"Developing Perfect Pitch"

[No Compute]

Paris?

Yes. She was singularly the most talented piano player I ever heard, supernatural, a gift, she didn't even have to think about it, it just flowed in great rivers.

Flowed across the Atlantic Ocean as well, it seems... Julliard is in Manhattan

 

[Blueinred]

Yes. She was singularly the most talented piano player I ever heard, supernatural, a gift, she didn't even have to think about it, it just flowed in great rivers.

Juilliard music school is in Manhatten, New York City.

Ce n’est pas à Paris.

 

[vvvmmm]

So years ago I hadda roommate was a classical piano major with perfect pitch.
We hadda mutual friend, I think a singer, had perfect pitch.
I recall riding the city bus with these two cracking me up by calling out the pitch of the diesel engine.

I can't play baseball, make tar or otherwise do anything about, "perfect pitch", but I can play my fretlesses pretty good.

 

[J Wilson]

I started piano lessons with them when I was in kindergarten (1960), and obviously I misunderstood.

My apologies and I stand corrected.

JW

 

[b/o 402]

I’ll throw this data point in -
I’ve known several people with perfect pitch.
Without exception, they were highly trained and practiced pianists. IOW, they had spent thousands of hours, starting at an early age, at the piano.
I have excellent relative (but not perfect)pitch.
Both of these abilities can be learned, IMO.
People who want to deny that remind me of those who say bodybuilders just have better genes.

 

[drumvsbass]

I'd say there are degrees of perfect pitch. Naming notes, tuning instruments without a reference pitch, singing notes perfectly in tune without reference pitch, naming notes with qualities of how many cents sharp or flat they are, people who can tune pianos to particular temperament sets.... none of which makes a better musician. Useful tools, but not essential to the musical craft.

For those so inclined I urge you to read Stuart Isacoff's 'Temperament'

https://www.amazon.ca/Temperament-Became-Battleground-Western-Civilization/dp/0375703306

 

[vvvmmm]

I once met a girl hadda perfect pitch.
I married her.
Turned out to be a foul ball.
(True story.)

 

[JimmyM]

General consensus of what constitutes perfect pitch is usually something similar to the following (pulled from Wikipedia):

[I know that this flies in the face of wikipedia's definition, but for the sake of my post I treat "perfect pitch" as an interchangeable term with "absolute pitch".]

Note that this definition does not have a time limit associated with arriving at the answers. You don't have to be able to do it "fast" to have perfect pitch. Note that there is also not a lower or upper bound to the number of tones in a given chord in bullet point three. You do not need to be able to identify every note in a 10-note atonal cluster specifically designed to confound you, and do it within two seconds.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've come to the conclusion that perfect pitch is perceived as a binary, which is false. IMO, it's not that one either has it or doesn't, it's a trainable skill with an entire spectrum of possible ability.

The language comparison is indeed an apt one in a lot of ways. But I'm not sure I agree with this:


Learning language is definitely easier as a child. Nobody thinks about learning their first language, it just happens as a part of growing up. Learning a new language as an adult, however, is much more difficult. Despite this, there are plenty of adults that, with a lot of hard work, have become fluent in additional languages. In the same way, it seems that perfect pitch is easier to develop as a child when one still has high neuroplasticity. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn at an older age.

For every qualification on the definition, for every "but what about..." that I've heard over the years, I've also met someone who disproves that qualification. I know a guy who taught himself perfect pitch as an adult, practices and hones the skill regularly, and is more proficient with it than most people I know who have had perfect pitch since they were children.

When I was younger, I went to Jamey Aebersold's summer jazz camp. When we broke out into theory classes based on ability, I was in the most beginner group, taught in a big lecture hall by Mr. Aebersold himself. At one point during the lesson, Jamey asks "what note is that" as he plays one on the piano. The answer he was looking for was relative, something like "the root" or "the fifth of the chord". Young, eager, and not fully understanding the question, I raised my hand and said "F#".

"How do you know that?"
"I dunno."
"Do you have perfect pitch?"
"I guess so?"
"Come up here."

I walk up to Mr. Aebersold sitting at the piano at the front of the lecture hall. He takes all ten fingers and mashes them on the piano indiscriminately.

"What are all those notes?"
"Uhhhhhh..."
"You DON'T have perfect pitch."

I sheepishly walked back to my seat. I have always been able to sing back any song I know in its correct key. Since receiving formal music training (learning that pitches and keys have associated names like C, Eb, etc), I have been able to conjure any pitch from memory and identify any one played on an instrument. Now, can I tell you that your D string is 7 cents sharp? Of course not. Can I identify your ten randomly chosen notes are in your tone cluster? Maybe if you give me a minute.

