Are we all born with perfect pitch? | Hacker News Reader

Are we all born with perfect pitch?

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48 pointssarahf31 comments

I can't find in any of the linked sources any conclusive proof that all children are born with perfect pitch. From my own research in 2011, I hadn't discovered any papers which would make so bold of a conclusion.

This proposal[0] linked by the article mentions a few studies that show some environmental factors that seem to have a high correlation to absolute pitch, such as growing up around tonal languages, but nothing conclusive about absolute pitch just being a thing that we all have but that most of us lose. There are correlations to age groups, ethnic backgrounds, linguistic backgrounds, and musical backgrounds, but again most studies have looked at the environment for clues about how absolute pitch works as opposed to presenting evidence of something innate.

Musical cognition is an absolutely fascinating field of study, and it absolutely plays a critical role in the way humans function. However, I think this article is a little click-bait-y, seemingly drawing an unfounded, fantastical conclusion about a particularly popular aspect of the field. As far as I can tell, it's completely unsubstantiated.

[0] http://www.auditory.org/mhonarc/2004/save/pdf00001.pdf

Edit: words are hard

Something major changes within our speech and/or auditory systems after early childhood. We lose the ability to learn fine differences such as the accent. It's not clear whether this is a difference in the way speech (sound) is perceived, or our ability to pronounce, or something in between.

Sure, accent is not pitch, it's more like timbre. In any case, both are related to the ability to do spectral analysis of the sound, and act upon it.

It has been shown that this changes after childhood, and that certain drugs (valproate) can reverse this effect.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

The article is written in such a fantastical style that my BS-meter was going off the entire time, so I wish I had the experience or time to determine how valid these conclusions are from the studies linked.

The only anecdotal experience I can bring to the discussion is that I have seemed to acquire a very limited version of absolute ("perfect") pitch, whereby I occasionally will hear a note or chord and instantly perceive the unmistakable "C minor-ness." Sadly, while the phenomenon seems to be perfectly reliable when it occurs, it only occurs rarely. This is probably what Wikipedia calls "pitch memory" rather than absolute pitch.

Absolute pitch doesn't tell you the quality of the chord, it only tells you its constituent notes. To know that a chord is minor is simply relative pitch aka ear training.

I just meant that I can occasionally recognize both, e.g. I will hear a chord at the beginning of a song and instantly know "A minor." You're right, only the "A" part is the absolute pitch. I can always recognize the "minor" part, which is just easy relative pitch.

The biggest howler in the article might be this: "Piano tuners frequently possess this gift, making their seemingly difficult craft effortless."

In actuality, absolute pitch is of hardly any utility in piano tuning. Even those who are recognized as having some degree of "perfect" pitch very very very rarely can tell 440 Hz from 440.1 Hz, which is the sort of thing a piano tuner deals with. And this task is always done with electronic help anyway, these days.

Its quicker if you don't need a tuner.

The key (forgive the pun,) is to listen for the tell-tale signs of a slight discord.

Most people can get within 2hz on the same note. With practice you can use one note to tune another.

For example when I worked in a sound studio, I could tune a guitar using a single reference note(e, a, d, g or b) (without harmonics or similar) More skilled people could use other notes.

Right. And the point is, none of what you are describing requires perfect pitch or is even helped by it.

Just another example of a non-musical writer with no understanding of the difference between absolute pitch, and relative pitch.

They weren't saying perfect pitch helps tuners, but synesthesia.

A music teacher once explained it to us like this: "perfect pitch" is simply memory. If you recall what something sounds like you can can compare and figure out what any note is. Some people have an amazing memory, some people have to work at it. But you can create all kinds of mnemonics to help you remember things, and pitch is no different.

By the end of his class I had a firm grasp on all the intervals and was getting really good at getting absolute notes. Had I continued training myself I have no doubt I could be considered to have "perfect pitch" (as could most of the class). It really demystified the whole thing to me.

Mnemonics is totally how it works for me. I can hear songs in my head in tune. Through learning to play guitar, I've memorized songs for each note, by the first chord of each song.

A: Jessica, Allman Brothers

A#: In Bloom, Nirvana

B: Out on the Weekend, Neil Young

C: Like a Rolling Stone, Bob Dylan

C#: Say it Aint So, Weezer

D: Moonage Daydream, David Bowie

D#: Woman, John Lennon

E: Melissa, Allman Brothers

F: Smells Like Teen Spirit, Nirvana

F#: Foxy Lady, Jimi Hendrix

G: Santa Monica, Everclear

G#: Brain Stew, Greenday

The only part I'm not completely convinced is a learned skill is being able to internalize the song in the first place.

