Perfect pitch study: Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors?(news.uchicago.edu)
news.uchicago.edu
Perfect pitch study: Why can’t we identify music notes as well as colors?
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/why-cant-we-identify-music-notes-well-colors-perfect-pitch-study-offers-clues
226 comments
What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch. While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones.
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.
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.
Fascinating remark. I don't have perfect (abs) pitch and never heard of the relative variety. But I grew up playing piano, mostly on my own time, which means I'm extremely comfortable playing anything I hear in C, and just slightly slower at repeating things in A#. My brain has to transpose. But now I play pedal steel slide, and I have a trick to picking up any song quickly. I find the root chord of a song and intentionally forget what it was... so I'm not playing in F or A. I remap my brain at the start of that song to remember that tone as C. And then I can find everything without thinking about it. If I think "where's the 7th of C#" I'd have to do a few steps in my head. But once I've got the hands synced with an artificial idea of "C" I know exactly where my options are. So in a way it really may be better than perfect pitch, because I can remap a song's scale to a keyboard in my head and then strum one or two times between songs and "remap" the "C". I realize that makes me uh... hahah not Mozart. But it works to let me forget what I'm playing and just play.
Same experience here with a pedal steel. That's why I am now pushing my bandmates to adopt the Nashville Notation System which only deals in relative position of chords in the scale[1].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System
Hah! I love that there's another PSG player on HN who gets this right away... that's awesome. I never heard of this system specifically... I feel like a singer holding up 3, 4 or 5 fingers has been the way I've been cued lots of times to changes in a song I barely knew, without me even thinking that was a system. I bet they didn't either.
Separately, I know zero music theory... but PSG really was what let my brain get comfortable with a 3rd of a 4th being a 6th that was two frets down from the 5th of the root... I think probably engaging your knees and ankles in reaching for the physical positions in time builds almost like a muscle memory of the musical relationships... like the kind of control you get driving a manual car... but only if you already have the tones you're looking for in your head, and you know where you're going. PSG is the most mindbending realtime puzzle to play... so it makes sense that players need tricks to know where to go from a certain position (especially if you find yourself stuck in one when you jump into a song)
I learned about that in the Paul Franklin online course (expensive, but worth the money if you are unable to find a personnal teacher, yay europe).
I don't have absolute pitch (and a crappy relative one), but this "standardisation" based on the root note really helps build a knowledge of how chord changes "feel". I suspect this is what builds this ability to easily find the right notes when improvising.
Weel anyway, always happy to find people keeping the steel alive !
I play guitar. I amaze people when I say I have no idea what notes I'm playing. I know the Nashville Number System (learned it before knowing it had a name) and use that. So going back to your example - I find the root and that's my 1. Next I look for does it have a 3 or b3, i.e. is it major or minor? That'll drive me to a major pentatonic or minor pentatonic. For a lot of songs you can stop there. There's a note that's outside of the pentatonic? That'll indicate your mode.
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.
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.
This sounds very similar to how DAW (digital audio workstation) software has features to "transpose" pitch. You essentially just move one of the notes to where you want it to be and all other notes get transposed relative to it.
> because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time.
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.
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.
How do you know? I don't mean this in a challenging way. Just that I'm completely ignorant to how one would even test these things.
To test whether your memory of a pitch is correct, you can just sing a note then listen to a reference sound in close succession. Absolute pitch ability is not required to tell whether pitches match.
Can't you just listen to a song you know well in your head, and be aware what the notes are?
the reference note needs to be listened in your ear to check wether the note you are imagining matches the reality, if it does then you can confidently (if you have trained it) find the intervals.
It was the first note in a vocal concert, no accompaniment, no cueing, and I remember that it's A flat. I just googled A flat 2 and sang what I was thinking of. When the recording started, it matched my pitch.
So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted, even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too long.
This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?
This supports the article's assessment that "it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum." Long term memory for the key or opening note of a particular song seems to be a more widespread skill than naming the pitch class of a pitch without such context. From wikipedia: "People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re...
See also: "The Levitin Effect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI
See also: "The Levitin Effect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI
Time-stretching algorithms like Elastique/ZTX make up for the change in time by compensating and keeping a neutral pitch
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.
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.
While true, it is somewhat tangential to what I'm talking about.
The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.
