Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum Can i learn the perfect pitch

You mean that they can produce any named pitch. We're stuck on names again. And those named pitches are also tied in with tuning. If an instrument is tuned to A = 435 or 430, then playing "F#' will be incorrect, because that name no longer corresponds to that pitch.

I don't care about"people with 'AP ' " ..... I am trying to get at something practical and fundamental. There are two fundamental concepts. Recognizing a pitch for itself: finding a pitch in relationship to something else. I deliberately avoided the name "AP", and I introduced that fact in the very beginning.

I do have a family member who has an extreme ability in what is called "AP" and we have talked about this often, so I'm aware of what that entails. It has often been a handicap of sorts, getting in the way. It is not something that I am motivated to acquire, and so have not tried.

Perfect pitch is not dependent on nomenclature in any language. You can name each note with a term of one's own devising, or a color (as in synesthesia?).

I heard an interview on BBC Radio 3 once with a violinist who had perfect pitch, and learnt the names of the notes in the standard A=440 (as used in the UK but not some other European countries).

Then she 'saw the light' and decided to start playing on period instruments. And hit a stumbling block - she saw C on the score but what she heard around her was closer to B. And HIP pitches also varied from band to band (then, in the early days), and like many instrumentalists, she was a freelancer, playing with the Academy of Ancient Music one day and then with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment the next, and the London Classical Players after that. It did her head in.

Until she made a concerted effort to rid herself of her perfect pitch - and she succeeded, though it took her some time. I hadn't known that was possible, but apparently it is. These days, she happily switches between period instruments for performances and (predominantly) modern instruments for teaching.

There are some tests of people with the real AP ability who demonstrate on first hearing a note, and without a prior reference tone, they can tell if the tone is even a few Hz off from the standard, either sharp or flat. This is roughly equivalent to being able to name audio frequency when they are played. I think this is a very demanding test of the real AP ability and I know that there are some young children who come equipped with this rather strange ability, which probably requires some special brain wiring. Tests like this are even more demanding than being able to tune your instrument without a reference tone, since for that, you only have to be able to internalize one reference frequency as Bennevis has mentioned above.

That is correct. However, when people test for it, they use names, and that is the problem.

I would propose a model for human pitchness. Imagine perfect pitch is not an on / off switch but a number along a number line from 0 to 999, where more people lands between 450 to 550 than other places on the line. If you were born above 900, you have perfect pitch. If you were born at 999, you hear pitch in everything including the pitch of people walking or flipping of paper.

I'm guess some people have more talent than others when trained because they happen to be born around 700-800 and can trained themselves to eventually reach the same result of someone born at 900. However, for most people training however much would only move 100-200 point up the line, so if you were born around 450, you never reach perfect pitch no matter how hard you try.

That's how I look at it. But I suspect using a two dimensional line is not really accurate as biological systems are often 3 or 4 dimensional, but using easy concept like a single number like 587 on the continuous line of pitchness makes it easy for me to understand. The real thing may be better described by multi-dimensional attributes like [587, 301, 242] for one individual. If things like this could be measured, it'd leading to almost infinite different individuals.

Studies have shown AP is highly correlated with and may be related to tone-color synesthesia, so that would seem to support the multi-dimensional hypothesis.

I partially agree with you, but there is something else. Apparently I always heard things correctly, meaning that for me if I think if a symphony, concerto or other music it's right. I can't explain it any other way.

There person who "tested" me was an idiot. I never had any theory. Never any sightsinging. Never sang at all. It never occurred to me that this could be tested. I did not improvise. Very weak teaching.

I had played a few years when I started playing tuba in 7th grade. I switched to euphonium/baritone three years later. In high school I wanted to try French horn, so my director gave me an F horn to fool around with. I could not play it. I did not understand how it worked. Bb instruments are like this: Bb F Bb etc. are played open. If you have a strong link to pitch, it's more than knowing that you have to finger a written Bb open. When you hear it, that's the fingering you grab. If you are playing by ear, that's the fingering you choose to match a pitch you hear.

Modern horn players mostly use the same fingerings I use, because they mostly play Bb horn. But because of history, because F horn USED to be the most common choice, music is still transposed a 5th or 4th, depending which way you think. This has produced the schizo system where the same exact part, using the same exact fingering, is written in three different keys. So even though a concert Bb scale is exactly the same fingering and pitches on tuba, euphonium, horn and trumpet, differing only in octaves, the bass clef instruments are written in Bb, trumpet is written in C, and horn is written in F.

I found out years later that I can pick up a Bb horn and just play it. Why not? The pitches are the same. Also trumpet. But I can't play a C trumpet to save my life. I think of pitch, and I blow that pitch. It won't play. By the time I figure out what stupid fingering is going to work on that C trumpet, it's too late. I look at the music, hear all the pitches perfectly, but I reflexively reach for the fingering that "belongs" with the pitch.

I'm hyper-aware of this because it is crippling.

When I was young my pitch sense was incredibly narrow. If you handed me a guitar, I'd tune it very close to perfectly in concert pitch without a reference pitch. That pitch was rock solid until somewhere over the age of 60. My pitch sense is more wobbly. My relative pitch is, if anything, even sharper.

I don't say I have absolute pitch. I say I have "imperfect pitch". But it's a royal pain in the butt. I give me NOTHING I can use, and it gets in my way.

So I agree that we are not talking about an A/B thing but rather degrees of connection. Whatever it is I have - I won't quibble about the name - I can't turn it off. But because it is not sensitive to a few cents, and never has been, it's not a problem for tuning to concert pitch.

