Welcome to the ZeroPP Club! That's 3 members so far and growing.

haha! 4/12. i think if my relative pitch is actually any good, i would have gotten 0/12, because i got the first one wrong and did relative pitch for the next 4 in a row (it was like Do-Mi-So-Ti or something right?), until the one which i actually can't identify the relative pitch and starting guessing all over again.

But this is for the PIANO. PIANO-PITCH does not equal PERFECT PITCH. Piano pitch is actually something you can train relatively easily because the harmonics of the piano sounds gives you "crutches" along the way. Better test would be to try a perfect sine wave or something.

For something this easy, i.e. within a couple octaves, you really should go 12/12. I've tested people who have perfect pitch, they can identify notes pretty much 100% within this range. In the extreme high registers, sometimes they miss by a semi-tone, but i kind of wonder if the piano is tuned right (because of anharmonics). Plus, as you age, your internal reference point apparently starts shifting lower, so notes appear higher than they really are. (or is it the other way around)

Yeap, for that test, somebody with perfect pitch should get 12/12 extremely easily. The harder ones are where they use sine wave samples at extreme registers as opposed to a piano tone.

What I want to know is of the people who actually train directly for perfect pitch (and have bad pitch to begin with), what percentage actually make significant progress?

Not many, and it's not important anyways. You can always listen to a recording, find a single note using an instrument and then start doing the rest with relative pitch. For people with perfect pitch, the tendency is to hear things as notes, C, F, G, C, and not as scale degrees - tonic, subdominant, dominant, tonic. The second is more important for you because you fill in harmony based on scale degrees, not note names.

I have several friends who teach little kids and do a solfege constantly (3 hours a day, because they teach group lessons). They have tried to be a PP person. None of them are successful.
I think it has something to do with age. The older you are, the more unlikely to be a PP person.

This is well studied. The answer is, next to none.

There is one guy I think in the 70s who was first to successfully train for perfect pitch. However, we do not know how much pitch recognition he has to begin with. I think his claim is that he did not.

A researcher did a study. He had subjects test for pitch recognition before and after training. Of the test subjects, which I think number in the 20s, only 1 guy achieved perfect pitch, i.e. scoring over 90% on his tests. However, his score before training was over 60% to begin with. I don't remember all the statistics from his studies.

Would you improve you pitch recognition through training? Yes. But few reach a standard of perfect pitch.

Lots of commercial software programs claim to help you achieve perfect pitch. They are more than likely bogus.

Could you be that 1% who achieve perfect pitch from the software? Maybe. Which is probably why people buy them.

Nothing special? Well, only that A440 is the standard pitch I grew up with, and that it's imprinted in my brain, to within a few cents. But no, other than that - nothing particularly special about that, you're quite right. Only problem is, it's the only pitch system my brain knows - and knows off by hand. For me, the awareness of pitch is just as present and conscious as the awareness of colour. By using the term "learn to accept", you imply that it's a voluntary act. Well sorry, it's not. Off-pitch music confounds me. Would you want to "learn to accept" a different "tuning" of your visual world where all colours were suddenly shifted to a different hue? Or a "re-tuning" of your olfactory world? Because someone told you that the smells and colours you perceive are really just arbitrary?

I didn't think so.

I don't want to accept other tuning practices, because they result in music that confuses and irritates me. (At least if I know the piece that's being played. If I don't know the piece, I'd just assume a different key - only to find myself irritated if I see the score afterwards.)



If I know the piece, especially if I've played it myself, e.g. a Brandenburg Concerto, then I follow the music very intensely: melodic and harmonic structure, etc. I know what to expect - in fact, I actually anticipate it. But in a historical tuning, my brain is continually bombarded with the "wrong" key, wrong harmonies, wrong melody notes. It actually causes me physical and psychological discomfort. This is highly regrettable, because I do enjoy the quality musicianship and fine interpretation of many historical performances!

I have made efforts, believe me. I own several historical recordings, and I love everything about them except their pitch. So, if I actually manage to accustom myself somewhat to historical pitch, and get grooving with the tuning, then as soon as I hear some music at modern pitch, or play something at my own piano, then it's as though my whole pitch system gets a serious jolt. This to-and-fro is really, really unpleasant, and nowadays I try to avoid it as far as possible.