The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.
I've been told I have fantastic relative pitch (but not perfect pitch) and it's exactly as you describe. For me, it's the theme to Super Mario Bros. I know what that sounds like in my head, and I know also that it's in C major. Taking the root of that will get me within epsilon of middle C, just from my head (I can also take the E or G from the first six notes), and then I can reckon whatever note I'm listening to on the C scale. I suspect most instances of "perfect" pitch are this skill, honed to a much greater degree.
Oh wow. This is an amazing life hack. I can hear the SMB song perfectly in my head, and now other sounds in my environment are clearly falling on one side or the other of that C. This is going to help a lot with my writing!
Nice one. Somehow I've never chosen a C reference. That's a good one.
I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me" for D, E.
I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me" for D, E.
> I know what that sounds like in my head
as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune?
For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice approximating it.
as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune?
For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice approximating it.
Really? That's fascinating to me because the music in my head is the actual music as if I were playing it off a CD. In fact I've learned many songs "by ear" just using the music in my head.
I must've overlooked your reply before, so apologies for answering so late.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
> perfect relative pitch is completely learnable
Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?
I used to have a music teacher who taught me to practice by associating the openings of common songs with each interval
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
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
If a beginners point of view is useful, let me tell you I'm using Ear Trainer on iOS and was using Complete Ear Training on Android, I've only been doing it for like six or eight months with a break in-between. I went from nothing to being able to recognize m2, M2, m3, M3, P4 and P5 upwards and I'm working on m3/M3 downwards and harmonically now, usually with 85%/90% accuracy. I can also tell major from minor 7th chords apart with like 70% accuracy and tell the major and minor scale and their pentatonics apart upwards and downwards with above 80%. All this with different root notes, same root note is way easier.
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.
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.
Practice transcribing music. There are also simple ear training applications you can get for your phone. Relative pitch is a fairly simple concept, so there's a proliferation of apps that teach it, at least to a basic level.
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.
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.
The same way it's taught if you go to music school. Practice. Have music played to you, and write it down. Start with very short pitch sequences; this will require you, of course, to learn to recognize intervals accurately. Then move on to longer and more complex sequences. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Look at Rick Beato's ear training course (https://rickbeato.com). It's $119 but you get 100 modules. Private lessons are commonly $20-$25 per half hour so this is a pretty good deal.
Thanks, I may do that.
I've put some links in a comment below to help with pitch and interval training.
I know a vocalist who has perfect relative pitch who can pretend she has perfect absolute pitch because she knows the lowest note she can (quietly) sing, giving her a solid reference point.
i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch after the age of 3.
Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3 other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?
There is also the valproic acid study where the window of the critical period appeared to be reopened in a two week study of 24 adult individuals.
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...)
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...)
It is possible, but it requires some native talent and a painful amount of practice.
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-...
https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch...
https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-...
https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch...
Rick Beato disagrees, although he puts the limit at 6 yo, not 3... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM
There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
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That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always people who didn't really put any time into music that would talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100% accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff all the time.
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.
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.
This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is that he has fun making music (which he does).
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.
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.
> ...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...
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment of music.
I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.
Oh that's great to hear. I'm slowly losing my hearing and to know that there are solutions that work even with music now is super good. Do you happen to know how many channels your implant has and whether it has any particular tricks up its sleeve? Maybe make & model?
I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing the number of channels doesn't have a significant difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real smarts are in the external processor, which is custom programmed or "mapped" for each recipient.
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 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.
Thank you, yes, this helps very much. A friend has had one since birth many years ago now, I'm wondering if an 'upgrade' would be worth it for them, I will read up on this and your comment prompted me to update how far this tech has come in the last years. Thank you very much.
i wonder how long until they can match average default human hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the peripheral auditory system.
If we were to exceed human hearing would people then get implants without a medical need?
That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function of the various components of the cochlear channel getting stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear win already.
I can relate to this as something I never thought possible either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr) I've made progress that almost feels magical.
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.
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.
I had an experience where for a couple weeks I could playback symphonic music in my head and be able to control the loudness of individual sections, repeat passages, etc. with the same fidelity as a lived experience. I knew it was meme-erex but it sounded live.
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.
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.
I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it, and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes.
Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.