Intervals are the same.

Minor 2nd: The Jaws theme

Major 2nd: Mary had a Little Lamb

Minor 3rd: What Child is This

Major 3rd: Kumbayah

Perfect 4th: Here Comes the Bride

Tritone: The Simpsons

Perfect 5th: The Star Wars Theme

Minor 6th: Close Every Door to Me

Major 6th: The NBC Theme

Minor 7th: Somewhere(Theres a place for us)

Major 7th: Take on Me

Octave: Somewhere over the Rainbow

This is amazing. Thanks so much for posting this. I "listen" to music all day in my head but never thought about using it to be able to sing the specific notes. I'm looking forward to trying this later with my guitar.

Terrific list, thank you! I have pretty good absolute pitch, and can hear songs play in my head just like the real thing (I often wear headphones that aren’t connected to anything and just “listen”), but I never thought to make the connections like this. Very fun!

What happens when you transpose one of your first chord songs?

Ha, This is awesome.

Absolute pitch (the proper name) is a spectrum. I have it myself, but my abilities pale in comparison to some others. While I have no problem identifying single notes and smaller chords, others can immediately name 10+ note chords. There's also the question of range: I'm hopeless at the extremes of the piano while others have no problem.

Many musicians are able to memorize the tuning note A440, for instance, which suggests absolute pitch is not simply a boolean property of our brains but rather an ability that can vary (and be improved) like relative pitch.

That being said, I do think those perfect pitch courses you see on Amazon are mostly snake oil.

Personally, it feels to me like the ability to recognize intervals (relative pitch) is so much easier than the ability to recognize pitches (absolute pitch) that I wonder if they really are both "simply memory." Why is one so much harder than the other?

Well, it's also a lot harder to tell a whether a given square is 20" or 19" on a side at a glance than it is to tell a whether a given rectangle is 2 x 1 or 1.9 x 1. Does that analogy help? It's more relevant than it might seem; absolute pitch is about recognizing frequencies and relative pitch is about recognizing ratios of frequencies.

That's true, but can you "memorize" something that lets you tell whether a given square is 20 or 19 inches on a side?

If you spent a lot of time with 20" squares (carpenter?), I bet you'd start to notice that 19" looked small, even in isolation.

> "perfect pitch" is simply memory.

Too bad not every teachers will tell you this.

No. The inference from "every baby in this study has perfect pitch" to "every baby has perfect pitch" is as unwarranted as "every person I have ever met is handed so ambidextrous people don't exist."

Most babies may well have better pitch than the vast majority of adults. To claim therefore that every baby has perfect pitch is sensationalist, unwarranted, and almost certainly wrong. Very poor science-reporting.

The interesting question, as always, is what the distribution is, not sweeping and almost certainly false categorical claims ("All members of category X have property Y!")

From one of the studies cited: ( http://www.auditory.org/mhonarc/2004/save/pdf00001.pdf ) "We conclude that the potential to acquire absolute pitch is universally present at birth, and that it can be realized by enabling the infant to associate pitches with verbal labels during the critical period for speech acquisition."

The article claims "each and every one of us is born with perfect pitch", but this is not cited, and being born with absolute (aka. perfect) pitch is not the same as being born with the potential to learn absolute pitch.

EDIT: Possibly evidence for babies being born with absolute pitch was hidden behind a misleading link (the "synesthesia" link). But full text is paywalled so I can't be sure: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11206435

I think it's just the common mistake of misunderstanding how to invert a logical implication.

Which is to say, what the journalist meant was "no one is born tone-deaf."

And to write 'of those babies we have examined...'.

Just to add another anecdote, I feel like the people I know who are able to whistle generally recall pitches very accurately, they just can't name the pitches without further training.

Whistling isn't hard to learn, and it is easier to control pitch through whistling than it is through singing (in my experience). I feel like whistling can be very helpful in revealing "perfect" (or very accurate) pitch recall in people.

I don't know that putting labels on pitches at a young age was a sufficient condition for my perfect pitch, but I feel like it was necessary.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis for music.

Mandarin is linked with perfect pitch

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041114235846.ht...

radiolab episode that deals with this

http://www.radiolab.org/story/91512-musical-language/

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