Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurieg | Hacker News Reader

Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.

As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.

One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.

Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.

I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly

Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.

Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know

If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition

You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.

Best of luck!!

You have a fencepost error; the notes in Western music in equal temperament are C, C♯/D♭, D, D♯/E♭, E, F, F♯/G♭, G, G♯/A♭, A, A♯/B♭, B, then c an octave higher is the thirteenth.

Ah thank you for the correction, I'm just a hobbyist and have not practiced in a few years

It’s accurate to say that there are twelve intervals, anyway, which is the point you were making.

In my experience the Japanese don’t refer to this as a change in pitch, but as you say, they consider it an emphasis.

The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it “Accent for Japanese dialects“.

That is to say, I don’t think this is pitch as in musical pitch perfect.

yeah I was wondering the same thing. I'm only marginally familiar with Japanese, but studied mandarin in Taiwan for years and Chinese is considered a significantly more "tonal" language in terms of pitching up, pitching down, etc.

I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native language though.

It is not referred to as a change in pitch, usually people call it intonation or accent, but the actual change in sounds is a change in pitch.

The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.

The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.

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