Sorry, that's the best explanation I can give. For me, it's a reality, and it's certainly no more voluntary or arbitrary than the perception of colour, smell, taste or touch.

Sorry, my reading on this subject is quite some years back. I can't cite any direct sources off-hand. What I do remember, is searching the internet wide and far, starting with Wikipedia and search engines, using terms such as perfect pitch, pitch memory, pitch awareness, psycho-acoustics. This led me from one website to another, including various online tests for PP. I also contacted some researchers who were investigating the possible heridity of perfect pitch. (I'm the only one with PP in my family).

[Edit: So, sorry I can't be of better help. If you're serious about statements (and their sources) on developing our ears, I suggest you read up popular and scientific texts on psycho-acoustics. It's fascinating.]



Well, of course I had to learn the names of the keys first, before I could actually name them - kinda obvious, isn't it? I mean, how can you say the colour of a flower if you haven't been taught the name of the colour? If knowing names is "prior knowledge", then yes, I had prior knowledge. But what's your point?

What I meant, was this: I received normal music tuition, just like my brothers, first from my parents, then like all other music students at my school. No undue or special attention was given to note names. I learned them like everyone else. But at that stage, I could already recognise the notes or keys, I'm pretty sure of that. It's just that they got names. That's when I could actually call out the name of any note being played on any instrument, or go to the piano and repeat a note that was sung or played to me on another instrument. And I would immediately recognize an instrument that was below or above pitch, even though in tune with itself.

I'm over-simplifying, because all learning is gradual. My two-and-a-half year old son is starting to name colours. To get back to your "prior knowledge": is his brain actually and consistently recognizing "red" as "red", even though he still gets the name wrong sometimes? In fact, does the colour "red" really even feature in his brain before it is given the name "red"? Who will ever know?

So, I'll let you recognize red flowers with your "prior knowledge", and I'll keep recognizing "C" with mine.

After all, what's in a name? What smells (or sounds or looks or feels) as sweet...

I ran it four times, deliberately trying to work as fast as I could click. Yes, relative pitch does help, and yes, this frequency range is the easiest, but I got 12/12 in about 15 seconds, all four times. The sequence is not the same each time, by the way.

speaking of 440...

that standard is actually relatively recent. think only in the 1870s when some people in paris standardized A=440. and by an odd twist the english thought they meant A=445 or something. anyways, you can read it all on wikipedia on the interesting history of "pitch inflation".

america didn't adopt A=440 until middle of last century, i think. and when it happened, orchestra members were extremely resistant to it, since so many of them had perfect pitch. changing from say A=430 to A=440 is a big deal for people with perfect pitch.

Yes, just as big a deal as is changing from 440 to 430 or even 415. I've only ever played in orchestras using 440, with one exception: the first and only time I played in a Baroque Ensemble using historical tuning, it felt more like a "Broke" Ensemble.

toymachine, I generally agree with your characterization although I don't memorize quite as easily now as I'm getting older (secure memorization of classical music has multiple dimensions).

Mine is tied to instruments in a bizarre way that the researchers at UCSF said was pretty common. I often think in Bb when listening to orchestral music because of having spent many years playing french horn (after playing trumpet) - so I sometimes will swear that an orchestra is playing a C when it's Bb. I flip right back to concert pitch upon hearing a piano. The UCSF folks told me many pianists play a concert pitch orchestral instrument to avoid this crazy flip flopping.

Agree - benefits far outweigh these minor annoyances.

AP seems to be in fashion this month.

Octaves and Memory

Asians and Perfect Pitch




Yes indeed. The other misleading Meme with 10,000 in it. It even appears in the introduction of AP papers but of course reading the actual figures in the paper makes that number irrelevant

To qoute Ken’ichi Miyazaki
"However, this is an unreliable estimate without any empirical evidence and is likely to be cited to overstate the rarity of AP"

This number refers to the "general population" which is meaningless. Somewhere in the equation it has been estimated what percentage take music lessons. But the result of that guestimate has been clearly manipulated to make it a round number.


Typical results have similar figures to this.

"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.

