Ear Training...Getting a trained ear.

[shankfiddle]

Well a dreamer has got to dream.

really? really? and i'm not even going to start with sascha. it's easy to insult others' arguments when you don't understand them. rather than using logic to attack ones argument you just take all the statements out of context and disagree with each one individually (and ignore the posts that actually explain my views). i know my style of debate is slightly over-the-top, but I do have valid points, namely about the cultural influence on perception.

enough about my students. if you have an issue with my ideas, then argue intelligently. you've been "debating" like a 16-month-old.

Absolute pitch (AP), widely referred to as perfect pitch, is the ability of a person to identify or re-create a given musical note without the benefit of an external reference

okay, so is memory an external reference? what about a memory based on a reference experienced in the past? is it cheating to use your memory?

Absolute pitch might be achievable by any human being during a critical period of auditory development,[50][51] after which period cognitive strategies favor global and relational processing. Proponents of the critical-period theory agree that the presence of absolute pitch ability is dependent on learning, but there is disagreement about whether training causes absolute skills to occur[52][53][54][55] or lack of training causes absolute perception to be overwhelmed and obliterated by relative perception of musical intervals.[56][57]... An unequivocal resolution to the ongoing debate would require controlled experiments that are both impractical and unethical. Researchers have been trying...

goes on to your passage

This immediately preceded the part you quoted. Perhaps it hasn't been observed in a laboratory setting, i'll give you that.
you can't just quote the parts you like out of context, how... GOP presidential...

perhaps there is a critical period and after a certain point it can't be acquired. perhaps we adults are screwed. all i'm saying is that if we tell children that you cannot learn absolute pitch, they absolutely will not. we should be actively trying to teach it. i try, maybe i'm just wasting my time. i'm probably just wasting my time. i'm just gonna forfeit. i lose this one. over and out. great discussion, guys!

[shankfiddle]

sigh http://www.rcm.ac.uk/

You are now finally making an idiot out of yourself (well, you already started before, more on that below...).
When you search that site for "pianoforte" or "perfect pitch" you get no relevant hits at all.
So, explain what you mean with "Royal College Pianoforte".

case in point:
Let's put this back in the context. fateamenable said that pitch identification was part of his musical training "sing the A below middle c", and you said something along the lines of

Pardon me? Just because you have most likely never even seen a music university, let alone absolved any ear training classes? you seem to have absolutely no idea about what things are like in the more or less professional music world.

So the "point" is that fateamenable has indeed been musically trained at one of the best damn conservatories in the world. and that practicing pitch identification was indeed part of the curriculum. your caustic personal insults do not discredit the validity of any of the things we have posted in this thread.

now i'm done

[Sascha Franck]

case in point:
Let's put this back in the context. fateamenable said that pitch identification was part of his musical training "sing the A below middle c", and you said something along the lines of

He *never* ever said that it was part of *his* musical training.

So the "point" is that fateamenable has indeed been musically trained at one of the best damn conservatories in the world.

Err? Is it fullmoon already? Fateamenabletochange has never absolved any training at any conservatory. Just ask him.

and that practicing pitch identification was indeed part of the curriculum.

It's not. Not at any more or less known conservatory in the world. And FAATC hence has never been part of any of those classes, either. As easy as that.

your caustic personal insults do not discredit the validity of any of the things we have posted in this thread.

Again, you're talking out of your ass. Nothing else. Just as FAATC, you start making an idiot out of yourself. Get some reality check, really.

- SF

[shankfiddle]

hahaha, this seems to bothering you much more than me. I'm quite enjoying this well I'll continue to ignore the childishness and attempt to return this to a professional level.

I am very sorry Sascha, I jumped to conclusions when I assumed fatc studied at rcm, but you are just as guilty for concluding that he has had no training (unless you know him better than I).

What do yo make of mix engineers who can listen to a mix and identify the exact frequency that needs to be cut? I've been fortunate enough to work with Chris Kress:

http://www.pmdrecording.com/contactm.htm
I've been blown away just observing this man at work in his mix studio. listening to a mix he can tell you instantly, "needs some 60hz cut on the guitar and slight excitation around 10k on the bass..." and he is spot-on without using spectral analyzers. He began his music career playing guitar, but according to him, he didn't really have an ear for pitch. but he is a genius in the studio... he's been engaged in a different kind of ear-training.

I have never been able to acquire this skill, no matter how hard I try. so is this a form of perfect pitch?

or was it influenced by his work, education, and experience? Or are you gonna tell me he was born with it?

Please, I would appreciate an intelligent mature response.

[Sascha Franck]

and attempt to return this to a professional level.

To a professional level that you've never been able to write at?

I am very sorry Sascha, I jumped to conclusions when I assumed fatc studied at rcm, but you are just as guilty for concluding that he has had no training (unless you know him better than I).

He was giving that away by his utterly stupid and uninformed comments. No need to know him any better (phew...).

