen probably more culture from a lot more countries than anyone before us all.
It really takes time and energy to get culture. Culture is not just a few family traditions or a little bit of food.
Besides, i do think culture became much more generic the last 30 years due to how we are now connected. Everyone has coca cola (which is ridiculous), everyone ewars colorful tshirts from adidas and all the other brands we know. We took culture and mangeld it in sending cheap old cloth to other countries, exporting everything and stop embracing local things.
And even if you do, sometimes you see how those local people cook (in which conditions) and than you are happy about the generic imported coca cola because they never heard of hygene.
There was a Youtube Video were someone interviewed people in germany / munich and asked them how living here changed them. And thats very interesting culture wise: They said things which were very german like 'no longer talking to anyone on the street just for fun' or being more on time etc. I bet this cultural trades took much more than just a few weeks to get ingrained.
Those poor parents, maybe on their next child - if they do raise them properly, that child will be able to speak 5 or 6 languages.
Like if I learn a song and then for whatever reason I have to change what key it's in, all I gotta do is start playing a couple steps higher and lower and then I'm good. But if I had thought in absolute terms, I would be screwed.
Am I off base here? I just play for fun I don't know.
I also find out of tune music extremely distressing, and can't stand it. My ears actually have this weird "bleeding" sensation if I listen to out of tune music long enough.
However, since I listen to so much music and tune my violin to A 440Hz every time I play, my ear knows when something is off even by a degree or two when listening to some European orchestras. And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)
There is a really cool phenomenon with some musicians who play instruments with a one to one correspondence between a pitch and feeling + fingering (so woodwinds, and sort of brass) that have played long tones for so long that they have internalized the "feeling" of a note and can (with a small delay) seem like they have absolute pitch. Really cool stuff. A youtuber called Saxologic dubbed this ability "Real Pitch". Really interesting video showing this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4zo6POThHc
> And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)
The notion of “out of tune” is different for people with and without absolute pitch. Someone with absolute pitch can hear something as “out of tune” just because it uses A=432 instead of A=440, whereas someone without absolute pitch will hear it as in tune. That is, more or less, THE characteristic difference between having absolute pitch and not having absolute pitch.
I don’t have absolute pitch. I’ll hear a guitar as out of tune if it is not tuned to itself. Like, if one string is flat relative to the others. However, if you tune a guitar to standard tuning in A=432, that sounds “in tune” to me. I think I have a decent sense of tuning—you can tune to equal temperament, and you can tune to just intonation, and I can tell the difference between the two. But I cannot tell the difference between A=440 and A=432.
The difference between 440 and 442 is exceptionally small, I’d be surprised if you could hear the difference in an A/B test.
Singers also get "real pitch," I think, and in general, when you know the sound of an instrument's registers really well, it can be a hack for professionals to turn their relative pitch into "perfect pitch."
Also, FWIW most professional musicians I know can't tell whether their A is sharp or flat by a few cents (eg the difference between 440 and 442), but they can tell interval size immediately. The interval sizing tends to determine "out of tune" rather than the frequency of the A.
I don't have absolute (or very good relative) pitch, but I find transposing something I already know pretty easy. I was able to sight read concert C sheet music and play it up a step on a Bb trumpet, for instance, whereas trying to find intervals that I don't already know is really difficult for me. So if were magically granted AP, I think playing up or down a step would be simple.
My friend's brother has absolute pitch. I've played 10 note chords for him & he can pick out every note and also tell me if each note is in tune, sharp, or flat.
He is a high school band director. I can imagine that this is a very useful skill for his job.
People usually identify and label colors with much lower granularity. There are 7 conventional spectral colors with wide subjective boundaries between them, but e.g. piano has 88 distinct tones and that is still not full audible range.
For pitch Googling suggests we can hear a difference of about 5 cents. A cent is 1/100th of a semitone, or 1/1200th of an octave, so N cents is a frequency ratio of 2^(N/1200).
At 440 Hz (A above middle C) 5 cents would be a difference of 1.27 Hz.
For light, a 5 cents difference would be about 2 nm wavelength at the red end of our visible range and about 1.1 nm at other end. (That's about 1 gHz frequency difference at the red and and 2 gHz at the other end). Can a human tell if two light sources differ in wavelength by 1-2 nm?
With simultaneous notes, counting the beats you can hear much smaller differences.
Ears: about 10 octaves
Eyes: about 1 octave
Probably because it's not necessarily just resolution of the eyes and ears, but resolution of the brain that perceives that information. How "perception" works is still somewhat of a mystery.
I didn't realize there were methods like Deutsch's, and they honestly seem a little wonky. I'm glad it worked for her.
I don't think the absolute value any pitch class carries is of much intrinsic musical interest. Musical comprehension is not aided by knowing the pitch-class of a specific note, but in perceiving its relationship to other tones.