Source: Oliver Sacks (Chapter from Musicophilia) Its legit. He works there.
http://www.columbia.edu/cu/alumni/Magazine/Fall2007/PitchPerfectMatch.html

So at best (age 4 or 5) given the prerequisite conditions, 16% for non-tonal speakers and 60% for tonal-language speakers. After that the figures drop. The non-tonal speakers plummet.

Its only rare if you're looking in the wrong place,like the general population. But that 10,000 number is quite punchy .



No, not really. Perfect scores are rare. There are plenty types of errors for AP subjects. I would ignore the ad-hoc definitions of what AP should be. It is not accurate, reliable, rare, relevant to music etc.....

"Absolute pitch is not ‘perfect’ pitch It is important to emphasize that AP possessors do not have an exceptional pitch acuity. Absolute pitch is neither
‘absolute’ nor ‘perfect’ in the ordinary uses of those words;‘absolute’ refers to judgments established independently,
rather than by comparison.
Levitin/Rogers

"Like most human traits, AP is not an all-or-none ability, but rather, exists along a continuum"

"AP possessors, who frequently make octave errors (confusing tones that are half or double the frequency), and semitone errors"

"Still, even those who score better than 90% show similar discrimination thresholds to, and are typically no better than, other musicians at noticing when one tone is out of tune with respect to another [11,17]. Clearly, there is nothing ‘perfect’ about AP; rather AP is the ability to place or produce tones within nominal categories."
Levitin/Rogers
http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/levitin/research/Levitin_Rogers_Tics.pdf

"black or white?" hehe you stumbled upon a type of error. The black key errors are common too. From memory I think G sharp is the most common error.





If you trying to weed out the mechanics on how AP works, yes, but as a test of AP it is totally out of context.

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

Ignoring pitch-class/chroma......

"AP listeners and non-AP listeners seem to be
equivalent in accuracy in identifying pitch height."
Ken’ichi Miyazaki
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/25/6/426/_pdf

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



Yes, I remember the fact but can't reference it. I think it was your perception shifts down by a semitone so a C# would be a C and so on.

That happened on my pc last year. I just reinstalled to drivers.

Exactly. It happens spontaneously. It had a citation somewhere .I remember someone trying to suggest AP subjects had deliberate training.

But an exception to the rule ..... in Japan for "prestige" they go out of their way and have specific training for kids (3 to 6 years) to retain AP. A figure of 50%+
Completely pointless for their musical education but people believe in silly things.
Source :Ken’ichi Miyazaki
http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ast/25/6/426/_pdf




It may be a certain brain-structure configuration (still genetic) that is common that has an influence. The external influence within the critical period is just as important though.

"A 1995 paper by Gottfried Schlaug and his colleagues showed that in musicians with absolute pitch (but not in musicians without) there was an exaggerated asymmetry between the volumes of the right and left planum temporale, structures in the brain that are important for the perception of speech and music. Similar asymmetries in the size and activity of the planum temporale have been shown in other people with absolute pitch.
Oliver Sacks


That ranges from genuine annoyance to "Moasting".

10,000... Meme...

I guess it's fitting for me to say IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAAAAAND!!!!!!

The thing about absolute pitch doesn't strike me as terribly different from the ability or not to hear (or make) differences in pronunciation for different languages. There are subtle distinctions in other languages that will change the meaning of a word that won't have any impact on meaning in English -- aspirated versus non-aspirated voiceless stops, for example. (Whether you puff your p, t, or k or not.) Since native English speakers grow up in a world where that distinction means nothing whatsoever, we simply lose the ability to hear it. "Pill" with an unaspirated p is just an oddly pronounced pill.

People in countries where they speak languages where that does matter (Korean as an example), will learn to hear it and quite handily. If you don't learn to hear it, you can't tell the difference between fire and grass. So they learn. Many English speakers can't hear the difference between an r and a d at the beginning of a Japanese word, either. "Rakuda" sounds exactly like "dakuda." Exactly.

They feel the same way about American r versus l. Doesn't change a thing in their world. Say the word "rakuda" as "lakuda" and it just comes across as a strangely pronounced camel. In English, though? Glass versus grass. Yep, that matters. So we learn to hear it. And while Japanese English learners can push themselves to hear the difference if they make special effort, it will ALWAYS be clumsy and prone to error, unless they were raised speaking it or have a natural "feel" for languages.