I'm glad it's wobbly. And I think being super-sensitive to A having to be 440, or anything fixed, is a horrible curse. I can't imagine JS Bach navigating musically with that kind of limitation.

I could, and I hear in pitches. They may be wobbly, but if someone "passes gas", I know instantly to within a 1/2 step what I'm hearing. Doorbells, phones, random pitches. I know what they are. Also, pitches for me are white or black. I associate everything with piano keys, including notes I play in brass. Tuning note Bb is black. Not synesthesia. I just see piano keys when I hear sounds.

Thread necro, saw this in the news today: Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible

From the abstract: "Absolute pitch (AP) refers to the rare ability to name the pitch of a tone without external reference. It is widely believed that acquiring AP in adulthood is impossible, since AP is only for the selected few with rare genetic makeup and early musical training. In three experiments, we trained adults to name pitches for 12 to 40 hours. After training, 14% of the participants (6 out of 43) were able to name twelve pitches at 90% accuracy or above, with semitone errors considered incorrect. This performance level was comparable to that of real world ‘AP possessors’. AP training showed classic characteristics of perceptual learning, including performance enhancement, generalization of learning and sustained improvement
for at least one to three months. Exploratory extrapolation analyses suggest that 39.5% and 58.1% of the participants would acquire AP if the training lasted for 60 and 180 hours respectively, suggesting the potential for the majority of the participants to acquire AP. We demonstrate that AP continues to be learnable in adulthood. The extent to which one acquires AP may thus be better explained by the amount and type of perceptual experience."

There's hope for us oldsters yet!

Interesting, but aside from for research purposes, is it worth the time expenditure? Even for us, the obsessed?

Interesting. I could pass their test for AP, but I don't have AP. I can recognise pitches in isolation, but only because I recognise g, for example, as the first note of Pictures at an Exhibition, or the Goldberg Variations. I know if something is in d minor because of Beethoven's ninth, or the chord of d minor from the Bach/Busoni Chaconne, or Breathing by Kate Bush and so on. This is something I learned as an adult. However, "conventional" AP skills are very different, and I don't know of anyone acquiring such skills.

Do not talk about the books, or about the interviews, or about the videos ; tell about those adults who tried to develop PP in 13 years using different methods. Why exactly 13? 13 years ago on Russian music website, began the first stream about PP . Since then, there have been 12,000 visits.
NO ONE OF THE PARTICIPANTS OF 11 DISCUSSIONS FOR 13 YEARS GOT THE PERFECT PITCH.

Urban Legends.

I don't care about what people did for 13 years, and what kinds of tests they passed. In fact, I don't care about tests. I care about my own experiences, and what practical things I gained and did not gain. Btw, I did not seek to develop pitch recognition - it happened through activities. How about going by our own experiences? I actually don't see the point of pitch recognition in piano.

About tests: In teacher training you learn that tests are about the poorest way of assessing abilities in anything. So I would not work toward any kind of test, or assess abilities via them. Any "pitch" test that I have ever seen involved giving names to things. That's a big flaw already. And if the training activity is aimed at giving somebody the ability to name things - how does that help you in music?

Please don't use words like "urban legend", unless you have a specific legend that you wish to name and define.

keystring, do you have opposite statistics?

You missed most of my post and the point. When I'm learning, I don't care about "statistics". I don't care about "tests". I am not interested in gaining points in tests. I care about what I am actually learning - if it works for me it works for me - and I'm utterly disinterested in the fact that somebody somewhere didn't pass some kind of test. Secondly: whether the thing is useful to me.
You are asking the wrong question.

Can someone list the advantages of having PP? Thanks.

According to Rick Beato, adults can't develop perfect pitch:


Having a good relative pitch is more important for someone who plays a string instrument such as a violin or cello. Besides getting a good sound, if you have a finger off by a fraction, you are out of tune. With a piano no matter how badly you hit a key, you still produce a sound that is in tune. Otherwise it's the technician's problem.

Having some sense of pitch is important. A while back someone in the family went for a conservatory exam (violin) for Gr. 1 playing "Minuet in G". It is a common piece from the Bach Anna M. Notebook most people would played at some point. Besides getting the counting right, there were some tuning issues. After 2 weeks of intense practice the person managed to pass (barely). Sound recordings were made before the exam. then the person relied almost entirely on playing by the music by reading.

Many of us started off learning to read music and a piece of paper becomes the only way we'd learn to play songs. Getting more into playing by ear, we can basically learn songs faster. Once we hear a common pattern repeating in a different key, playing the next part of a piece becomes automatic. We can even transpose songs by ear.

You can save dozens of dollars on pitch pipes and tuning forks? ;-)

And don't waste your time by someone who is blown away by what his kids can do and then develops some theories based on what he read, and comes up with some outworn strategies about relating to pieces of music, which, however, he decides doesn't work unless you're young.

I developed something along the lines of pitch recognition by accident due to an exercise for something else. I didn't see much use to it and so did nothing with it.

... nor have I yet encountered a salesman with "the perfect pitch"!

Cheers!

How about coming off your high horse and just tell us whether you actually learnt perfect pitch?
This is not about your opinion of tests, which you have already repeatedly told us are totally pointless - though I don’t think you would see a doctor who hasn’t passed any tests to determine his/her competence.


Let’s get things straight - we are talking about perfect pitch here, not pitch recognition and not relative pitch.