OT? Perfect pitch: Sorry, it ain't perfect

[Steve Nathan]

1 minute ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

Is it something other than remembering pitch (or a small range of pitches)?

Yes

[Floyd Tatum]

2 minutes ago, Steve Nathan said:

Yes

Go on.   🙂

 

If you're used to A=440, and you hear an orchestra playing at 435, how does that sound to you?

 

[Steve Nathan]

1 minute ago, Floyd Tatum said:

Go on.   🙂

 

In my previous posts, I tried to explain it, (clearly unsuccessfully again),  and then said that I've NEVER been able to convey it to anyone.  I've had many conversations with other people who truly do have it (and not just the tonal memory thing you seem fixated on), and they confirm sharing my experience. That's all I got for ya.

[CEB]

41 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

I just read that University of Chicago page, and it seems to line up exactly with my original description.

 

The point I was making, is these people who can sing an "A" on cue, are remembering a pitch that is arbitrarily chosen, and then given the name "A".   That, to me, seems to be the crux of the thing.   It's not like there's an objective "A".   So, the people that can sing an "A", are able to remember the pitches of the "A's" they've heard, within some range of hertz or cents.   The range of hertz/cents is the thing I questioned.    This all seems readily apparent. 

My wife does this.  I’m not sure what it is called.  The only difference is she would called the  “A” a “B”.  She lives in the world of Bb instruments. 

[Floyd Tatum]

8 minutes ago, Steve Nathan said:

In my previous posts, I tried to explain it, (clearly unsuccessfully again),  and then said that I've NEVER been able to convey it to anyone.  I've had many conversations with other people who truly do have it (and not just the tonal memory thing you seem fixated on), and they confirm sharing my experience. That's all I got for ya.

So, I'm "spouting on a topic with just my opinion and no basis in the science", but you can't explain why.   Got it.   It's not a problem, really.

 

I'm still confident about my original post - pitch memory must essentially be a function of memory.   If I see something to convince me otherwise, I'll change my position on that.

 

 

[ElmerJFudd]

There have been an awful lot of great players who have perfect pitch.  It does make certain things easier.  It can make learning instruments easier.  However there have been many great players without the pitch perception as well, although they surely developed a very strong sense of relative pitch whether they realized it or not.  
 

In the end, who gives a sh;t?  Work with what you were given and devote as much time as you can to the craft.  That’s all we can do.  

[MathOfInsects]

35 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

Is it something other than remembering a frequency (or within a small range of frequencies)?

It's not remembering. It's "perceiving as." Same as when you see yellow, you don't "remember" it as the thing called yellow, you perceive its yellowness.

I'll just answer the other thing here since I'm here now.

 

I am going shorthand some stuff that is more nuanced than I am making it.

Eyes and ears work differently. Vision is much more efficient, in that the calculation to tell the brain what to make of a certain set of wavelengths is done essentially at the source--the eye. Then that information is sent downstream to the brain precooked. "Hi, brain, yellow is here."

 

Yellow is yellow always and forever. It's yellow before we even know we saw it. 

Ears work a bit differently. The waves disturb these little hairs that each respond to different sets of frequencies, and that disturbance essentially opens a trap door to a nerve impulse that tells the brain something has been heard. Then the interpretation is done later--downstream, in the brain. So not, "Brain, A is here." But rather, "Brain, this whole bunch of info is here, do with with what you need."
 

We do lots of stuff with that information once it's received, one of which is to shuffle the mental rolodex and see if it's a thing we already know. "Knowing" is where the science/memory divide gets dodgy, because it means is, we check if there are any familiar synaptic pathways for this information, and if there is, we then associate those with the names or ideas we have about them. So it's neuroscience, and also, "retrieval."

We do hear a general relationship between wavelength and the highness or lowness of pitch we perceive from it. But there is nothing "A" about 440, except inasmuch as we in the west have agreed to call that frequency by the name "A," and some are able to associate the pitch they perceive with the names they know for them. 

As @Steve Nathan says, there is nothing "not-A" about 442 or 438; we know that stretch of frequencies is roughly the one we have given the name "A" to.

Our Western tradition is one of many tuning and musical traditions across time and across the globe. Each one comes with its own names for things. Not all are so aggressively scale- or pitch-based as ours. Many have no absolute pitches at all, and instead are concerned with the relationship between pitches--highness or lowness relative to one another.

In fact, we in the west chose a sort of arbitrary subset of the octave to give names to, and ignored more than we named. It's weird, actually. But in between the ones we named, are infinite ones we didn't. Those all mean something, we just don't have them in our musical-scale rolodex under a certain name. Others do.