Thanks for this information, I’ve been recently going through some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what they are able to pick out.
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.
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'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty badass
> I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song
I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.
I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.
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Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without anything to compare it with?
Who says we can identify colours well?
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.
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.
> Who says we can identify colours well?
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.
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.
you can learn relative pitch not absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is only possible before 3 years old or something like that.
Absolute pitch may not be possible to learn as an adult, but what they're describing is having good pitch memory, which is different from absolute/perfect pitch, and is definitely something you can develop with a bit of practice.
pitch interval training is different yes, I can do that to a certain extent but absolute pitch is very different.
you keep replying with this like it is absolute. why do you feel so strongly about this "fact"?
This is, in fact, current mainstream scientific position. There is a lot of distinction in abilities between absolute and relative.
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.
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.
> and people like me who can barely tell you the interval between two notes
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
With enough training and practice, I do believe that most people can accomplish quite a lot. Will that trained person be as good as a naturally gifted person? It depends on if the "gifted" person "wastes" their ability or is also training as well. If someone can hear a 440Hz tone, and state that it is an A, then that's pretty damn good and in 99.9999% of the time good enough. If they hear a 439Hz tone and also call that an A, then that's pretty damn good as well. For the rare person that could say that it's 1Hz off, then sure, that's even better, but there's always someone out there better. The person that wins the silver metal at the Olympics but lost by 0.01 seconds is still a really damn good athlete.
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.
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.
As someone who studied music throughout school and played for quite some time, there is clearly be something innate about perfect pitch. I think a good allegory is people who can multiply giant numbers in their heads easily (previously referred to as "idiot savants" though that term sounds ridiculous now). While the rest of us can certainly practice and improve our multiplication skills, we'll always be missing some connection that allows them to do so effortlessly.
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.
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
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.
https://www.pnas.org/content/104/37/14795
You do not have to experience the difference between = vs == or & vs && in order to learn it - in fact, that would be a difficult way to go about it.
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.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
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.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/
> You do not have to experience the difference between = vs == or & vs && in order to learn it
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.)
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.)
>You do not have to experience the difference
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.
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.
We have all done that, even though we do know the difference (we really have learned it, not just "learned" it, and if asked, could explain it.) What you learn from this experience is merely to pay close attention.
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.
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.
"In the case of perfect pitch, it seems that the necessary adaptability in the brain disappears by the time a child passes about six years old [...]. (Although [...] there are exceptions of sort [...])" in Prof. Anders Ericsson's book "Peak" in which he presents results from his research area of expert performance. He also quotes a published study in which childs aged 2 to 6 consistently were taught perfect pitch: "A longitudinal study of the process of acquiring absolute pitch: A practical report of training with the 'chord identification method'"
You can apparently get Perfect Pitch from the medication Valporate, according to some study years back. Though, I do not recall how effective it was. It was significant enough to be detected though.
I would challenge that claim. Also a quick google search on meditation and perfect shows mostly claims and speculation nothing conclusive.
I found this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
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.
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.
I wonder how much overlap there is with the ability to easily gain native-level proficiency in a language. We’re raising our child bilingual, partially because no one should learn German from me (started in college, speak well enough to get through life, but everyone knows I’m a native English speaker), but I’d be ok with our child learning English from my husband, as he speaks well enough that Americans think he’s British. His mother, who also learned in high school and university, taught him for a maternity leave year at age 4, then left it to the school system, which didn’t expose him to English again until he was 10. His younger sister does not speak English nearly as well as he does. I’m quite sure that early exposure is why he doesn’t have a German-sounding accent when speaking English.
There is some indication that valproic acid makes it possible for adults, though (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/)
Prove it.
This is just argument by assertion.
This is just argument by assertion.
We do not identify colors well.
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".
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".
Yes. Another key thing with colour is we can't visually see the difference between a full spectrum (like sunlight) and where there only a few peaks being broadcast (like an LED display) as long as they fall on the cones similarly.
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.
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.
Indeed. The ear is a one-channel spectrum analyzer and the eye is a camera with a two very distinct regions each serving different purposes. Both of these then have a ton of post-processing done in the brain before their outputs are presented to higher order functions.
