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Really? I think it's supposed to be one of those quasi-psychological tests, telling you to name the color in which the word is written instead of reading the actual words "red" and "blue." When you have to do ten of those mismatched color/words, you're bound to make a few errors, because our brains have been wired to read words, not tell the color of words.

I just don't get what that has anything to do with perfect pitch.

Any site selling AP courses no doubt sell ashtrays for your motorbike, DVD rewinders and all other pointless products. One site gives 60% commission for people to link to their site. $53.23 a sale. You could earn $1,916,280.00 a year. Not available in the shops. When you get it you’ll know why.


1 in 10,000?
"However, this is an unreliable estimate without any empirical evidence and is likely to be cited to overstate the rarity of AP"
Ken’ichi Miyazaki - How well do we understand Absolute Pitch (2004)

The figure 1 in 10,000 is a general population guesstimate (from Ward, W.D. (1999) Absolute pitch.) This figure would derive from a guess of what percentage of children play an instrument starting within the critical period. When you look at direct figures in the relevant subset (young musicians) it’s about 1,000 times less rare.



Yes. If you look in the appropriate place you’ll not only find them but statistically they’re not rare. There are conditions that influence the likelihood of retaining AP.


Professor Oliver Sacks posted the whole chapter from his book “Musicophilia”. Feel free to look up the authors mentioned within the article.

"For students who had begun musical training between ages four and five," they wrote, "approximately 60 percent of the Chinese students met the criterion for absolute pitch, while only about 14 percent of the U.S. nontone language speakers met the criterion.” For those who had begun musical training at age six or seven, the numbers in both groups were correspondingly lower, about 55 percent and 6 percent. And for students who had begun musical training later still, at age eight or nine, roughly 42 percent of the Chinese students met the criterion while none of the U.S. nontone language speakers did so. There were no differences between genders in either group.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2007/PitchPerfectMatch.html

So at best (age 4 or 5) given the prerequisite conditions, 14% for non-tonal speakers and 60% for tonal-language speakers. After that, the figures drop. The non-tonal speakers plummet.


Documented number of Adults learning AP? Zero

"In every scientifically documented case, the adult had slower responses, suggesting that (s)he had learned only a few "landmark" tones, and was using relative pitch to calculate the remaining pitches from there. This is what Bachem (1954), Ward (1982) and others have called pseudo-absolute pitch. I am emphatically NOT saying that Stephen is mistaken, and I am NOT saying that adults cannot learn AP; rather, I am saying that there are no scientifically documented cases of adults learning AP."
Daniel Levitin
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Absolute_pitch&oldid=302937570


At least get that zero figure a little higher before you spend your time and money on a pointless endeavour.

yes, more or less what I meant and I agree, not all people will be able to re-learn but if you tone dead you shouldn't be seeking carrier in music anyway

that's why you won't get it...

Get what??? What's "it"??

Please write clearly if you wish to engage in an intellectual discussion.

Huh? You're saying people who don't have absolute pitch are "tone dead"? (or "tone deaf", if that's what you meant) Sounds like you don't know much about relative pitch.

Now that's a question - for that matter, is perfect pitch at European, American or Baroque frequency? I forget what they are but they're all different. Ditto for me on the 'one instrument out of tune' allergy and I think that's a classic relative pitch thing. I mean, the frame of reference is clear: first desk second violin is out of tune relative to the rest of the orchestra not the other way around....

The data for Chinese student is far from the reality. In the community I live, There are nearly 50 Chinese speaking students, almost all of them learn instrument of some kind (mostly piano) from early age. Only two of them have absolute pitch as far as I know (it is a very tight community that I know almost every kids). I think those data might apply to the preparatory school of the Central music Conservatory, which is far different from the general Chinese student population.

ok, I'm outta this thread.

Yes. AP seems to be dependent on specific instruments. I don’t recall any experiment on non-musical instruments though some people can do this. You’re likely to get a huge failure rate with nothing interesting to derive from it.