I'm guessing you picked those two genres of music because they are often referred to as "dissonant" or "noise". As far as modern classical music is concerned, much of the material has a unity between the foreground, background, and middle-ground details. Imagine you've been listening to an orchestra busily sawing away on pitch set [0 1 4] (in all its permutations) and then you realize the lonely glockenspiel's three disembodied notes over the last minute and a half spelled [0 1 4].
Training someone to listen to such a piece so that they might tell you the glockenspiel's second note was an e-flat does not improve anyone's musical comprehension. Training someone to listen to such a piece so that pitch-relationships in the foreground can be heard to form relationships at different scales of the composition does greatly aid in musical comprehension (and is routinely accomplished -- pretty much anyone can do it).
Musical comprehension depends on the relationships between pitches. A modest investment in ear training will pay handsome dividends in comparison to absolute pitch acquisition (even if the later worked).
IMO if you want your kid to have absolute pitch, you should expand your own musical palate by listening to some Schoenberg or Stravinsky with your child. If you want your children to be musicians, you don't need to do that but you should give them some theory and ear training lessons.
Here's one of the more interesting videos:
My anecdote is that I gained absolute pitch by playing on a Yamaha keyboard as a young child. Seeing the notes on the screen while playing and hearing them is almost certainly what made it click for me. I strongly believe that AP can be acquired at a rate that is an order of magnitude higher than what we observe today.
I have a similar anecdote. I had a small Casio keyboard that I gave to my daughter to play with when she was 3 or 4. There was no training or any kind of instruction beyond that. It was just another toy that was in her pile of toys and it wasn't something she played with very often.
Many years later, we are in a music store and I hit a key on a piano and she tells me it's wrong. I didn't really understand what she was saying and then we found out the keyboard had some pitch shift mode enabled and she was right. That's the day we found out she had perfect pitch.
3:4 is a fourth.
So I think following this method with your toddlers will probably recreate musical ability, and absolute pitch, but following a different musical routine with this level of regularity and consistency would also recreate the musical ability.
The reasoning is simple. You can sing a song in any key you like (within the bounds of your vocal range). You don't even have to sing in a standard key. (You could sing it half-way between C# and D for instance). If you pick the exact right key out of the effectively infinite possibilities, you have remembered a specific pitch. If you can remember specific pitches, you can label them. (It's just that music always makes things easier. Writing a song to memorize something is an underused technique IMHO).
I have played music for quite some time and have worked on my relative pitch a fair bit, and I still struggle to improvise what I think in my head, whereas a person with perfect pitch would do it effortlessly and perfectly every time.
So the complement of Asian is ... Caucasian? Seriously, I would expect a self-described furious shape rotator to know better.
If they don’t speak a tonal language at all, they fare no better on AP tests than students who grew up speaking non-tonal languages.
Archive link: http://web.archive.org/web/20230622023623/https://furiouslyr...
I do believe AP can be taught to some degree. My pitch recognition isn't that great in general but when I play my instruments I can immediately tell if something is off so the super-strong feedback loop you gain from learning an instrument, especially something that can go off-pitch, is a strong driver.
Show me a proof there is such a thing and that it can be objectively measured.
Here is a list of things you can objectively measure to determine which children have innate musical talent.
And it doesn't matter a great deal either. Innate talent plus no work will get you nowhere. No talent and work will get you somewhere although maybe not to the top.
https://www.aimm.edu/blog/is-musical-talent-innate-or-acquir...
I've read of older musicians with perfect pitch saying that when they get up near their 50s their perfect pitch drifts. They start hearing things as being higher or lower than they really are. For some that drift can be up to two semitones. This can make it very annoying to listen to music--it all sounds off.
For everything you need as a musician relative pitch is fine, and won't go out of whack when you get older possibly ruining your ability to enjoy music.
the gist was that a child prodigy is defined as a child who can play at 10 what professional can play but the kids need a few 'talents': 1. stamina and a lot of it 2. motivation/fun for playing music and 3. a ton of exercise.
And this blog article sounds definitly much more involved while trying to give of the vibe of 'look i have prodigy kids' and 'i only do a little bit of excercising with them and its just 5 minutes a day or so'.
Nonetheless, 30 minutes a day on avg is still so much more than a lot of other kids do and as others said, the bragging is annoying.
They developed white key absolute pitch meaning they can recognize any natural tone by ear and can sing any pitch from memory.
Many of the students developed some form of absolute pitch.
However, I am not sure the utility of the skill. I am into jazz and tried to teach them some improvisation and they never showed a great aptitude or interest for it and they also struggle with relative pitch tasks, essentially converting the notes they recognize into the interval.
In short, I came to the conclusion that absolute pitch recognition by itself won't make you a great musician.
this mom sounds insufferable.
but i smiled too.