A New Absolute Pitch Thread

[JeffLearman]

The thing about words is, they don't always mean the same thing to everyone. I'm sure there are different things we call "perfect pitch". They have in common the ability to know a note out of context, but how the mind works to do that can be very different.

 

Just as some people have innate math abilities like the ability to identify prime numbers immediately or calculate exact square roots of enormous numbers, I'm sure some people have innate musical abilities that are not learnable by the rest of us, no matter what happens in our infancy.

 

Our minds are *not* all alike at birth. There's plenty of evidence. If you're interested, read "The Blank Slate" by Steven Pinker.

 

Our minds are remarkably plastic, though, and have an amazing ability to adapt and learn.

 

I'm confident that there is both learned absolute pitch and inherent absolute pitch, and I doubt the experiences are similar, even though the results of a simple test might be. More sophisticated tests would likely be able to detect objective differences in the abilities.

 

BTW, that Bflat the earth hums is what, 12 octaves below middle C? And I guess there's a Bflat the universe hums too, and it's WAY down there!

 

How high does absolute pitch go? Can you identify pitches above 10K (if you can still hear them)? I can hear pitches up there (not real ones, tinnitus) but I couldn't begin to associate pitches with them.

 

Oops sorry mentioning tinnitus. I never hear it unless I think about it!

[iLaw]

BTW, that Bflat the earth hums is what, 12 octaves below middle C? And I guess there's a Bflat the universe hums too, and it's WAY down there!

Perhaps I was being too literary. When I said that "the world hums a B half-flat" I was talking about the ordinary (North American) 60-cycle electric current powered world. Sit perfectly still and it's a near certainty that, unless you're living in Ted Kaczynski's old place, there's a 60-cycle hum lurking in your background noise (I'm getting it off the computer fan right now).

 

That's the ordinary everyday non-cosmic B half-flat I'm talking about.

 

Larry.

[Cygnus64]

 

Here's my theory: there may be people out there with "absolute smell" and "absolute taste". They don't know it and we don't know they have it because there is no way to express it as tangibly as we can express frequency. There is no "smell language", there is no way to put into words how weak or how strong one's taste or smell is, unless one has a condition that takes away those senses.

 

When I do symphony gigs, someone always announces "don't wear cologne or perfume because some are sensitive to it". I always assumed those people were just a$$holes. Maybe they DO have some sort of super-smell, and I have no point of reference because I don't. In fact, maybe my sense of taste and smell is subpar due to having the super-pitch. It could be that those with PP have it because the other senses are weaker. A fine wine was totally lost on me. That might have been because I was an alkie, but I really couldn't see the justification between buying a fine wine or a bottle of Thunderbird. The same with things like uber-fancy chocolates. My gal loves buying fancypants coffee, I would be perfectly fine with Folgers.

 

I always thought some foodies were pretentious snobs to an extent. In thinking about it, this might be how people are viewing those with PP. It's all about point of reference, and maybe those foodies can taste something I can't that makes the cost of a fancypants meal worth the price. Likewise, maybe the PP people can hear something that others can't.

 

 

[SK]

I always assumed those people were just a$$holes.

Well, then maybe some people can detect a$$holes better than others. (Not sure what that means either, but it needed to be said...)

 

[iLaw]

Here's my theory: there may be people out there with "absolute smell" and "absolute taste". They don't know it and we don't know they have it because there is no way to express it as tangibly as we can express frequency. There is no "smell language", there is no way to put into words how weak or how strong one's taste or smell is, unless one has a condition that takes away those senses.

I like your analogy, but I think it points the other way.

 

In the context that we're talking about here, "absolute ..." means (1) recognition (i.e. identification based on comparison with a stored long-term memory for the stimulus) plus (2) associating a label with that memory. So I would contend that the majority of the population has a fairly high degree of both "absolute smell" and "absolute taste."

 

For example, my younger daughter, if presented with a dozen unlabeled sample strips of perfumes could easily identify all twelve as quickly as someone with absolute pitch could identify twelve pitches. Starts to sound like "absolute smell" to me. Could she pick out the constituent perfumes in a perfume cluster? Interesting test. I might run it.

 

Was she born with "absolute smell"? Yes and no, just like absolute pitch. She was born with the ability to discriminate between different stimuli and form a memory image, to which she was later (having acquired language) able to attach a label.

 

FYI, she favors Guerlain.

 

Larry.

 

[Cygnus64]

So I would contend that the majority of the population has a faily high degree of both "absolute smell" and "absolute taste."

 

 

 

There's no such thing as "fairly high" in regards to perfect pitch. The same might be true with "perfect smell" or "super-smell", I have no idea because I have no point of reference.