"The accuracy of AP identification is dependent on the
timbre of the tones to be identified."
Ken’ichi Miyazaki


When I hear an “A” , I identify it by its sound. “A” sounds like all the other “A’s” . The texture/chroma/colour is dependent on the frequency. It’s a repeating spectrum.

This mechanism is why when you have AP you are prone to errors.
http://www.pianoworld.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/1728061/1.html

Why memorizing notes frequencies is not AP

“It is not pitch height (octave placement) but pitch class (musical characteristics of a scale tone within an octave) that AP listeners perceive directly. It is assumed that AP listeners adopt the two-stage process in which they identify pitch class of the presented tone and
then locate its octave position. By contrast, people having no AP are insensitive to pitch class but are able to classify tones into rough pitch categories in terms of timbral
characteristics correlated with positions in the frequency continuum. AP listeners and non-AP listeners seem to be equivalent in accuracy in identifying pitch height.”
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/25/6/426/_pdf
Daniel Levitin also points pitch perception being the same.

Also...

"Because the pitch of a pure tone depends on its intensity (Stevens, 1935), results of absolute pitch experiments using pure tones should be interpreted with caution."
http://www.uni-graz.at/richard.parncutt/publications/PaLe01_GroveAbsPitch.pdf

It shouldn't matter the skill level of the music student. It occurs spontaneously without external interference. But......

In Japanese AP papers it mentioned specific training for children. From memory it was like 50% for these non-tonal students. The author pointed out there is some prestige (misguided) into having AP and this may have an influence into getting into schools.

Would it be a leap that it could happen in China also? So maybe its skewed a little? We'll have to wait to conflicting data because I've never seen anything disproving it.

Also you have genetic studies showing an influence to the Chinese, Korean and Japanese irrespective of tonal language or environmental factors.

Its clear where to look for AP folk and the prerequisites. Measuring the strengths of some of the factors is another.

Totally irreverent to musical intelligence. These papers are filed under Neuroscience, linguistics and genetics etc

I can’t find the paper at the moment but some papers will point out that the labelling happens naturally without specific training. You have until 7 or 8 to figure it out. But when you notice all that the C’s, D’s etc have the same chroma/texture it’s hardly an amazing feat to identify a note’s name.

If you search an AP paper with the word “error” you’ll jump to the statistical analysis of the types of errors AP folk make. With AP you are prone to a variety of errors. I vaguely remember an out of tune piano being blamed for the common G# error and compensation was made. But surely you hear other instruments other than your own?


Most AP papers never mention it because it is irrelevant . When it is mentioned it always in the negative. Hence the absence of studies trying the link AP to Musical Excellence. That nonsense only exists on forums and snake oil sites.

“However, contrary to the common belief that AP is a component of musical ability, it was found that AP listeners have difficulty in perceiving pitch relations in different pitch contexts, and in recognizing transposed melodies, as compared to listeners having no AP. These
results suggest that AP is irrelevant and even disadvantageous to music”
Ken’ichi Miyazaki
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/25/6/426/_pdf

“Sometimes regarded as a mark of musicianship, AP is in fact largely irrelevant to most musical tasks. Being unable to turn it off, many possessors of AP perform dramatically poorer at judging whether a melody and its transposed counterpart are the same, a task that non-AP musicians accomplish with ease”
Daniel J. Levitin and Susan E. Rogers - Absolute pitch: perception, coding,
and controversies

Ps
Out of tune is out of tune. Who doesn’t notice it? You would notice it from the intervals?

Whoever wrote that doesn't really understand music, or did not major in music. Are you kidding? AP is extremely helpful. It helps with dictation, interval and chord recognition, and memory! If you have AP, once you memorize a progression of sounds/notes, your fingers actually move toward those keys naturally. You can also start playing a familiar piece/tune in the correct key without the score.

I teach kids music theory. Those with AP are at a distinct advantage. How can you (aurally) tell the different 7th chords without being able to recognize the individual notes?

When playing on a transposable keyboard, that would be a problem, because people with AP would have memorized a piece in its original key. If you just move the notes down a M2, it would cause major issues for people with AP.

It is not "nonsense" that AP is helpful. Just because there are some quacks out there claiming that they can "teach" AP does not mean that AP is not helpful.