I know that I have perfect pitch. But now when people discuss perfect pitch or ask me if I have it, I usually just say "no".

Imagine this conversation:

"I'm a weightlifter."
"Oh really? Can you bench 500lbs?"
"Well, no..."
"Then you're NOT a weightlifter!"

It seems pretty silly to me. Perfect pitch is a skill, not a one-dimensional "you have it or you don't" trait.

Then there's the pernicious conflation of "relative pitch" and "less developed perfect pitch" According to consensus definition, you don't have to have internalized all pitches. If you had only memorized the pitches of the open strings on a bass and then used those as mental references to identify others, all in your head, then by definition you have absolute pitch. You can do what it says on the tin. (Your only mistake would be explaining to others about how you arrived at your answer, to which they'd shriek "you don't have perfect pitch, you have really good relative pitch!") Okay, so you used relative pitch to think about a note you do have memorized, open G, and from there you mentally identify Ab. How did you conjure the mental reference tone out of thin air? There's a name for this skill - perfect pitch.

Anecdotally, almost all of the perfect pitch posessors I know are very humble about it. The ones who really seem to care about the semantics (and sometimes seem hell-bent on convincing a perfect pitch posessor that they don't actually have perfect pitch) are the ones that don't posess the ability at all anyway.

It’s a good parlor trick, but in all practicality, not all that useful.

 

[TyBo]

I’ll throw this data point in -
I’ve known several people with perfect pitch.
Without exception, they were highly trained and practiced pianists. IOW, they had spent thousands of hours, starting at an early age, at the piano.
I have excellent relative (but not perfect)pitch.
Both of these abilities can be learned, IMO.
People who want to deny that remind me of those who say bodybuilders just have better genes.

I haven't seen anyone saying absolute pitch can't be learned, it's more the nature of how it's learned that's the issue. To my mind, Beato's point is telling, that in all his vast experience in music, he knows of, has heard of, no musicians who left any music school with perfect, absolute pitch, who didn't already have it going in. If keyboard players who've studied from a very young age are seen to have absolute pitch, there's no real reason to believe they didn't come by it in the manner he describes in his video. And clearly there are people, like Rick's son Dylan, who have it at a very young age before they even know what formal musical notes are (G is the "Superman" note )... so a matter of natural learning comparable to language, rather than something like rote learning.

That idea is further reinforced by the fact mentioned in the U of Chicago piece I linked, that a particular very strong drug for epilepsy has a side effect of increasing brain "plasticity" (similar to that of babies and toddlers) to the point that acquiring absolute pitch has been seen. I haven't seen an actual study on this particular point ... but it does come from a reputable source, for what that's worth.

 

[longfinger]

It seems to be that there are two kinds of absolute pitch perception in people

- Perceptual Transcoding
- Heightened Tonal Memory

I'll have to find the web links for that later on... I read those terms online a few years ago.

PT is the kind of AP that folks talk about being "born with it", or develop it as a baby.
HTM is the kind of AP that folks say they learn with musical practice.

Both are forms of absolute pitch, but seem to have different internal brain processes?

For musicians:
Absolute Pitch is about the notes themselves (pitch colour)
Relative pitch is about the spaces between the notes. (Relationship hearing)

Like everything there are gradations of ability. A person can have absolute pitch and not be as capable as Pierre Boulez with it. Some folks are better at some stuff. Normal. Being like Pierre Boulez (or Dylan Beato), isn't the starting point of AP + RP, it's pretty much the human limit ending point of AP + RP.

 

[TyBo]

It seems to be that there are two kinds of absolute pitch perception in people

- Perceptual Transcoding
- Heightened Tonal Memory

I'll have to find the web links for that later on... I read those terms online a few years ago.

PT is the kind of AP that folks talk about being "born with it", or develop it as a baby.
HTM is the kind of AP that folks say they learn with musical practice.

Both are forms of absolute pitch, but seem to have different internal brain processes?

For musicians:
Absolute Pitch is about the notes themselves (pitch colour)
Relative pitch is about the spaces between the notes. (Relationship hearing)

Like everything there are gradations of ability. A person can have absolute pitch and not be as capable as Pierre Boulez with it. Some folks are better at some stuff. Normal. Being like Pierre Boulez (or Dylan Beato), isn't the starting point of AP + RP, it's pretty much the human limit ending point of AP + RP.