I'll agree and add one example: from a repeated sequence of played notes, and a repeated sequence of flashing colors - I can readily identify a modified note, however not a modified color. For context imagagine 10 seconds of a song VS 10 seconds of flashing lights... If on the 3rd repetition of the pattern, one random note was changed and one random color was changed, which change would be most immediately obvious?
> We may be able to point at a red object and call it red
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.
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.
False comparison - there are about 10 octaves in the audible spectrum. Telling E4 from F4 is like distinguishing two slightly different blueish greens. A better comparison would be to classify sinewaves into bass/mid/treble, which I'm pretty sure most people can do.
>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).
Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
Wouldn't we have to be able to distinguish polarity to tell the difference?
I don't think polarity has anything to do with this. The idea is that we can't distinguish at all between two independent light waves, one at ~600nm (red) and one at ~540nm (green), vs a single light wave at ~580nm (yellow).
We can’t identify "colors" in isolation either. Color is all relative. If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12) [the interval of one semitone], they wouldn't be able to do it. (With significant training and in standardized surroundings it could probably be learned by some people.) And precisely identifying hue/chroma in isolation is just as difficult.
(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.)
(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.)
Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays. 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, from A0 to G#9 if you want to stay within a practical range, and from A0 to C8 if you want to stick to a standard piano, and the way pitches repeat every 12 semitones has no real equivalent in color.
You can also distinguish between a soprano singing vs. a baritone, or a flute playing vs. a saxophone.
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).
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).
Even on the same instrument, skilled people can often pick out what range it is being played in due to timbre changes. However, this is much more difficult if not nearly impossible when using pure tones like a tuner. These timbre changes can even differ between two semitones depending on the physical properties of the thing producing sound. A B on a trombone is going to sound different than a Bb since B is played in 7th position while Bb is played in 1st position.
Yes, this is very clear on wind instruments where the timbre can change substantially from one note to the next. The saxophone is notorious for this, it is technically a woodwind and it is absolutely unplayable if you don't tune the individual notes as you play them, you have to use your embouchure to get the notes to match pitch. Especially noticeable when playing with other instruments.
https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-staff/2020/1/30/...
https://www.sarahlynnroberts.com/beyond-the-staff/2020/1/30/...
I have a trick for that. I search up or down whistling from middle-C and count, that number modulo 12 is the pitch. Of course that only works for the range that I can whistle.
There are 88 notes on a piano, but there are at least 2000 pantone colors... I'd be surprised if there are more than 10 people total who can correctly match them all.
The difficulty of both problems is understated.
The difficulty of both problems is understated.
While the farnsworth-munsell 100 hue test is definitely doable. I'd love to see a bigger test just for the hell of it.
I'd be surprised if anybody would be able to do the color test.
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.
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.
A piano is particularly easy to tell if it is out of tune because most notes have multiple strings. They beat against each other horrendously when one of the strings is at a different frequency than the other. If all the strings for a single note were out of tune by the same amount most people would think the piano was fine.
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.
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.
For all we know, there may be an equivalent light octave to the sound octave (mathematically it would make sense). The catch is that the frequency range of visible light falls entirely within a single “octave,” but then if you think about the color wheel which puts red next to violet which are at opposite ends of the color spectrum and it suddenly makes sense.
In fact it would be only about half an octave.
Unless I've done my math wrong, it's roughly a doubling of frequency between the two ends of the spectrum, that makes an octave. From Wikipedia: “A typical human eye will respond to wavelengths from about 380 to about 750 nanometers.[1] In terms of frequency, this corresponds to a band in the vicinity of 400–790 THz.”
How do you explain optical phenomena such as the viral dress phenomenon then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress#Real_colours_of_dres...
That is based on the color of the illumination and this of course affects the perceived color. It's the difference between emitted and reflected light, but in the case of a comparison with musical notes it would be fair to only use emitted light.
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!
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!
> It's the difference between emitted and reflected light
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.
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.
Ah ok, that's simply an optical illusion. The brain is full of pre-processing that you can mess with in order to trick it to see things that aren't there and to shift colors around as well as to play with figure-background. But that is a case of 'bad faith', you could do the same for audio illusions, it wouldn't help to draw any further equivalence between the visual and the auditory system.
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!).
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!).
You may want to amend your original statement "Of course we can. Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors [...]" then, because clearly that's not the case as you state yourself.