I've been blown away just observing this man at work in his mix studio. listening to a mix he can tell you instantly, "needs some 60hz cut on the guitar and slight excitation around 10k on the bass..." and he is spot-on without using spectral analyzers. He began his music career playing guitar, but according to him, he didn't really have an ear for pitch. but he is a genius in the studio... he's been engaged in a different kind of ear-training.

Proves that you have no idea. Again.
When mix engineers talk about something like that, they do know of some "corner frequencies". They *never* talk about the exact pitch. Never. You just don't know that. Too bad.

I have never been able to acquire this skill, no matter how hard I try. so is this a form of perfect pitch?

Not at all.

or was it influenced by his work, education, and experience? Or are you gonna tell me he was born with it?

He learned about the relevant frequencies of whatever instruments by working with them. But it doesn't matter whether it's 60 or 70Hz. On musical instruments that would make all of a huge difference.

Please, I would appreciate an intelligent mature response.

Forget about that. I reply the way I like to. Or the way you deserve it.

Seriously, you folks, in all your cluelessness, are annoying, to put it mildly. Fortunately I don't have to give a damn. So I won't.

- SF

[Tony Ostinato]

in college once my ear training teacher figured out i had a good ear he would make me do extra functions that the rest of the class didnt have to do.

like once id transcribed it id have to also tranpose it up or down.

i didn't think that was very fair, especially at 8 in the morning. but you can't complain so that was fun. argh.

one fun game you can play is stripnotes, where contestants take turns guessing at randomly produced notes and take off clothing for every wrong guess.


as far as perfect pitch i dont know if it exists or if anyone has seen this but id need to see a scientific demonstration like an examiner dialing up random frequencies like 567.789 and have the guy pick the right number.

even if you dialed up 440.01 and he said "A, slightly sharp" id be impressed.

i have 2 transcribed songs on my soundcloud, a remake of "a remark you made" by weather report and imogen heap's "hide and seek" arranged for brass.

http://soundcloud.com/tonyostinato

oh yeah and the klezmer thing, i had to transcribe that and learn in it a couple days, took like a half hour to transcribe but days to learn and to get that feel somewhat convincing.

and the rest of the songs there have transribed horns and strings stuff in some form or other. theres really only one original called "nothing is real".

[shankfiddle]

Tony

really diggin the klezmer tune, and I usually don't like live recordings. you should consider tracking it in your DAW. what was your instrumentation, solo+computer, or live band?

and the clarinet tone sounded great even through the din of the audience. was it real or midi? [edit: never mind, dumb question i just saw your sax tracks]

[Tony Ostinato]

heeeeyyy thanks man!

that was a live group, and everyone got sent the tune the same day. drums bass guitar keyboards and me on wx5/vl70-m "wxclar" patch. we didnt get a chance to run it down before playing it.

i wouldnt be able to play real clarinet to save my life, and especially not that. listen very very closely for the characteristic glitch octaves here and there that are my thumb missing the octave keys or hitting the wrong ones on the wx5.

i go back and forth between vl70-m wxclar and the wivi clarinet for different things and on this one i chose the vl70m because i knew thered be a lot of slop and vl70-m deals with that just a little better.

about halfway thru i settle in and calm down and that goes away. i was kinda caught off guard cause usually those request tunes are in the beginning of the night and we were long past that and id already figured we werent gonna do that song and had turned that part of my brain off, but sure enough it got called right then.

on those gigs id just record with one zoom h2 in the room somewhere where it wouldnt get trampled, now i put a zoom h1 in the room and hook the h2 up to the mixing board and then i mix those 2 recordings together to get some of both.

we use a studiolive board so i could maybe someday hook up a firewire computer and record everything on its own track but i hear scary stories of that crashing the mixer itself, not good during a show.

otherwise no way for multitracking , i never have that much time for setup and testing.

[shankfiddle]

hahahah, totally fooled me. What you call the "glitch" I thought was the decorative flutter you hear in klezmer.

[jancivil]

Researchers have been trying to teach absolute pitch ability in laboratory settings for more than a century,[60] and various commercial absolute-pitch training courses have been offered to the public since the early 1900s.[61] However, no adult has ever been documented to have acquired absolute listening ability,[62] as all adults who have undergone AP training have failed, when formally tested, to show "an unqualified level of accuracy... comparable to that of AP possessors".[63]

using Wiki as definitive on anything is lame.

pap and dogma and pedantic overanalysis. Once the term 'absolute' is used it is defined out of existence. No one has ever acquired 'absolute' pole vaulting ability either, which isn't to say the lots of people don't/can't do this.

so you've shown only that you're ok with 'perfect' but 'absolute' is anathema. and obviates all points?

No. In the terminology, there is consensus that 'perfect pitch' means 'absolute pitch'; as opposed to say 'perfect results in the realm of relative pitch'. It means just that; an individual will at once know that pitch with no consideration of other pitches or their relation to that pitch, that pitch per se will be known to them by ear. These terms, ie., how they are used to make a distinction, is known to people interested in the subject.

