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Let's start with two extremes:
Amusia:
Levels of perfect pitch:
Now test yourself online and contribute to scientific research:
Test Your Sense of Pitch | NIDCD
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01-25-2020 11:12 AM
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Always interested in this topic. Here are my thoughts on certain aspects. I have a little trouble conveying this type of thing in text form:
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Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
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Originally Posted by medblues
Give us all a note, and we should be able to identify other intervals via relative pitch. Ear training develops that skill like any other skill.Last edited by cosmic gumbo; 01-26-2020 at 03:04 AM.
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I had 25/26, but I did not know all the tunes, some may be right with different notes. I think it's different from the "perfect pitch". It's the relative pitch. I don't have an absolute pitch, in hz. Without checking with a pitch or an instrument, I am unable to tell in what tonality these tunes are played. I had a saxophonist buddy who heard with perfect pitch, he plays the tenor Bb in C
Last edited by Patlotch; 01-26-2020 at 06:18 AM.
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What is the concert pitch of one's perfect pitch?
Concert pitch was standardized on A 440Hz less than a hundred years ago; prior to this, concert pitch was local or regional and notes like one we would call "A" today ranged then over a pitch span of over half an octave through the centuries previous.
What is the temperament of one's perfect pitch?
There have been over two dozen temperaments over the last few centuries, equal temperament being a historically late one.
Why do I see videos where I'm told some people don't understand perfect pitch (the video above says that), and then he tests to demonstrate by playing a series of chords (and demonstrates he himself may not understand relative pitch)?
What is the error allowed in a perfect pitch test?
A perfect pitch would have a precise frequency with a deviation width of zero cents, but pitches in equal temperament are 100 cents apart, so in a test of pitch naming, the subject's answer of a note name is almost 100 cents wide (almost 50 cents below through almost 50 cents above).
Testing of perfect pitch would need to meet some harsh standards, one of which would be that the testing must be done in a special environment. We are surrounded by the hum of 120Hz in the USA and growing up immersed in it most don't even have an awareness of it, but it confounds any tests that wish to exclude relative pitch as a factor in determining perfect pitch... almost everything we've heard has been within and agaist the 120Hz background. Preparation for testing of perfect pitch would need to begin with the subject spending a few days isolated within a sound proof room without any electrical power, then tested there with the presentation of a single beep, then a few more days in the hole before the next single test pitch...Last edited by pauln; 01-26-2020 at 08:51 AM.
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Originally Posted by Lobomov
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Does anyone think one can have high level absolute pitch but be poor in relative pitch recognition ? I don't think so. I believe great relative pitch recognition follows naturally from having absolute pitch. But I don't want to rely in this belief yet in case people here know cases of people with absolute pitch accompanied by poor relative pitch (both require practice and training for full development but let's keep that out of the discussion for now).
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Originally Posted by pauln
Absolute pitch - Wikipedia
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What is the source of "120Hz hum"?
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Originally Posted by sgosnell
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Originally Posted by medblues
on the other hand, can we have absolute pitches? My saxophonist friend's ear was set to 440hz. It was terribly demanding when I tuned my guitar. I guess it was a drama for him to play at 442hz!
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Originally Posted by medblues
Chord recognition for example. The instructor would play a chord and we needed to state the quality (major,minor, major 7, etc) and the inversion.
Plays a chord for Ms. Perfect Pitch, you could see her brain turning while she struggled... Instructor said, what are the notes, she immediately said B G D F#. But she was trying to use theory to name the chord quality and inversion, and that was the struggle.
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Originally Posted by fep
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Originally Posted by medblues
Last edited by pauln; 01-26-2020 at 11:56 PM.
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If the car horn event occurred during a lesson, your teacher already had heard enough notes to use relative pitch upon hearing the car horns.
The saxophonist's saxophone was set to 440Hz; of course he was demanding that the guitar be in tune.
How would you like to have your guitar in tune but have the sax adjusted up out of tune? You could still play with him by bending all your notes a little - that would be drama.
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Originally Posted by pauln
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Originally Posted by Patlotch
There is a hierarchy of what is tuned to...
1 - concert pitch (assuming the piano is in tune, if there is a piano)
2 - the piano (without assuming it is in tune)
3 - other relatively fixed tuning instruments (brass, woodwinds)
4 - strings (including the guitar)
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Originally Posted by pauln
Thank you for your advice. Good bye
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Originally Posted by Patlotch
When you write, "My saxophonist friend's ear is set to 440Hz" or "My saxophonist friend had an absolute pitch" that reads as if you think he used absolute pitch to help you tune, but the sax player used relative pitch to compare his tuned horn to your guitar. He is not walking around as a tuner, he is walking around with a tuned sax. The story might be relevant to perfect pitch if the sax player had helped you tune your guitar by ear before opening his sax case and playing any sax notes.
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Originally Posted by pauln
sorry, but I found your intervention painful, because it suggested that I confused absolute pitch and relative pitch
Originally Posted by pauln
Last edited by Patlotch; 01-27-2020 at 02:01 PM.