So the names we do give, are "arbitrary," broadly speaking. We all agree to hear this pitch as "A," and our brains have learned to file that information away as important. Then when 440 happens in a musical context, we "hear" it based on the name we know for it. 

If our tradition were to call 460 A (and there are plenty of other ways to divide an octave that give nice consonant multiples), we would "hear" that as A instead, because what are actually doing is sending information to the brain and saying, "Here, see if there's already a name for this thing." In that case, there would be.

Did that clarify or obscure?

[Floyd Tatum]

2 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

It's not remembering. It's "perceiving as." Same as when you see yellow, you don't "remember" it as the thing called yellow, you perceive its yellowness.

I'll just answer the other thing here since I'm here now.

 

I am going shorthand some stuff that is more nuanced than I am making it.

Eyes and ears work differently. Vision is much more efficient, in that the calculation to tell the brain what to make of a certain set of wavelengths is done essentially at the source--the eye. Then that information is sent downstream to the brain precooked. "Hi, brain, yellow is here."

 

Yellow is yellow always and forever. It's yellow before we even know we saw it. 

Ears work a bit differently. The waves disturb these little hairs that each respond to different sets of frequencies, and that disturbance essentially opens a trap door to a nerve impulse that tells the brain something has been heard. Then the interpretation is done later--downstream, in the brain. So not, "Brain, A is here." But rather, "Brain, this whole bunch of info is here, do with with what you need."
 

We do lots of stuff with that information once it's received, one of which is to shuffle the mental rolodex and see if it's a thing we already know. "Knowing" is where the science/memory divide gets dodgy, because it means is, we check if there are any familiar synaptic pathways for this information, and if there is, we then associate those with the names or ideas we have about them. So it's neuroscience, and also, "retrieval."

We do hear a general relationship between wavelength and the highness or lowness of pitch we perceive from it. But there is nothing "A" about 440, except inasmuch as we in the west have agreed to call that frequency by the name "A," and some are able to associate the pitch they perceive with the names they know for them. 

As @Steve Nathan says, there is nothing "not-A" about 442 or 438; we know that stretch of frequencies is roughly the one we have given the name "A" to.

Our Western tradition is one of many tuning and musical traditions across time and across the globe. Each one comes with its own names for things. Not all are so aggressively scale- or pitch-based as ours. Many have no absolute pitches at all, and instead are concerned with the relationship between pitches--highness or lowness relative to one another.

In fact, we in the west chose a sort of arbitrary subset of the octave to give names to, and ignored more than we named. It's weird, actually. But in between the ones we named, are infinite ones we didn't. Those all mean something, we just don't have them in our musical-scale rolodex under a certain name. 

So the names we do give, are "arbitrary," broadly speaking. We all agree to hear this pitch as "A," and our brains have learned to file that information away as important. Then when 440 happens in a musical context, we "hear" it based on the name we know for it. 

If our tradition were to call 460 A (and there are plenty of other ways to divide an octave that give nice consonant multiples), we would "hear" that as A instead, because what are actually doing is sending information to the brain and saying, "Here, see if there's already a name for this thing." In that case, there would be.

Did that clarify or obscure?

 

It clarifies.   You are essentially saying that you are able to remember certain frequency ranges, which is what I said in my original post.   It can't be compared to colour - nearly everyone can identify colour.   Pitch is something different - only a small percentage of the population have the ability to remember pitches.   Saying "anyone can do it" is, I think, not quite correct - only a small percentage have that ability.

[MathOfInsects]

1 minute ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

It clarifies.   You are essentially saying that you are able to remember certain frequency ranges, which is what I said in my original post.   It can't be compared to colour - nearly everyone can identify colour.   Pitch is something different - only a small percentage of the population have the ability to remember pitches.   Saying "anyone can do it" is, I think, not quite correct - only a small percentage have that ability.

I really am not saying that. It does not have to do with memory in the way you are using the term. However, don’t forget, in my first response I confirmed that the place you ended up at is closer to perfect pitch than the premise you started with.

[Floyd Tatum]

3 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

In my first response I confirmed that the place you ended up at is closer to perfect pitch than the premise you started with.

 

?  I don't understand that sentence - please explain.

[Floyd Tatum]

Let me just state - I'm not dismissing the ability to remember pitches - far from it.   I'm simply stating a logical axiom.   Pitch is defined, basically, as (fundamental) frequency in hz.  Yeah, I know there's a psycho-acoustic component, but, blah, blah.   It's basically frequency.   Some are able to hear a frequency, and know that it matches (within in some probably-unknown-at-this-point-range) a frequency they have heard before.   That is called memory.    That's all I'm saying.    Some have this memory of pitches, most don't.