This language is apparently new to you! In which case you'd be well advised to be more reticent to opine on the subject.

[Sascha Franck]

In the terminology, there is consensus that 'perfect pitch' means 'absolute pitch'

Fwiw, the german term is "absolutes Gehör" (Gehör = hearing, or so...), we don't even have any other term (such as "perfect"). And of course it makes sense, as it is about absolute pitches.

- Sascha

[jancivil]

listening to a mix he can tell you instantly, "needs some 60hz cut on the guitar and slight excitation around 10k on the bass..." and he is spot-on without using spectral analyzers. He began his music career playing guitar, but according to him, he didn't really have an ear for pitch. but he is a genius in the studio... he's been engaged in a different kind of ear-training.

I have never been able to acquire this skill, no matter how hard I try. so is this a form of perfect pitch?

or was it influenced by his work, education, and experience? Or ... he was born with it?

I notice there is 60 cycles, which I can pretty much identify because it is a prevalent noise I have focused on previously, and 'about 10k', which isn't very meaningful. I would guess that it's not perfect pitch.

I'm not sure about perfect pitch myself. I do understand that 'in the trade' the distinction is made by terms 'absolute' vs 'relative' pitch. But there is a cultural norm present any time someone answers 'C' or whatever.

That will be a set of 12 tones tuned by a convention, eg., A=440. Once upon a time this wasn't true. If they tuned to A=415, that's basically an Ab now. I don't know what to do with that information.

[jancivil]

all i'm saying is that if we tell children that you cannot learn absolute pitch, they absolutely will not. we should be actively trying to teach it.

WHY? Is there some particular use for it in music? I think there is not, and in fact it's a hazard. I am very glad I don't have the affliction myself.

First of all, there is a problem of relativity in the whole exercise! If you put little Perfect Pitch Joanie in the Wayback Machine to a day where 'A = 415' will she fail to have perfect pitch any more? She will have to rename 'all 12'. Will the pitch exactly halfway between A/440 and Ab/415.305 stump her? IE: Will it be a non-pitch, according to this preconception. These are the kind of questions that crop up, relecting a little on the nature of 'absolute pitch'.

In string and in wind playing, there are more than 12 useful tones and often the notes you cannot describe in these terms are the ones you want, to obtain a better concord, in concert with others, since the intervals are to a certain extent botched by ET. Or even to obtain concord with your own instrument. Is perfect pitch a help or a hindrance here?

To, say a Persian classical musician, the whole idea of absolute pitch is anathema.

now, if one was only going to be involved purely with Dodecaphony, ie., all 12 tones are equal, maybe it could have an actual use value, that you could apply? But, per se, I don't see how it helps a musician be a better musician.

NB: I have a very refined sense of intonation, which I obtained through relating one pitch to another. WHERE INTONATION HAS ACTUAL MEANING.

[shankfiddle]

well jancivil,

if you read through the last few pages I hypothesized that perfect pitch is nothing more than a combination of relative pitch and pitch memory. not one skill, but two. and there are pages of argument/examples (starting page 5), I really don't want to be redundant.

For example, as you can immediately recognize 60hz, I can remember the lowest G on a violin, the C-string of a viola, the A440 of an oboe etc. solely from experience. So when I say "teaching perfect pitch" I really just mean developing pitch memory AND interval identification to the point that the student can intuitively and sometimes subconsciously find reference pitches from environment. But as i said above, I don't consider it a weakness if a student has difficulty in these skills. Some can get it, some can't.

I also said that once you have developed the ability to identify pitches, you are not done ear-training. It's not the final goal by any means.

But it is NOT useless. it is one of many pitch-related skills that all support each other. Absolute pitch identification, chord quality identification, chord progression transcription, melodic transcription... no single one of these is necessary, but they're all interconnected.

what IS useless is when a musician with perfect pitch develops a perceived superiority complex and stops ear-training altogether because he/she is already "perfect"... that is useless. In a previous post, I cited fellow students "born with PP" who couldn't identify chord qualities without picking out all the notes and THEN analyzing intervals. Being able to differentiate between a B and D is just as useful as differentiating between maj/min/dim/aug chords, albeit in different circumstances.

damn, you forced me to be redundant

[tapper mike]

The constituion of perfect pitch states that it is infact "Perfect" That you don't need a reference and can sing A440 and it align to A440 on a tuner in a blind test. Also that you would be called out to sing A415 and be able to produce it aurally.

Some people do have A440 voices and can hit spot on. Like.... Michael Franks
Some people don't like.... Rod Stewart or the autotune types of today.

Perfect pitch implies what it means that you don't need relative pitch to support it because you already can produce from thin air the exact correct tone.

Having perfect pitch does not mean one is a better musician or singer.

Usually people develop some sense of pitch with their primary instrument If it is acoustic. The vibrations against ones body help to faciliatate the understanding much more then when one uses electronic instruments.

No two instruments resonate a tone in the same manner. Much of our ability to develop relative pitch stems from how the notes resonate.