Think of a song you know best, one you've listened to hundreds of times: can you sing it or hear it in your head pretty accurately (edit - not accurate intervals, but accurate pitch)? If so, congrats, you have the capacity for perfect pitch. Learn what note it starts on and you're 1/12 of the way there.
There's a fascinating phenomenon known as the Stroop effect[0], where if you get people to read a series of color words (e.g. "purple blue green red"), where the words are colored, but in the wrong color, it slows them down quite a bit. This was used to identify Soviet spies by showing them colors written in Russian; native Russian readers were slowed by the incorrect coloring, people who didn't know Russian could read it quickly.
Well, the Stroop effect applies to music notes, too! People with absolute pitch are impaired from reading a sequence of note names when a non-matching pitch is played at the same time. People without AP can read it just fine.
People with true absolute pitch can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has. It taps into the language center of the brain. Does your song trick give you such an overwhelming sense of the note, that if someone played a different note it would be noticeable and distracting enough that you can't read a simple word or music note on the page?
Hold up, I’m confused. How could people who didn’t know Russian read them at all? There’s probably something obvious I’m missing, but I just can’t parse this at all.
So you might have, in a red font, the word "blue", followed by the word "green" in yellow letters. The correct response is to say out loud "red, yellow". This is hard to do when the words are in your native language. So if the words are in Russian, it's an easier task for someone who doesn't read that language, because they aren't distracted by the meaning of the word and can just see the colors.
See the example on the wiki page for reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect
Imagine красный written in Blue
With the Russian word you just see a funny shape and it's blue.
With the English word you see red and blue at the same time!
> can't help but know immediately and automatically what note a sound has
Well, and what note does a sound have? What is "a note?" Is it just a name for a specific frequency? Then why enharmonics. Is that D a little flat, or are you just tuned to A 442? Oh actually we're in 24TET over here, that's simply a quarter tone.
Sound is just a sound, you need other context to make a note. To infer a note from a pitch, someone (with perfect pitch or not) knows already or is assuming a lot of context that makes that work.
But that context isn't universal, and if it has changed they'll need to find out how and adapt to it. The fact that they can adapt is because there's no universal mapping from frequencies to notes, either in their mind or anywhere.
Having (a) talked with acquaintances who have absolute/perfect pitch (b) read a fair bit of research (c) practiced the “trick” under discussion (d) had a brief mid-adolescent period where I experienced tones as having an extra layer of color/personality that was definitely distinct from note memory, everything points me toward the idea that it’s a different way of experiencing the sound itself. Like the difference between “they all look the same to me” vs frequencies having faces you recognized or if numbers came with fixed colors. Honestly the experienced part was a bit jarring and I think that’s part of why it didn’t take.
This same prank would have no impact on someone who memorized approximately where A440 is by listening to a tuning fork every day for 10 minutes.
Absolute pitch and tonal memory are different physical phenomena.
A lot of orchestra musicians don't like listening to recordings that deviate too much from their preferred concert pitch. I don't like listening to British or American recording where a equals 440 or some old German ones at 445-446. That is less than 20 cents.
[0] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/41599/was-the-s...
I experience this effect a lot, despite "learning" these notes when I was 21.
I've spent a lot of time with musical people, and it's very clear that it functions similarly to a foreign language: it's a learned skill that is easiest to pick up in childhood. Like distinguishing /r/ and /l/, if you start young you can do it, if you start late it may always be difficult.
Why we would assume that it functions differently is beyond me.
The cognitive bias to put some people on a pedestal and worship them for being extraordinary. The perceived rareness and specialness of absolute pitch.
Absolute pitch can't be self-assessed subjectively like this. Hearing a song in your head is meaningless because you don't have an absolute reference to compare to.
Also, please read the first line of the abstract: Absolute pitch in this context also specifically refers to identification of heard tones, not ability to produce those tones yourself (in your head or otherwise). The test for absolute pitch involves playing different pitches spanning an octave and measuring how accurately and quickly the candidate can identify each pitch.
The first line of the abstract:
> Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references.