 

[Steve Nathan]

5 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

   Some have this memory of pitches, most don't.

 

Again, you (and most everyone) are fixated on a tiny part of this condition.  Pitch "memory" is a symptom, not the condition.  It's not the big picture, far from it.

[nursers]

12 minutes ago, Steve Nathan said:

Again, you (and most everyone) are fixated on a tiny part of this condition.  Pitch "memory" is a symptom, not the condition.  It's not the big picture, far from it.

 

 

Agreed - I don't have perfect pitch but as MOI and Steve have said, it's perception not memory, which can be two very different things. When I've interviewed players with perfect pitch what's struck me the most clearly is the fundamental perceptual nature of it i.e. when a keyboard is transposed the player does not like it at all, not because they 'remember' the pitch ascribed to that key on the keyboard, but because when they perceive both the visual (the key being pressed) and the auditory (the sound heard), there's a perceptual dissonance. I'm probably not grasping it anywhere near fully either...

[David Emm]

I've been told that I have relative perfect pitch, which is useful. I can't name a pitch upon hearing it like the 'perfect' crowd, but I know when things are being presented in proper tuning and thus on the mark. You could argue the point concerning some of my compositions, but at least they're cohesive. That's why I furrow my brow when someone is singing in the key of H-flat. Its also more obvious when my dog scratches to be let out and whines. Its not to pee; its pop singers veering around and making her squirm. Sometimes I go out with her, too. Just watch a local "talent" show. You'll be out in the yard, scratching your back on a tree like a bear. See you there!

[MathOfInsects]

40 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

Let me just state - I'm not dismissing the ability to remember pitches - far from it.   I'm simply stating a logical axiom.   Pitch is defined as frequency in hz.   Some are able to hear a frequency, and know that it matches (within in some probably-unknown-at-this-point-range) a frequency they have heard before.   That is called memory.    That's all I'm saying.    Some have this memory of pitches, most don't.

 

This is indeed what you are saying, but is not accurate. This phenomenon is not about memory. It is about "perceiving as..."

I may have muddied the water a little with the rolodex metaphor. The sifting the brain does to determine if input is familiar or not happens way before anything gets to the "remembering" brain. It's lower-brain stuff, and tells us if something is a danger or not. 

 

You are describing higher brain stuff. The thing that happens when we "hear" a song in our head that we've heard before is pitch-memory. We do hear that in key almost all the time, and almost all of us. That's not quite the same as perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is not "memory" any more than walking outside and feeling cold is "memory" of cold. It's perception. Then we use thinking brain, later (fractions of fractions of a second later, but farther downstream) to put the name to it.

Not everyone has the mechanism to connect perceived pitch with part of us that knows names for pitch-spaces. Everyone has the potential for it, not everyone does it actively.

 

That is not memory. You're on the wrong track.

 

[Finale]

Anyone who thinks has perfect pitch or not should read about the Tritone Paradox and/or try the exercise (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8FjZ5NHzeM).

[MathOfInsects]

17 minutes ago, Dr Nursers said:

 

 

Agreed - I don't have perfect pitch but as MOI and Steve have said, it's perception not memory, which can be two very different things. When I've interviewed players with perfect pitch what's struck me the most clearly is the fundamental perceptual nature of it i.e. when a keyboard is transposed the player does not like it at all, not because they 'remember' the pitch ascribed to that key on the keyboard, but because when they perceive both the visual (the key being pressed) and the auditory (the sound heard), there's a perceptual dissonance. I'm probably not grasping it anywhere near fully either...

I have to disconnect the wiring to do this, and funny enough, once it's off, it's OFF. I have to decide not to hear it as pitches but as sounds or "moves" or abstract harmonic structure, for that song. 

[Floyd Tatum]

9 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

This is indeed what you are saying, but is not accurate. This phenomenon is not about memory. It is about "perceiving as..."

I may have muddied the water a little with the rolodex metaphor. The sifting the brain does to determine if input is familiar or not happens way before anything gets to the "remembering" brain. It's lower-brain stuff, and tells us if something is a danger or not. 

 

You are describing higher brain stuff. The thing that happens when we "hear" a song in our head that we've heard before is pitch-memory. We do hear that in key almost all the time, and almost all of us. That's not quite the same as perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is not "memory" any more than walking outside and feeling cold is "memory" of cold. It's perception. Then we use thinking brain, later (fractions of fractions of a second later, but farther downstream) to put the name to it.