I like the clarity in the way you've broken that down. I'd be interested to see a comparison of the two different pathways described, in terms of degree of consistency and accuracy.

Relative pitch seems to be of a somewhat different nature than absolute pitch. I think most (or many) musicians have some degree of relative pitch ability.

 

[ardgedee]

I started piano lessons with them when I was in kindergarten (1960), and obviously I misunderstood.

My apologies and I stand corrected.

JW

No worries. She may have gone to Paris Conservatory, which would have been even more impressive at the time. Either way, she sounds like she was an amazing person.

 

[No Compute]

I started piano lessons with them when I was in kindergarten (1960), and obviously I misunderstood.

My apologies and I stand corrected.

JW

Yeah, I was just being a wise guy. No offense intended, no apology needed

 

[fdeck]

I don't have perfect pitch.

But I discovered, as a kid, that I could remember pitch for a long time. For instance I could pick up my cello and tune it without a reference pitch, or I could tell you what key something was in.

Then I noticed, when my family went on a long vacation, that my pitch was gone when we got back home. After a few days it was back.

An interesting factoid, I've read that countries with inflected languages have a higher proportion of people with perfect pitch.

 

[Rich Fiscus]

26491512[/URL], member: 200143"]I'd say there are degrees of perfect pitch. Naming notes, tuning instruments without a reference pitch, singing notes perfectly in tune without reference pitch, naming notes with qualities of how many cents sharp or flat they are, people who can tune pianos to particular temperament sets.... none of which makes a better musician. Useful tools, but not essential to the musical craft.

For those so inclined I urge you to read Stuart Isacoff's 'Temperament'

https://www.amazon.ca/Temperament-Became-Battleground-Western-Civilization/dp/0375703306

It’s not so much a question of degrees as it is specific cognitive abilities. Perfect pitch is essentially a cognitive deficit - a sign of some kind of mental inflexibility affecting the brain’s development. That’s why it can’t be learned. Not by coincidence, it’s significantly more prevalent among people on the autism spectrum than the population at large. One of the major hurdles of autism is overall mental inflexibility.

I’m on the spectrum, and have perfect pitch, but I don’t have good recall of specific notes. My deficits in memory and executive functions make that pretty much impossible. I can, however, sing any song I know at exactly the right pitch, even if it doesn’t match standard 440Hz tuning. Songs, and especially vocal parts, are one of the few things I remember effortlessly. I’m not sure that even rises to the level of parlor trick.

Perfect pitch makes playing, and especially singing when tuned half a step down very difficult. A bandmate once commented that I was the only singer he’s ever heard who drifts high, instead of low, when I’m off key. That was me trying to resolve the difference between my ears and memory. I always had to watch him when I was singing harmonies. If Larry gave me the stink eye, I knew I was sharp again.

Fortunately I’ve always had excellent relative pitch. When I was taking cello lessons as a kid, the orchestra instructor sometimes commented on it while I was tuning. One time he even got out several tuning forks to test me against other instruments in the room. In a sense, good relative pitch is what helps me overcome my perfect pitch.

 

[turf3]

...A bandmate once commented that I was the only singer he’s ever heard who drifts high, instead of low, when I’m off key. That was me trying to resolve the difference between my ears and memory. I always had to watch him when I was singing harmonies. If Larry gave me the stink eye, I knew I was sharp again.....

Better to be sharp than out of tune.

 

[Rich Fiscus]

26492607[/URL], member: 202749"]Better to be sharp than out of tune.

That’s sort of my attitude. I have certain gifts that come at a price. I would rather live with my deficits than lose the gifts that come with them.

 

[Patrice B]

Here is a big study (2019), where they « trained » adults to learn AP:

Invalid Link Removed

Well, for me at least, AP is the ability to identify immediately the pitch of a note (or even several notes in a chord) without errors. IMHO, a result of 90% a few months after for « the best » contender in the study is not AP for me.

From here: Invalid Link Removed

BTW, little girl in one of my groups is 9 years old and she unmistakably has the right answer, each time. This, since the two latest years I learnt she has it: I was looking to find the first chord on a tune in front of them at the piano and she candidly said to me, « It’s in C »…

She can also reproduce any sequence of chords without mistakes at the piano.

For her, it’s obvious as when we see something blue and we say: « It’s blue ».

It has also to do, I think, about the way the brain is so plastic at young age and we loose it when we are older.

 

[LBS-bass]

I am sure that I could learn to relate every key or pitch to some song that is embedded into my memory banks. By merely remembering the note names.

I don’t know what that proves. I’m 63 and never needed this info.

 

[TyBo]