AP is irrelevant to certain aspects of music-making (phrasing, dynamics, tone production), but it is absolutely helpful in other aspects. What's not helpful to be able to look at a chord and immediately hear it in your head and recognize its quality?

I wonder if a study has been conducted to link AP with intonation for stringed instruments. My secondary instrument is violin, and my feeling is that AP helps one play in tune.

From this I can conclude that you either have AP and don't understand how well those without AP can master the keyboard, or, if you don't have AP then you haven't mastered the keyboard very well yourself.

A person with well-practiced and learned relative pitch (with adequate exercise in all keys) only needs maybe one or two seconds to find the key of a piece they are hearing, and then their fingers move to the positions just as naturally as the AP musician. Only on the very first note will their finger not move to the very first pitch -- other than that they are as good as APers.

Those with RP can also recognize the notes in chords, once they find the key; which, again, is just a matter of finding one note to start with.

So does relative pitch.Why is that easier with AP? Once I memorise a progression of sounds/notes, my fingers move towards those keys naturally too. I'm not sure what you're saying here.Perhaps, but with relative pitch you can start playing a familiary piece/tune in any key without the score. Both useful skills, I would have thought. By recognising the intervals.

In my experience, people with AP have a hard time understanding how people with good RP process music. Some just can't understand how we can hear and write down notes/chords/intervals, because we do it differently to those with AP.

Maybe, but none of those skills can't be accomplished without AP. Just because one person employs it doesn't mean others don't have an effective means of their own. It's not proof of anything other than they can name a note when they hear it and they can faithfully write down what they hear in the correct key. Not really that earth-shattering. You can write dictate a phrase, complete with modulations etc, with no trouble, AP or not. You might have to adjust the key later though. Usually when you write a piece down, you are aware of the first note and you go from there. It's inconsequential in the end. Life isn't an ongoing aural exam. You use the tools at your disposal. AP might be handy at times, but it's not a deal-breaker in any situation.

For what it's worth, when I was studying, my girlfriend who had perfect pitch struggled with aural tests a lot more than I did. It did not help with numerous tasks like transposition and even naming of extended chords. somebody with good relative pitch hears the bass note and all other notes on top of it as one big picture. People with absolute pitch don't process it this way. They tune into certain notes selectively and then work out the totality of the harmony after they have written down the notes they have heard. Where I was able to say, "thats an Amaj7b9#11" chord very quickly, she first had to run through the pitches she heard, then use theory to try and give it the correct name. There is a real difference in the way the mind processes the information when the primacy is on pitch levels rather than pitch clusters with many different intervals within them. People with good relative pitch are using very fine skills. They are able to process the "beats" between different notes and very accurately state the relationships between them. My girlfriend was extremely good at dictating melodies she heard, but wasn't as quick at transposition. Why? because she would tend to process what she heard as absolute notes with no attempt to label them for their tonal purpose. For me, I tended to listen to all notes in terms of their position in the harmony: I knew where the tonic, sub-dom, dominants, leading-tones were, etc, which made transposition much easier because all the mental work was already done. She had to go back to her perfectly dictated melody and analyse the interval structure from that.


Are you serious with that remark? I can't believe you are a teacher of aural/theory with beliefs like that. I always got 100% on all my chord/interval recognition tests. Go on: ask me how I did it. BTW, I believe that people who rely totally on AP should not be teaching aural skills. There is a definite art to teaching relative pitch. If done well, you can produce very attuned ears and minds.

Cross-posted and agreed with charleslang ... and ando

Hey, I'm not here to bash RP!! I'm just sharing some of my thoughts coming from a person who has AP and worked with students of various levels of AP.

Maybe I just haven't worked with people with strong RP. But AP is very helpful in some aspects of music-making.

You serious about hearing intervals in various types of seventh chords? Maybe if they are all in root position, but what if the notes are spread out in open position? What do you listen for in particular? I think I posed this question before on PW and never got a satisfactory response.

Since when did my posts mean RP sucks and AP is better than RP? Don't put words in my mouth.