Not everyone has the mechanism to connect perceived pitch with part of us that knows names for pitch-spaces. Everyone has the potential for it, not everyone does it actively.

 

That is not memory. You're on the wrong track.

 

Bafflegab.

[ElmerJFudd]

The memory comes into play when naming the pitches. The same as you learned to give names to colors.   Otherwise you would still perceive these things, but not know what to call them.   
 

Another interesting comparison for example are those who are colorblind.   They do not perceive color in the same way as those who do.   For them, it is a decreased ability to see differences between colors.   While perfect pitch appears to be an increased ability to differentiate between pitches.  

[MathOfInsects]

7 minutes ago, MathOfInsects said:

This phenomenon is not about memory. It is about "perceiving as..."

 

I will say that only once in my life (alas, because I've wanted it to happen again), I was sitting at my speakers late at night, and a sound came on, and I experienced "E"--not a sound I knew was E, that happens all the time. But an E as its own thing in the world. I'm not sure how else to describe this. It was an experience I've never had before or since, and felt like what I gather people sometimes experience while hallucinating. (That's why they synesthesia comment above was interesting to me.) It wasn't sound. It was a state of being. Then as my brain started to try to sort it out it faded back into "the sound of E" again.

 

It was awesome.

[Finale]

28 minutes ago, Dr Nursers said:

when a keyboard is transposed the player does not like it at all, not because they 'remember' the pitch ascribed to that key on the keyboard, but because when they perceive both the visual (the key being pressed) and the auditory (the sound heard), there's a perceptual dissonance.

A fun thing is to create a keyboard program with negative pitch slope and to try to play it for more than one minute. So with 88 keys, A0 = C8 and vice-versa, etc.

[Floyd Tatum]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

This is indeed what you are saying, but is not accurate. This phenomenon is not about memory. It is about "perceiving as..."

I may have muddied the water a little with the rolodex metaphor. The sifting the brain does to determine if input is familiar or not happens way before anything gets to the "remembering" brain. It's lower-brain stuff, and tells us if something is a danger or not. 

 

You are describing higher brain stuff. The thing that happens when we "hear" a song in our head that we've heard before is pitch-memory. We do hear that in key almost all the time, and almost all of us. That's not quite the same as perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch is not "memory" any more than walking outside and feeling cold is "memory" of cold. It's perception. Then we use thinking brain, later (fractions of fractions of a second later, but farther downstream) to put the name to it.

Not everyone has the mechanism to connect perceived pitch with part of us that knows names for pitch-spaces. Everyone has the potential for it, not everyone does it actively.

 

That is not memory. You're on the wrong track.

 

So, if I go outside, and it's cold, I know it's cold.   But, can I state the temperature, within fractions of a degree?   Most people, I would venture to guess, could identify the temperature within several degrees.    I could think to myself, "Brrr,  it's cold.  It's gotta be somewhere around -5".    (23 to you Americans)

Would I be accurate?   Probably not.  I'd probably be somewhere within plus or minus 10 degrees F.     Who knows, maybe there is some small percentage of the population that can be spot-on plus or minus a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit.   See what I mean?       Call it memory, call it perception.     I call it memory.     The point is, most people don't have a thermometer implanted in their brain.   And most people don't have a built-in pitch pipe.

 

[elsongs]

8 hours ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I've mentioned this before, but the topic came up again for me, so I thought I'd say it again.  A better name for "perfect pitch" would be "pitch memory".   

 

I never thought of it that way, but you do have a point. Like you, I have great relative pitch. But not Perfect Pitch. That said, I can hum a perfect "C," "E" (Because I've heard those pitches so many times - i.e. scales, tuning guitars, etc.) and "F#" (Because it's the first note in A-ha's "Take on Me" synth melody and I can play back the melody in my head).  Maaaaybe I can hum a perfect A, but not as confidently. As far as the rest of the notes, I'm lost right there.

[drawback]

Thank god I can only describe this as tinnitus.

[nursers]

An interesting article that teases out the difference between memory and perception (albeit from a visual perspective):

 

https://www.wired.com/story/how-your-brain-distinguishes-memories-from-perceptions/

[Floyd Tatum]

47 minutes ago, elsongs said:

I never thought of it that way, but you do have a point. Like you, I have great relative pitch. But not Perfect Pitch. That said, I can hum a perfect "C," "E" (Because I've heard those pitches so many times - i.e. scales, tuning guitars, etc.) and "F#" (Because it's the first note in A-ha's "Take on Me" synth melody and I can play back the melody in my head).  Maaaaybe I can hum a perfect A, but not as confidently. As far as the rest of the notes, I'm lost right there.