I think a Ring Modulator might have some equivalence. Depending on the frequency you set it to the ability to accurately detect the frequency of the input notes can diminish quite drastically.
But then still everyone would have the identical misconception. Clearly, that was not the case.
Part of that was variations in displays. Cheap laptop LCDs especially crush white levels and black levels if not viewed from exactly the right angle.
> Everybody that isn't somehow colorblind can reliably distinguish between a basic number of colors, say Red, Green, Blue, Yellow, Orange, Brown, Green, Purple, Pink, Teal, and to add Black and White allows for all the grays.
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.
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.
The weird aspect about our perception of colors is how our brains interpret them relative to nearby colors (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_illusion#/media/File:C...)
True, but that's optical illusion territory, similar things will happen with music, there are all kinds of acoustical illusions:
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.
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.
Even if we can reliably identify 12 unique divisions of spectral color, that's still very different from the 12 semitones in Western music, because the 12 spectral colors would span the entire range of human spectral color perception, whereas the 12 semitones repeat every octave, and humans can hear up to 10 octaves.
“Everyone can do it, aside from those who can’t”
Brightness is not related to colours, and while colours are "relative" in the sense that colour perception is influenced by context, it's still the case that you can accurately identify lots of colours in an absolute sense, given a specific context.
You can also accurately identify a lot of sounds, given a specific context.
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.)
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.)
I mean you can easily identify 5-10 absolute colour frequencies, but how many can identify even a single absolute tone?
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.
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.
Identifying 5-10 absolute colors is similar in difficulty to being able to identify whether a note is bass, baritone, tenor or soprano. Which anybody who knows what those 4 words mean would be able to do.
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.
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.
"bass, baritone, tenor or soprano", that's only four categories, that's much less than 10. And I would guess that timbre will play in here as well, since the human voice is pretty restricted. A bass is not just a frequency shifted soprano.
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.
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.
People will fail the pure color test and that is all there is to it. They will know it was light blue, but won't be able to choose correct light blue. Nad they will sux even more with mixed non-primary colors.
Reproducing visual properties is much harder then you think.
Reproducing visual properties is much harder then you think.
There is no "fail", it's just a matter of how many colours one can distinguish, vs how many absolute tone frequencies.
Infinite amount of both. But there is also issue of remembering which is not as easy as people assume and of comparing.
And of light conditions and context affecting your perception. And so on.
And of light conditions and context affecting your perception. And so on.
Infinite? Not at all, we’re talking about identifying absolute frequencies here, not just telling them apart. For sound I’d say it’s less than five, for colour perhaps a dozen.
The difference between red and blue is half an octave in frequency. So 4 tones is about right.
I'm pretty sure I'd do a lot better at reproducing the note.
Heh. Personal anecdote: at 10 seconds I would do as you expect, but if the gap were longer I would do much better with sound.
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.
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.
> If a person had to identify the luminous intensity of a visual stimulus to within a factor of 2^(1/12)
Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
Without a unit this affirmation makes no sense.
The visual light spectrum starts at around 380nm, if we arbitrarily assign that to be "C", and we ascend(ascending wavelength, descending frequency) from that with the same 12-tone "equal temperament" used in music we get:
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.
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.
If your ear had only 3 types of detectors which only detected 3 specific frequency distributions within about half an octave but could locate stimuli within your field of hearing with pinpoint accuracy, after a lifetime of using that equipment you would probably be able to make relatively fine distinctions in pitch in that very limited range.
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.
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.
But yellow isn't necessarily just a spike at 569.356... There are plenty of other combinations of frequencies that together will stimulate the green- and red-cones enough to create a perception of (nearly?) the exact same yellow.
Right. I put the tildes before the color names to indicate that they are "around here".
I can 'recreate' any scale by starting from one memorized note (middle C), but for the life of me I can't seem to reliably detect intervals or in some conditions even whether one note is higher or lower than another, let alone identify pitch of any random note. So identification without some kind of extra mechanism is magic to me. For instance, when re-creating some tune whistling it is effortless, to do the same on the piano takes a lot of fiddling and much more time. I hope to be able to develop that skill because it would be very useful.
There are some interesting websites for this:
https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
There are some interesting websites for this:
https://tonedear.com/ear-training/intervals
https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/ear-interval
Rick Beato on YT tells stories of musicians realizing that they are losing their perfect pitch.
Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
Have not looked at your links, but Beato stresses training around recognizing intervals -- which sounds like an acquirable skill.
It's also really valuable to learn how to recognize chord progressions relatively. I had an ear training class with a bunch of people with absolute pitch and they were way slower than me at transcribing chord progressions (without voicing). They had to listen for each line and mentally reconstruct what the chord was using theory while I had an intuitive knowledge of a I-IV-V-I progression versus I-ii-V-I.
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.
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.
Adam Neely also has a video about age-related degradation of perfect pitch and about perfect pitch in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4 .
Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
Relative pitch is certainly learnable.
Some observations:
* 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.
* 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.
The premise is somewhat flawed. We _can_ recognize different sounds. Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
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.
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.
> Almost anybody can say "That was a violin" or "That was a female voice" or "That was a guitar" with basic training.
That's about timbre, not pitch.
That's about timbre, not pitch.
What is known as timbre is technically the degree to which certain harmonics are present or not.
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.
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.
That's my point. I believe red vs blue is more like violin vs voice than A440 vs Exyz.
But it isn't. To make it a bit more specific:
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9Qh709gas
Although I concede and agree with you on a basic level that base frequency is more like color than timbre, there are some other interesting factors.
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... :)
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... :)
7 octaves above cover the UV spectrum and 7 octaves below cover the IR spectrum. I guess our eyes could see 14 octaves with 50 instead of 3 sensors per pixel.
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.
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.
Not octaves. An octave is a doubling of frequency. When you go seven octaves below 'red' you are much, much lower than IR and when you go 7 octaves above blue you are way higher than UV.
Am I? 7 octaves above 400nm is 3-4nm, somewhere between extreme UV and x-ray. 7 octaves below 700nm is about 0.7mm - the end of IR and beginning of microwave spectrum. Unless I'm really missing something in my calculations.
Yes, it is fascinating, highly recommended book about sound:
"The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus.
"The Acoustical Foundations of Music" by John Backus.
It's not though, red and blue have specific frequencies, just like a 440 Hz sine has.
No, red and blue have a 'range' where most people will agree on what's red and what's blue. They are not exact frequencies but frequency bands that have been culturally defined. You can most easily see this in green, there are 100's of 'greens' but we call all of them green.
Sure, but we are still talking about bands of _frequencies_, not sets of harmonics (although there are colours that are not pure). So it would correspond to identifying 440 Hz with a tolerance of N Hz.
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 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.
Of course we are not talking about harmonics, the first overtone of 'red' would be a bit above ultra-violet and invisible.
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.
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.
Sure, it's complex, but the basic point still stands. Most people will probably be able to accurately identify 10-20 different colours, if we fix the luminosity etc and they are given cards with each colour.
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.
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.
> Hearing a musical note and naming it is beyond the listening expertise of most people.
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.
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.
Naively I'd guess that it's because sound is all munged up into two serial ports, whereas color is perceived simultaneously through a matrix of rods and cones of different sensitivities, each dealing with a tiny section of the visual field, and when that field changes, doing consistency checks with each other, filtering out effects due to changing light sources and qualities.
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.
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.
Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer).
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.
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.
> Sound perception is extremely parallel at the physical level, each and every one of the hairs in the cochlear duct (a fluid filled chamber that acts as a biological spectrum analyzer).
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.
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.
The summary says that the timbre plays an important role in recognizing the notes. I partially agree with this observation, but on the piano, there might be something else than the timbre.
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.
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.
The central point of the article (taken from the actual paper) is based on a false assumption. We can easily differentiate between the colors of the rainbow: ROYGBV. That is 6 colors. If you divided the human auditory range into 6 parts and named them (super low, low, mid low, mid high, high, super high), I think you'd see very similar performance.
Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
Further, the "FFR" they claim as a good predictor isn't even that good if you look at the numbers given in the paper.
>They have argued consistently that perfect pitch is not a dichotomous ability that people either have or do not have: Instead, it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum.
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.
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.
You are in much better shape than most mortals in this respect.
> 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.
> 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.