Is it genetic? Of course not. Each person merely lives in a world where they must learn to distinguish between the sounds that carry meaning -- and they never get a vacation from it. Ever.

The fact is that, unless a kid has a natural love of music and will pay mind to pitch even though it means nothing (some kids do), the absolute distinction of pitch means zip in anyone's daily life. Train yourself with software for five minutes a day all you want, but if it's not going to impact your job, your life, or whether you can correctly tell the cop what color the traffic light is, your brain just isn't going to care about it enough to hold on.

Hence, of course speakers of tonal languages have better pitch recognition -- pitch differences DO mean that they won't get their coffee back correctly if they don't say the right words. Pitch recognition isn't just a game to them -- it's survival in a day to day world, and it never stops.

Yes, some English speakers have it, just like some Japanese speakers can "get" r versus l. It's not magical ability, it's just that some people have a native enjoyment of languages, and so will pursue that distinction without being pushed to do so. I've had myriad experiences of being told that things just "come to me" naturally, when in reality, I find them so enjoyable in my mind that I get the heck up and go get them. I can hear the difference between Japanese r and d, and aspirated and non-aspirated stops. I don't have a genetic ability, I just love languages so much that I masticate the challenge until I've mastered it. It does take effort. The difference is that it's effort that I love to make, so I do it without prompting ... causing other people to say it just "came to me." *eyeroll*

Yes, AP is related to language. The cut-off point for AP is because of language
"the development of language necessitates the inhibition of absolute pitch. and only unusual conditions enable it to be retained. (The acquisition of a tonal language may be one of the unusual conditions that lead to the retention and perhaps heightening of absolute pitch"
Oliver Sacks

And the tonal language factor is undeniable.



It may be genetic.
I'm going to guess that your primary auditory cortex is bigger and is a more complex shape, in fact a different shape to normal folk.
Its very unlikely to have happened because of something that has to do with expertise. Its almost certainly to do in how your brain developed in the womb.
It does suggest that there may be some basic reason why some people might find the world of sound and speech more interesting

Not my words.

I heard this from the Guardian Science podcast a few weeks ago.
Phonetician's brain.
http://www.box.net/shared/l8ybj4crekx6l359nnd1
Professor Sophie Scott
The Guardian Science Podcast. 1st August 2011

If you ever have to get your brain scanned ..."primary auditory cortex".

move to germany. You would have a blast. I got 12 out of 12. So did my girlfriend. We both can sing a pitch like nodes on a line and it is never really wrong as it is just natural like being able to see blue and say that is blue without having red as a reference. But if you played it a bit sharper or flat, well if it is just a few cents , it might not be noticeable but when you start doing micro tunins , it gets confusing. IF someone plays a rather sharp C , the time it takes to calculate exactly what it is is much longer than just playing a C which would take 1 second.

You know you actually can train yourself to have perfect pitch.

Well there are certainly people who would tell you that you can, and take your money...

of course you can. It is just memory. It isn't some super power. My girlfriend developed perfect pitch by singing. She didn't have it as a kid. It grew out of needing to sing pitches and checking the tuning against the piano. You do that enough, you will get perfect pitch.

I think she developed perfect vocal (physical) memory for pitches.. can she identify the pitch of a truck's roar as it goes by? If she can within milliseconds (i.e., without having to use her vocal memory to check its pitch by singing it or by thinking about how it would feel in her vocal cords to sing it), then she probably has perfect pitch.

A PP people still need to compare what they heard to what in their memory. However, the process is close to immediately. If it takes move than, say, two seconds, they do not have perfect pitch.

nice test!

someone who really does have perfect pitch should get 12/12 every time and complete the test within 10 seconds, with no reference pitches.

many people just "say" they have it, or have to think about it before they name the note.

anyone know of a sine wave test?

This thread, like every other thread on absolute/perfect/whatever pitch that's ever existed, has become comedy. We can't even agree what the h*ll it is, and we're asking ourselves detailed questions about it?

Is a unicorn's hair straight or curly? Let's go back and forth on this for three pages, too. o_O

Straight, as I understand.

BTW, sometimes people say, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? But they never define how big the pin is.....

Another couple pages of this topic, and I'll be ready to stick that pin in my eye.