It's interesting that you said that.   When I read that, I thought of the melody of the first lyrics of "Take On Me", and kept it in my head, then looked up Take On Me on Youtube, to see if I was right or not.   And wouldn't you know it, I was right!   So, in some rare cases, I do have pitch memory.    But not like some people.   (Then again, it could have just been luck - after that I tried to remember the beginning of Hey Jude, looked it up on Youtube, and I was wrong.  So, yeah.)

I still couldn't tell you what note the first note of Take On Me was, unless I went to the piano, or happened to know what key it was in.    I still call my ability to conjure up the sound of "Take On Me" as memory.

[AnotherScott]

2 hours ago, jazzpiano88 said:

I have something related to perfect pitch but not sure what you would call it.    I know what the white notes are and can hum them because I know what they sound like.    If someone said hum a C#, I would need to make the mental jump to hum a C and then use relative pitch to get there.  I don't have a C# sitting in my memory of sounds.

 

It's not as reliable now as I've gotten older.   Some say age make you lose it.   I used to have trouble playing transposed  because my internal pitch was inconsistent with what I was playing and I'd end up playing the right keys, non transposed, creating a train wreck.

 

That's not to far off from my personal "pitch status" as well, though I think I'm a step behind you. I don't exactly hum a C out of the blue (or I don't trust myself to be sure it's a C), rather if you asked me to hum a C, I would think of Paul McCartney singing the opening note of "Hey Jude", and I'd have my C more confidently in my head, "appearing" to hum it out of the blue, but taking it from a reference memory as a cue. And as you say, with relative pitch, I can get anywhere else from there. My occasional limitation here just comes from my weak vocal chops. Sometimes I "hear" the right note in my head, but in trying to sing it, the first pitch that comes out of my mouth doesn't match what was in my head, and I can then lose my bearings. I've thought that I should practice this, and I'd probably get better at making that first pitch match what I want it to be... but then I think, why bother, it doesn't provide any needed benefit, it's pretty much just a parlor trick anyway. 😉

 

And if someone hits any key on a piano... I may not be certain what it is... until they hit a C. That one I recognize for sure, and once I've got that, again, relative pitch lets me easily identify any notes from that point on.

 

And yes, playing transposed can be tricky. I'm okay within a whole step, but if I transpose beyond that, it starts to feel really weird, and if I don't stay focussed, I can end up hitting the "real" chord I want instead of the transposed chord that would audibly generate the correct sound.

[Floyd Tatum]

8 minutes ago, Dr Nursers said:

An interesting article that teases out the difference between memory and perception:

 

https://www.wired.com/story/how-your-brain-distinguishes-memories-from-perceptions/

I would say they're similar, but not the same.    Memory can get very distorted.   I'll give you an example.    When I was around 12, I had a paper route.   One of my stops was an apartment building.   You went inside, then the apartments were arrayed around a sort of "central courtyard, or at least that was the way I remembered it.   I remembered that "central courtyard" as being perhaps 50 to 100 feet across, and just as high.   Not sure why I remembered it so vividly, but I did.

Well, guess what.   I moved back to the town I grew up in, and one day, just for the hell of it, I went back to that apartment building and had a look.   The "central courtyard" was about 10 feet across, if that.   My memory was distorted, exaggerated, and wrong.    So, memory and perception may be similar, but they are not the same.

[nursers]

6 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I would say they're similar, but not the same.    Memory can get very distorted.   I'll give you an example.    When I was around 12, I had a paper route.   One of my stops was an apartment building.   You went inside, then the apartments were arrayed around a sort of "central courtyard, or at least that was the way I remembered it.   I remembered that "central courtyard" as being perhaps 50 to 100 feet across, and just as high.   Not sure why I remembered it so vividly, but I did.

Well, guess what.   I moved back to the town I grew up in, and one day, just for the hell of it, I went back to that apartment building and had a look.   The "central courtyard" was about 10 feet across, if that.   My memory was distorted, exaggerated, and wrong.    So, memory and perception may be similar, but they are not the same.

That's right - and that's what the article discusses - there was a view for a time that they were but science shows they aren't

[Floyd Tatum]

14 minutes ago, Dr Nursers said:

That's right - and that's what the article discusses - there was a view for a time that they were but science shows they aren't

And yet - some people's memory of pitches seems to be very accurate.   Interesting.