The catch is that trying to tune a piano by ear gets really tricky since your ear wants to tune intervals to integer ratios of frequencies. It's really easy to tune a piano so that it sounds good in C and then the further away from that key you get, the worse the tuning gets. (I've encountered twentieth-century pipe organs that aren't equally tempered—I had been hired to play bass and guitar at a church once and things were fine rehearsing with the piano, but in the church, the guitar sounded horrid and I had to switch to playing bass for all the songs that were accompanied on organ.)
True, hence 'stretch' tuning and various other tunings. It all depends on whether you want the piano to play 'period correct', by itself in a solo concerto in together with other instruments.
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:
http://piano-tuner.org/
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:
http://piano-tuner.org/
> 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.
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.
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.
The strings and reeds adapt more readily than more rigid fixed intervals. but I keep everything out of tune. Piano is always a bit flat. But for some middling g. And I double on sax.
What fascinates me about this topic is that both "absolute pitch" and "absolute colour recognition" is essentially cultural.
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.
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.
> We are born with perfect pitch
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?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford
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?
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford
There are also individual differences in how people perceive color (not just how they label them), even among those who are not color blind.
The analogy between pitch and color recognition is funny to me - it's like the skill gradient is backwards for artists versus musicians. One critical skill in learning to paint (naturalistically, at least) is learning to differentiate relative color, not absolute color. Learning to look at an apple and see warmer/cooler bits of red, for example. As the article points out, naming "red" is easy for most people, and then you spend years learning to mix all those funny shades in between.
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.
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.
We're terrible at identifying colours, because colour is context dependent. Which makes it easy to create colour illusions like these:
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.
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.
Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite seeing them all your life.
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.
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.
>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.
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?)
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?)
Hi! Uhh.. I guess I hear the maj7 quality and the notes at the same time.
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!
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!
Thanks for the reply, that's interesting to know. I'm trying to wrap my head around how PP actually works for people, though I understand that there's a lot of variation.
Here's an interesting quote on the utility of perfect pitch outside of music:
"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.
"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.
>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.
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.
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.
I recently learnt to differentiate notes in a scale using an app[1]. Basically, you listen to a few chords for musical context and then you hear a note and have to choose which note it as. When I started I couldn't do it at all. After a few weeks I was able to tell which note I was hearing pretty reliably.
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...
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...
I'd argue it's the opposite: our audial perception is way richer. It's because of harmonics: the same pitched sound on piano or violin has different texture and we hear that clearly. Try to do the same with a mix of 7 colors ("harmonics"). Moreover, we can hear a 1 Hz difference between two sinusoidal tones. Now try to notice a 1/20000 difference in two colors.
Harmonics and base wave form. A plucked string vs a bowed string have a completely different shape, the first is going to decay and is mostly sinusoidal in its components (as is each of the harmonics) whereas a bowed string will be mostly triangular. And when you start comparing string instruments or open pipes and reed instruments you will find that the relative strength of the harmonics will vary widely to the point that some appear to be missing entirely due to the different modes of vibration.
"Base wave form" (ignoring transients and such) doesn't matter for humans, and how a wave is perceived by humans is determined by the set of harmonics it contains.
Fair enough, the waveform is the relative strength of the harmonics. But it's a convenient short-cut to 'the whole of the relative strength of each harmonic as compared to the fundamental, as well as which harmonics are present'.
A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
A sawtooth wave shape has a very distinct sound, as has a pure sinewave, square wave and so on.
And modulating the string on a cello to harmonize with a reed is extraordinarily rich in harmonics.
I know an artist who has worked on creating colour palettes (for a living, through commissions and art works) and creating light art works, who claims that most people are very poor at precieving colours because our brains so quickly adapt to changing lightning conditions. His conclusion is that there is no such thing as absolute colour perception.
The good news for people without perfect pitch who feel bad about it is that people who learn relative pitch retain it for life while perfect pitch declines precipitously with age. It has other drawbacks.
Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
Video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QRaACa1Mrd4
I studied musicology with a focus on perception of sound.
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.
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.
Without having read the link, one obvious answer is that colour vision helps us tell what plants are ripe, but detecting absolute frequencies probably has little survival value.
A shared understanding of what colors are what helps us communicate as well. Of course, some of that is reinforcing, but I would never tell people I'm at the house where the windchime rings about a middle C; but I would tell them I've got a white fence and a red door.
Ich you are interested in that kind of stuff, you may want to check out Rick Beato on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/RickBeato
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.