 

I think you've hit on the difference between how most people view PP and how people with PP view PP. People without it think those who have it have a fairly high degree of it. For those who have it there are no degrees: you have it or don't have it, it's that black and white.

 

FYI, she favors Guerlain.

 

I just googled it, great googly moogly! Is this the daughter who aspires to be an opera singer? If so, break her of this habit STAT, and get her hooked on something she can afford in the future. I fancy Old Spice: Manly yes, but ladies like it tooooo.

[iLaw]

... Is this the daughter who aspires to be an opera singer?

Yep. Ended up at Eastman (thanks for remembering).

 

If she's going to be a starving opera singer for the rest of her life, the least I can do is pop for a bottle of L'Heure Bleue!

 

Larry.

 

[Cygnus64]

Yep. Ended up at Eastman

 

 

Outstanding. She'll be a frosh in the fall, correct? She'll be able to use her super-smell in Rochester, the last time I was there it stunk pretty bad.

the least I can do is pop for a bottle of L'Heure Bleue!

 

Get her a bottle of this too, it's name is very clever.

clonk

[iLaw]

For those who have it there are no degrees: you have it or don't have it, it's that black and white.

I agree that, for those who have it to that degree, there are no degrees (how's that for sounding like a lawyer!). The problem with that analysis is that it cannot account for such things as:

 

- people who can consistently pull a 50%-60% correct on a pitch identification test, when chance would give them less than 10% correct. By your test they do not have AP. OK, but if not, what do we call it? (in the lab we called it "pretty good pitch" or occasionally "really good pitch"). If Funkman's self-assessment (earlier in this thread) is correct, he'd pull a 33.3%. What's that?;

 

- people who can consistently pull a 100% correct on a pitch identification test on their major instrument, but then fall way down when presented with pitches having a less familiar timbre?

 

The second problem, by the way, is why I was pulled in to set up the ARP 2600. Sine waves generated by a standard bench oscillator were not giving the same test results as actual instruments, and various researchers suspected that the upper-harmonic content of the pitch was significant (in the statistical sense). The researcher I was working with wanted to test for variance correlated with waveforms that more closely resembled actual instruments, yet had the controllability of lab gear and I was good at making the ARP 2600 resemble other instruments.

 

That was in the middle 70s, pre-sampler. Later, Diana Deutsch just started using a Kurzweil.

 

Larry.

 

[iLaw]

She'll be able to use her super-smell in Rochester, the last time I was there it stunk pretty bad.

I'll tell her you said so and report back tomorrow with her Cleveland-bashing response.

 

Larry.

 

[Cygnus64]

- people who can consistently pull a 50%-60% correct on a pitch identification test, when chance would give them less than 10% correct. By your test they do not have AP. OK, but if not, what do we call it? (in the lab we called it "pretty good pitch" or occasionally "really good pitch");

 

 

 

Yeah, good pitch or even great pitch.

 

- people who can consistently pull a 100% correct on a pitch identification test on their major instrument, but then fall way down when presented with pitches having a less familiar timbre?

 

Same as above.

 

 

[Cygnus64]

She'll be able to use her super-smell in Rochester, the last time I was there it stunk pretty bad.

I'll tell her you said so and report back tomorrow with her Cleveland-bashing response.

 

Larry.

 

Oh, I just assumed that's why she didn't pick CIM. With her super-smell, she got a good whiff of Cleveland and knew she couldn't go to school here.

[Michelle ggurl]

In the lab we had to watch out for the problem, however, because it was well-known in music school that the world hums a B half-flat.

 

Really? I had an improv teacher in music school who was convinced the earth's rotation caused it to hum Eb. He was pretty avant garde in his approach and for a few years there, he'd host an "Eb festival". There would be an audible Eb drone for people to come and improvise, anything, around it. Painters, dancers, musicians, performance artists, all coming out to pay their tribute and add their spice to the life in Eb.

[Theo Verelst]

Perfect pitch could be that a song in let's say a could come full circle with all the harmonics reverberating through a stadium after the last note exactly, to the (low and high) wave accurate.

[d halfnote]

To address a tangential question in the other thread, tonal languages, wherein pitch inflections affect word meaning, are not confined to languages of the Far East.

Just reading abt sub-Saharan Ituti Pymgy music & apparently "many" Central Afr languges are tonal.

[d halfnote]

Here's my theory: there may be people out there with "absolute smell" and "absolute taste". They don't know it and we don't know they have it because there is no way to express it as tangibly as we can express frequency. There is no "smell language"...

Actually there are ppl who make their living based on their ability to recognize & describe, in fine detail, their olfactory & taste sensations.

They range from testers in distilleries to quality-control techs for perfume producers to those who develop flavors for commercial food operations.

 

The range & degree of human sense recognition is not as acute perhaps as in "lesser" animals but it's still deeper than most of us exercise.