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IMO, absolute pitch is mostly about memory of sound, as related to frequency.
Being born with absolute pitch, does not mean born with knowledge of how an A sounds, or how 440 Hz sounds, or any other note/ freq, or what's the name of musical note of some freq. It means born with ability to memorize certain characteristic feature as is, and never forget it, always be able to recognize it. I am not sure, though, how it function over more than one octave. Is it memorizing, or processing?
Analogy made with visual recognition is OK, IMO.
Where it is applicable, just as you see different shades of red. I guess they can perceive a range of frequencies as different shades of one musical note. Speaking about exact frequency, just watch tuner scale wobble around upon plucking a note on guitar, or blown on trumpet. What was correct freq, was it one up the hill, or one down the valley? Analogy is not only to color recognition, it is to memorizing anything else you can see. Something you will remember, something not, for some things that appear in varieties you will say "they are all same to me".
One can not name musical note without being exposed to it and being taught the label. From that point on, there is a reference.
It is always used to name that same note. However it is not used to name other notes relative to it. Each note is memorized individually, with own name reference. Again, I wonder about octaves.
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Originally Posted by Vladan
"An interresting feature of absolute pitch recognition is that when errors are made, they are often octaves errors. That is, a tone of pitch C5 is described as C4, or C6."The Musician's Guide to Acoustics, p.97
and I have an answer to my question in #13 about my saxophonist friend: I guess it was a drama for him to play at 442hz!
"For musical performance in non-standard tunings, such as “Baroque pitch” (reference pitch of 415 Hz, unlike the modern standard of 440 Hz), having AP could even be a disadvantage."
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Originally Posted by Patlotch
The other part, about problens with tuning refference, I do not buy it in full.
Apart from perfect memory, Does their frequency discrimination work on the same principle as with ordinary people? Do they "hear" it in Cents, or maybe in Hz? Maybe there lies the difference? Anyway ...
How does your friend perceive "stretched tuning" of piano?
How does he deal with vibrato?
How about non tempered instruments, like various strings (fretless) where all notes are played off mark, but close enough?
Try this, tune your guitar to 440Hz and pluck A note, hard. It will go from pretty sharp, to somewhat flat, then back, maybe couple of times before it stabilzes. Then during decay it will be all over the place again (or not).
Your friend certainly won't process it as "sharp, closer, close, right, flat flatter, close, right, sharp, sharper, but less than 5ms ago ...", or rather soon he would come to overload shutdown. He must allow for some margin. If there is a margin, why would he care about 2 Hz difference. That is about 8 cents in that range. Noticeable, but tolerable, for normal people.
Play A octave higher. 2Hz is only 4 cents there. Normal people do not care.
220Hz, 2Hz are over 15 cents. That is clearly audible, but still not worth more than chorus effect.
How would your perfect pitched friend feel about it?
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Originally Posted by Patlotch
Perhaps the clue is that absolute pitch should consider being more described as absolute pitch class? This suggests something, too.
Perception of color is sourced from three types of receptors (four receptors in a very few women, and five receptors in an even less very few women - "vive la différence"!) Perception of scent is sourced from seven types of receptors. In both of these perceptions, we tend to recall and recognize quite well the colors and smells.
Perception of sound is sourced from around 20000 receptors with individual very narrow frequency bandwidths. As opposed to the eye and nose accessing the relative balance between a few source types, the ear is presenting a couple tens of thousand source types. The curious clue about the octave error may be related to how these thousands of source types are managed with regard to pitch. These source types stimulate neurons, but what is important is not to think that there is a firm relationship between the frequency of sound and the frequency of the neuron's signal rate... it is not the case that there is a neuron for each frequency we hear. The fastest a neuron can fire is just about 1000Hz because it needs a brief refractory period to re-pump ions back outside its axon's wall membrane in order to re-establish the -70mv potential for a subsequent depolarization (to set up the charge for another firing of the neuron).
The ear does use the neural firing rate as the corresponding signal to indicate the sound frequency up to about 1000Hz, but for sound frequencies above that, the pitch perception is derived through additional processing of which none of the signal rates involved exceeds about 1000Hz. About half of all the notes in music are above this and the majority of all the harmonic frequencies are above this... just to give some sense of how much of what we hear is actually internally derived, constructed, and synthesized - so, subject to individual variation.
Vladan, as usual, raises very insightful observations. Not even the low frequencies are free from further processing. The perceived pitch is stretched "outwards" (called German tuning on the piano, Sweetened tuning on the guitar) in that in order for the pitches to sound in tune, the lower pitches have to be tuned progressively flatter, and the higher pitches progressively sharper. Using just raw doubling or halving of frequencies for the octaves will sound horribly out of tune away from the center.
Perceived pitch also goes sharp as the volume increases... you have probably heard this at the end of an orchestral piece that finishes on a fff finale, then suddenly stops, and the softer reverberation of that last chord drops in pitch as it fades.
KA PAF info please
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