Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Chemically Induced Perfect Pitch?

Right.

It looks suspiciously like BS to me. For one thing, perfect pitch cannot be taught (although relative pitch can).

(Just noticed that was my 4444th post!)

It's not. Check the research.

Read the rest of my post.

Read the research. Again, you don't even know what you're talking about.

Maybe I don't, but I know enough to know that they are confusing perfect pitch with relative pitch.

What makes you think this? This tells me that you don't quite understand how perfect pitch is actually developed, and how the mechanisms behind the "pill" have shown results. If you read the research, you'd learn something and probably realize you don't understand perfect pitch correctly.

It's not developed.


The pill may well be able to produce relative pitch. But true perfect pitch cannot be taught.

Incorrect, and entirely false. A little bit of research (including the journal article at hand) will teach you that it can be taught, under certain parameters.

The more you know...

There's plenty I don't know about perfect pitch, and in no way do I claim to be an expert on the subject. But I am pretty confident that I am correct about what I have stated in this thread. I'm willing to be convinced I'm wrong.

I'm telling you that you're wrong. You can literally Google this subject right now and find that you're wrong. It only takes a little bit of time to learn so much :P

I suffer from Bipolar disorder and I have been on this medication and many others before. I don't know in what sense they are using it in this study, but most psychotropic medications are pretty bad deals in terms of treatment vs damage from side effects. This one is no exception. For what it is worth, I recommend avoiding these medications at all costs unless you desperately need them for serious and real psychiatric symptoms. Even then, please don't end up with a long term dependence if you can at all help it - you will pay very dearly.

Perfect pitch may be very challenging to teach later in life, however the notion that it's entirely genetic has been practically debunked. It's more likely the case that past the so-called critical period of life (0-12 years) when the brain is very plastic and prepared to learn languages, and without early exposure to the tones of the Western tuning system and their corresponding letter names, learning it later in life becomes extremely hard. It would be as difficult as improving your functional memory or learning a tone language. Not impossible, but very challenging. Surely, some people with exceptional memories or language skills from birth would have an easier time learning perfect pitch than others at any age, but theoretically all humans are equipped with the hardware to learn it and so it shouldn't be off limits to the vast majority of children if they were taught with effective methods. Learning to recognize intonation and assign it meaning is a basic function of language.

Therefore a dodgy chemical may not be necessary here. Even as an adult, depending on your level of musical exposure in your life and how dedicated you are, it's possible to develop a set of skills functionally indistinguishable from perfect pitch that are focused around a good pitch memory. This is what I have done, and I know that I'm one of many who have succeeded at this. I wouldn't guarantee it can work for everyone, because your starting pitch memory needs to be pretty solid already and improving memory itself is very challenging. However, if you are decent at remembering tunes on key some or most of the time, or decently close (to within 1 to 2 semitones), then with practice you can identify tones by ear. At that point the limit then is really dependent on your dedication. With practice, theory knowledge, and relative pitch skills, you can go much further such as identifying entire harmonies and transcribing music.

Would it kill you to do some research on the matter, instead of being instantly dismissive?

Not literally, but it probably would kill his post count from 4456 to some 100 in total! :P

Now, on the subject at hand, I don't have perfect pitch nor I'd like to acquire it. That's all from my part!

I'm with Poly.

BTW, FWIW this article misspells the name of the drug.

I'd bet my string of poloponies that this is BS (if I had poloponies).
In fact, having worked with this drug for about 30 years, I'd bet my bippy and a string of poloponies. There is absolutely no way that this drug can do a danged thing to help anyone have "perfect pitch."

I would agree that it's POSSIBLE (although still unlikely -- I'd still take the bet, although not for my bippy) ....possible that this could help someone learn to be better at recognizing intervals, i.e. be better at relative pitch. But merely better; not necessarily real good. Relative pitch and absolute pitch depend on things that have nothing whatsoever to do with anything that this drug can possibly do.


Sorry, whether he's at Harvard or at Close Cover Before Striking Academy for Temp Work, I'm calling BS on that -- at least if he's thinking of "perfect pitch" correctly.

BTW, before anyone starts taking the work more seriously than it deserves....have you looked at what the guy is?

"Professor of molecular and cellular biology"

How qualified does that make someone to do a study on a drug?
How qualified does it make him to measure learning?
How qualified does it make him to know what's what about something like "perfect pitch"?
Or to be able to judge the results of anything like this?

Answer: About zero.

When you have someone with no qualification to do something, and he comes up with a finding that seems pretty hard to believe.....well, I think it's not hard to finish this sentence.

+1

And I'll take it further: This claim for valproic acid isn't merely highly unlikely; it's perverse. Remember, the study doesn't claim that the stuff gives people perfect pitch. It only claims that it helps people be better able to learn perfect pitch, or more likely (I would guess) something sort of like perfect pitch.

But that's where we get into something that we already know about that drug: how it affects learning.

It doesn't help, but it can hurt. An exception is if the person has some real disorder that keeps him from being able to function at his normal level, and in that case, it doesn't make him "super"; it just brings him back toward his normal level, hopefully all the way up to it. But besides that kind of effect, if anything the drug impairs learning. One of its main side effects is to impair "cognitive functioning." It doesn't necessarily do that, but often it does. In any event it sure as heck doesn't help learning, nor anything else about cognition.

That's one of the things we know about valproic acid. I would suggest that it wouldn't be a bad idea for what we already know about it to be sort of starting point in understanding supposed research like this.

As well as (need I add) what we know about perfect pitch. Putting it all together, the claim is close to bizarre. At best, it is based on a misunderstanding of what perfect pitch means. At worst, it's just completely false. Assuming this isn't simple fraudulence, I suspect misunderstanding plus something like placebo effect -- and probably, small samples.

Someone with perfect pitch can tell you the note of a penny hitting the floor. They don't even have to try. It just comes to them as if their seeing the note name flash before their eyes. Relative pitch is memorizing certain notes or keys and being able to move around, counting half steps or whole steps, and determining the pitch based on that. The second one can be practiced or even taught. The first one can't. At least, you can't convince me it can. You might as well tell me there's a pill that can make me a chess savant. I think the author of the article just had an honest mistake of terms.

Thanks, Roland and Mark. I thought the reporting here was borderline irresponsible. The idea of taking such a drug for such a frivolous purpose would be absurd if it weren't dangerous.


(BTW of course I mean the article reporting, not Frycek!)

I appreciate those here who provided informative comments including from experience (thanks Roland) instead of just being insulting.