Perfect Pitch Training

[jopy]

why seek for software? if you train your ear with an instrument (instead of a mouseclick), you will practise some more skills at the same time. Nature gave us 2 brain-halfs.

most of the computer programs encourage/allow you to perform with an instrument. it's call and response often. but you can't really give yourself audio quizzes on intervals on an instrument you play well because you already know where all the notes are.

[Meffy]

Pardon me for quoting myself but:

[...] I can't identify or call out absolute pitches, just remember them in a way that "feels" as if my head held audio recordings, and tell when something's been slowed or sped up a bit (or actually pitched up or down).

This came in handy back when I was working as a radio announcer. This was in the days of magnetic tape. We mounted small plastic or big aluminum reels on a wall of tape machines with a rack of satellite decoders and automation gear and such beside it, and remote controls in the two studios. Once I was talking idly with the station manager as a syndicated program on tape played unattended, when suddenly it struck me that the faint tune on the monitors wasn't quite right. The manager said there was nothing wrong, but I went from the kitchen into the main room and sure enough, a piece of paper had fallen off the top of the equipment and was stuck between reel and machine, slowing it down just a tiny bit.

Fortunately, my incredible phonographic memory and hearing detected the problem and I removed the paper just before the entire rig would almost certainly have burst into an immense fireball from the friction. Did I get a pay raise for saving the station -- nay, that entire stretch of Wilkinson Road and the Chickahominy Swamp? Not a sausage. *sigh* Life.

[edit] And even if there hadn't been an explosion, the program would've gone a few seconds over and I wouldn't have had time to play the requisite station ID and PSAs before the top-of-the-hour news.

[Per Lichtman]

[edit] And even if there hadn't been an explosion, the program would've gone a few seconds over and I wouldn't have had time to play the requisite station ID and PSAs before the top-of-the-hour news.

And that may be even more important.

Seriously though, kudos on saving the equipment.

[Per Lichtman]

Btw, as far as relative pitch, my only experience is with EarMaster Pro and Auralia. However, I was intrigued by the ads for http://www.perfectpitch.com/ in Keyboard Magazine, and they have apparently been in business for 27 years.

Here is an SOS article on the subject.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2345065/Ear-Training

[BERFAB]

As others have said, perfect pitch, to my understanding, is not a learned skill.

There is some debate, but there has been strong scientific evidence in recent years to suggest that perfect pitch is actually an acquired trait during the first years of life--from birth to somewhere around the 5th or 6th birthday while the receptors are still forming.

Relative pitch is essentially a recognition skill. Certain popular pieces of music demonstrate this--i.e. the opening bars of Beethoven's 5th, or the Wedding March, are examples of intervals that most of us can recognize without too much trouble.

Except for the tone deaf, of course. My dad and my mother-in-law suffer from this (dad actually played piano for years), and it always amazes me when I'm standing near them during a prayer service or other group-sing. Whoa!

Cheers
-B

[Meffy]

Seriously though, kudos on saving the equipment.

I might have exaggerated the risk of fire just a mite. The probability of disaster was actually somewhere in the region of "cometary impact during Super Bowl kickoff" or "power generating companies declare electricity free from now on." :-}

[Per Lichtman]

Actually, technically my last link was to the iPaper version of the SOS article from 2001. Here is the article in its original context.

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul01/a ... aining.asp

[Per Lichtman]

Seriously though, kudos on saving the equipment.

I might have exaggerated the risk of fire just a mite. The probability of disaster was actually somewhere in the region of "cometary impact during Super Bowl kickoff" or "power generating companies declare electricity free from now on." :-}

You mean those comet drills they had us running in school were for nothing? Dang.

[Meffy]

The fictional Captain Horatio Hornblower was famously tone-deaf. He could not tell "God Save the Weasel" from "Pop! Goes the Queen."

@Per: With the Tommy Turtle cartoon explaining? I remember those!

[jancivil]

Just an aside.

Persian musicians, I mean traditional ones who've mastered the thing, think it's a really bad idea to train your ear to say an A=440 hz.

According to the idea that one's physiology changes with age, and things will sound 'wrong' to you when you're older; also, a whole philosophical objection is there, to absolute pitch as an idea. Which goes along with the objection to equal temperament.

[herodotus]

As others have said, perfect pitch, to my understanding, is not a learned skill.