Even studies of students at prominent music Conservatories have shown low prevalence among their students. These are people who have been training for years and started at a young age. So you can't expect to come anywhere near perfect pitch as a casual person singing a song in your head.
Absolute pitch isn't a strictly defined trait. The participants in this study improved their pitch identification abilities after intense training, but they still haven't approached the thresholds of absolute pitch identification used in many of the studies of music students.
A common theme among absolute pitch studies is that people who started music at a young age (typically less than 5) score higher on absolute pitch tests. This study doesn't undermine that fact.
However, my sister does have absolute pitch (I don't), and the difference between "studying a known reference and knowing the intervals" and true absolute pitch is crazy. She can tell you what pitch the fluorescent lights are vibrating at, she can tell you what pitch your speaking voice is at, and all sorts of other things. My understanding of the psychology is that this is more like synesthesia than like something that you can study.
There are some people who suggest that kids who hear a lot of "atonal" music (modern jazz, modern classical, etc. - things whose pitch is hard to predict) at a young age are more likely to develop absolute pitch, which makes sense to me but also seems like it might be pseudoscience.
The people who impress me are those who can count cycles and identify/sing A440 vs. A415 (perhaps for a Baroque ensemble), different temperaments, etc.
See e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3280891/
[1] Everybody with a functional cochlea at least.
- Learn a piano song, memorize it, play it many times.
- My wife plays random keys on the keyboard.
- I tell her when she got to the opening note of the song by comparing what she played to my memory of the sound.
So then I was confused because aren't I not supposed to be able to do that?
After reading online it became clear to me that this is called "pitch memory" by musicians and it's a totally normal ability that anyone should be able to do if they remember a sound well enough, and it's distinct from "absolute pitch" because people with "absolute pitch" don't try to remember a sound and match it up. They just know what a D sounds like abstractly and can identify any D based on that feeling. It would be like the difference between me knowing what green and red look like, and me identifying green and red things by imagining whether they look similar to traffic lights.
The study linked is also aware of this distinction:
> It remains unclear whether the participants [in prior research] really learned the chroma of the tones, which is shared by notes that are one or more octave(s) apart with the same pitch name and considered the essence of AP (Bachem, 1955; Zatorre, 2003), or they merely learned to name a highly specific set of tones based on pitch height.
What you're describing is the same concept as fluency in a language. You're at the place where you are still translating the language in your head, but once someone becomes fluent it just comes out in the second language.
That there exists a lower bar of skill is actually evidence that it is a learned skill, not evidence that the higher bar is only attainable by some select few who were chosen by genetics or something. We'd expect it to be relatively teachable to young children and rather difficult to pick up as an adult, like languages, and that's pretty much what I've seen in my experience with a lot of very musical people.
I'm afraid my favorite song is on a microtonal scale...
https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/singing-memory-u...
It's the being able to name a note and sing it or hear a note and give the name that's rare.
Few people do this because it's simply not practical, but that 44% of recordings match the pitch of their source exactly shows pretty conclusively that there's nothing magical behind absolute pitch, it's just that most of us learn to associate pitches with songs rather than giving them names.
There is something special about musical memory. When I was starting out as an anime fanatic I would quickly learn to sing theme songs like [1] [2] although I didn't understand Japanese at all then.
Notably different language have different words for colors, for instance the Japanese word 青い (pronounced aoi) can mean either blue or green. [3] There's been a lot of controversy over whether language shapes perception, but if you do psychophysical tests that don't involve language you find people can tell colors apart pretty much the same no matter how rich or impoverished their vocabulary is [4].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hulET9tn9M
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW9BapLxwkw
[3] ラム (Lum), the girl with oni horns and a tiger stripe bikini who appears in [1] has 青い-colored hair which seems to drift in the blue-green area throughout the 5-season anime
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_...
Because it is really magical and unattainable https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI
Show me an adult that trained to this level.
Also, I know from my own experience that the idea that this is an innate skill is bunk—my wife's mother taught her children absolute pitch through deliberate training. Sing a note to them, they identify it, they check themselves on the piano. Repeat.