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.
Some people can identify music notes as well as colour.
One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another. Early training works wonder for music. Colours are everywhere, and most people can see, whereas most people don't train to recognize individual notes. That skill is not that useful, including for trained musicians. Most people can agree that the sky is blue. However, a trained painter may be able to see much more nuance.
> One should note that colours perception may also essentially differ from one individual to another.
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.
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.
There is a training aspect to identifying color as well. People from cultures without the name for a color group have difficulty identifying a color as distinct without a name for such group.
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.
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.
Memorising pitches as Colour (or concepts, to be less sycophantic to the title) can actually be a good way of "feeling" the notes of a scale.
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.
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.
We can't identify colors accurately either. As various paradoxical pictures show. Color is something created inside our brain using context information (additional information about the scene).
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.
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.
Didn't read, but isn't it obvious?
- 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.
- 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.
One of the papers quoted by this paper is something I always wondered about: how can anyone have absolute pitch when you can detune your intrument slightly, e.g. if the Oboe gives the A and everyone tunes to that there's no guarantee that it's 440. Not everyone picks 440 for A anyway so really absolute pitch has a basic cultural reference.
Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds with some exposure.
Apparently possessors of AP can re-calibrate to detuned sounds with some exposure.
I have perfect pitch. Perfect pitch is basically rounding the frequency to the nearest pitch in your resolution. As a pianist, my resolution is more or less half of a semitone, so I can tell that a note is off, but it doesn't get really annoying until it's so off that it's close to rounding to the next note.
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.
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.
I had some fun with my piano tuner to 'check' his tuning using a stroboscope for each individual string (not a choir) after he was done and it was quite amazing to see how accurate he was. And what blows me away is how fast an experienced tuner can work, what would take me hours - and with tremendous fatigue in hearing afterwards - takes him 1/2 hour and with much better results.
What is your reaction to some of the historical-tuning recordings that have proliferated in the past decade or so, especially on piano? Do you see aesthetic value in those tunings, when taken as a whole piece, or are you so locked in to equal temperament that it's irritating to hear alternative tunings?
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.
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.
Those tunings are not so off as to be annoying, so I don't really have much of an opinion of them except to think that they're kinda silly. Other tunings (like 31 EDO) I just can't handle.
Never heard of 31 EDO till now. Indeed, pretty brutal even for this non-perfect-pitch person: https://youtu.be/hLjnNflnvEQ
I had a music teacher who said that perfect pitch was when you tossed a banjo in a dumpster and it landed on an accordion that was already there :)
Do you think that over time you could "re-tune" yourself to different pitches, e.g. if you listened to a ton of music that's detuned by half a semitone that eventually you'd think that that's the new normal? Or maybe it's something that gets hardwired at a young age and then you're stuck with it?
I'm probably too old for that, but yes.
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.
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.
This tracks exactly with my experience. I'm in my 40s and my pitch is definitely no longer perfect -- it's close, though? It's not uncommon for me to be semitone off these days.
Is this a studied aspect of perfect pitch? I've never read about it but, talking to friends, it seems like a common experience.
Is this a studied aspect of perfect pitch? I've never read about it but, talking to friends, it seems like a common experience.
Or they find it extremely annoying. I once played a piece with notes that were hanging just below or above their 'true' pitch and then slowly home in on it and the listener could not stand it and asked for it to be switched off.
If you want to test yourself against it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM
Enjoy :)
If you want to test yourself against it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGdRNca4rZM
Enjoy :)
There is a drug that allow perfect pitch to be learned past early childhood https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...
I've found that the only unteachable component of perfect pitch is the ability to internalize music in tune. If you can do this, you have perfect pitch. The ability to identify the note, or intervals, or the components of chords is all done through mnemonic devices.
No one has mentioned microtonak music. The breadth of perception on the continuum becomes more similar between sight and sound when you discriminate more. Think the carnatic system. Or Harry Partch. Or the oud. Modal music in microtunings gets very colourful.
As for the "Why". Speaking as a guy who meditates.
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.
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.
Significant proportion of population is color blind to some extend. The rest sux about identifying colors too, just somewhat less.
A lot of optical illusions seem to play with relative color, so are we really so good at identifying absolute color?
On the other hand, we can’t see color intervals and chords.
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.