There is some debate, but there has been strong scientific evidence in recent years to suggest that perfect pitch is actually an acquired trait during the first years of life--from birth to somewhere around the 5th or 6th birthday while the receptors are still forming.

What strong scientific evidence?

And what is perfect pitch but an exhaustive pitch memory?

I mean, people aren't asserting that one can be born with 12 tone equal temperament as an a priori mental construct are they?

Sorry, but 'perfect pitch' has got to be more riddled with fuzzy thinking than any other concept I know of.

[nuffink]

As others have said, perfect pitch, to my understanding, is not a learned skill.

There is some debate, but there has been strong scientific evidence in recent years to suggest that perfect pitch is actually an acquired trait during the first years of life--from birth to somewhere around the 5th or 6th birthday while the receptors are still forming.

What strong scientific evidence?

And what is perfect pitch but an exhaustive pitch memory?

I mean, people aren't asserting that one can be born with 12 tone equal temperament as an a priori mental construct are they?

Sorry, but 'perfect pitch' has got to be more riddled with fuzzy thinking than any other concept I know of.

Here's an article outlining a test method which attempts to deal with that very problem... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 080600.htm

[herodotus]

Here's an article outlining a test method which attempts to deal with that very problem... http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 080600.htm

Interesting.

And it assumes as a matter of course that the entire process is a matter of memory.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if they tried testing for the ability to recognize acoustically pure consonances as well, and whether the people with a good ear for these had trouble recognizing tempered pitches afterwards.

[mtilli]

I did some work for these guys recently: EarMaster. Quite well respected software, I helped with some of the recent OSX translation.

Earmaster is indeed nice ear training program. Here is another one with quite similar feature set: http://www.cope.dk/index.htm

[Sascha Franck]

I mean, people aren't asserting that one can be born with 12 tone equal temperament as an a priori mental construct are they?

Of course not. But the problems start when you have perfect pitch by nature and learn an equally tempered instrument. At least that's what my aforementioned friend said. He's born with perfect pitch (or maybe has developed it during his early years, as BERFAB said) and later on (actually starting rather early, at 5 or 6) became a master on the keys. Now, perfect pitch in his case was certainly helpful when he made the jump from early classical lessons to some more pop/jazz oriented stuff, because he actually never had to learn any tune (which, in itself is quite amazing). He already had all the technical skills required to play almost everything, so during studying, when we would, say, analyze some piano stuff of Bill Evans and the likes, he would just sit at the piano and play it 1:1 in the first attempt (maybe a tad slower than the original), sometimes even correcting the teacher a la "isn't it that vocing?".

Ok, I'm saying all this because over the years, his perfect pitch skills got so much tied to equal tempered tuning and the piano that it's just like the same. We even made a couple of small experiments. At first we just put the tune of a keyboard slightly off (a few cents, so concert pitch would be something like 430Hz or so). He was getting along rather fine with it. Then we really transposed the thing, like, say, by a third. Now, due to his technical skills, he did sort of manage to play through a tune, but according to himself, it was a massive effort and he said it would've been a LOT easier for him if he actually didn't hear the music but just have a visual metronome and imagine the tune would be in the key he was playing in.

Fwiw, things such as that can, at least partially, happen to non perfect pitched persons as well, something like "perfect instrument related pitch" or so. I know at least one (pretty good) piano player who will almost always be able to tell you the key of a tune once a piano is involved (and no, it's got nothing to do with resonances, playing techniques or so, we did a very brief transposition test using MIDI stuff and he detected the transpositions).
Of course, if you play a lot of music, study about and are enthusiastic about it, there's a few things that will more or less automatically happen, enhanced by whatever memory skills (pretty much along the lines of Meffy's story).
Let's assume I take the better part of the day to practise (or record) a tune. Could be several hours. Now, even after some break, the tune may still "ring" inside me. Very often even after listening to something else, so I could probably sing the main melody instantly in the right key.
Also, back in my rock band days, we once had a little longer tour going on, and as the singer was really reaching his limits each evening, we decided to tune our guitars down a halftone for that tour. Now, some tunes really improved by the additional fatness (and because the singer would be more relaxed), but I remember a particular one in C, which we all found to sound rather strange - maybe because B is one of the most unsual keys for anything related to open string guitar voicings? Finally we played it in the original key (I used a capodaster) and all was fine again.

So, I do think that folks with an "open" and trained ear and a decently fine memory will sort of adopt to certain absolute pitches, at least to a certain extent.

Cheers
Sascha