No one in any prior generations had the skill, nor do any of the cousins. Just the kids my wife's mom trained.
I'm sure like most skills it's one that is easier to pick up in childhood than later, but it's not some musical innate ability that you either have or lack, it is trained.
So you heard a word "test", then looked at a link that says "ear training" (and leads to a page that says "improving your __relative__ pitch") and decided that this 8yo went through the training and got this perfect pitch? Is that what you're saying?
And yes, he's 100% implying that this boy practiced to get there. He's not saying that he's going to be able to train any random person to get there with an online course, but he's 100% saying that this boy practiced the skill.
Beato's explanation is that his son was exposed to a lot of different music since the age 0 and at some age they noticed that he associates sounds like "hey, microwave sounds like star wars". Nobody drilled sine waves 5 hours a day. His whole point is that you need to immerse children into the world of tones, that will train to "see" them.
> Because it is really magical and unattainable
If it's unattainable, how can you also embrace the idea that there's a path to attaining it (immerse children in the world of tones)?
If this latest reply reflects your actual opinion then we don't actually disagree. No one said anything about drilling sine waves besides you.
> No one said anything about drilling sine waves besides you
Hey, maybe you forgot, somebody trained their kids not long ago, doing this lol.
Nevertheless, my initial point was that for now it's close to magic. Some, 1 in 10000, people are blessed to have this additional sense (at least for the first 40-ish years of their life), and others are not. It's a subjective perception of the thing indeed. If that doesn't awe you – well, ok, it doesn't hurt anybody. After all, every beautiful sunset is just you rotated away from a ball of plasma.
No, this is relative pitch. You might be singing it in the wrong key. That's why you can sing something a capella and it sounds right and then you add an instrument playing the correct notes and it doesn't.
Close your eyes and try to imagine a song that you know really well. Imagine the original version playing on your phone/mp3 player/cd/record. Pick a stable note from that song (for me, the third note of the beginning of "Tears in Heaven" is a solid A.) Try to sing it and match the pitch in your head.
As you practice it you'll get better, and do it faster, and over time even be able to recognize it in the wild.
This might not be something you personally can do, but for those who have memorized a song in that way it's a convenient way of demonstrating that perfect pitch isn't as unattainable as it might seem.
> Absolute pitch (AP), often called perfect pitch, is the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of a reference tone. [Wikipedia]
This is what I'm describing: knowing a song well enough that you can 'hear' it in your head, and use that to accurately identify and re-create a note from it. This is a few more steps than being able to simply 'know' a note upon hearing it but nonetheless can demonstrate the capacity to do so for those who haven't specifically practiced it.
It's literally the first line of the abstract:
> Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references.
I think what it is, is that it's murky whether perfect pitch is the ability to name notes, or the capacity to learn to be able to. Historical thinking has mostly been that the two are the same, however I'm referring to it more as the former whereas you're referring to it more like the latter.
So I guess the point I'm trying to make is that the two aren't the same, which is more or less what's being supported by the paper. People might have the capacity to learn the ability (as the 'listen to a song in your head' exercise I described aims to demonstrate) and think they don't, because the common perception is that if you don't have the ability you don't have the capacity to learn it. Or something like that.
That's not what this study is talking about. Click the link and read the first line of the abstract:
> Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the ability to identify the pitch of a tone without external references.
Lot of people are getting downvoted throughout this thread, but they're right. Absolute pitch in the context of this study is strictly about identifying heard tones.
You also cannot self-evaluate your ability to sing or recreate a specific pitch. You need an actual reference tone and an ability to measure it.
Most people will self-rate their singing pitch as being accurate, but when you introduce a calibrated reference tone and measure, it's a different story.
Also note that absolute pitch requires identifying 12 tones across an octave. Again, not as simple as singing your favorite song.
Not sure why, it's taught and commonly considered to be an ability you're born with rather than something you can develop yourself later on.
> However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability, because all adults who have been formally tested after AP training have failed to demonstrate "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
The Wiki article also describes just prior to this cited section that there have been countless attempts at it over the centuries.
Doesn't exactly sound like a learnable skill to me.