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

[jazzpiano88]

Rick Beato posits that  perfect pitch capability goes away with age based on empirical data.

I have definitely noticed it.

 

It would be interesting to hear from Steve Nathan if he can confirm or deny this assertion.

 

It would also be interesting if the current scientific literature and the current state of the art knowledge is consistent or inconsistent with Rick's assertion.  

[AROIOS]

In my experience, it's always been the musically illiterate who make a big deal out of having so called "Perfect Pitch" or better worded, "Absolute Pitch".

I've always found that "talent" utterly useless. In the frequency domain, music is mostly about "Relative Pitch". Who cares if a "prodigy" child always hears a 440hz sine wave as "A"? A $20 tuner does that 100x better than any humans ever could.

What we need is the boy prodigy to identify "400hz->600hz", "440hz->660hz", "480hz->720hz" all as perfect 5ths. Without that ability, he's practically tone deaf. And I've seen plenty of these "Perfect Pitch" prodigies who can't tell a C triad from a Cmaj9.

[Docbop]

What I've read or heard people are born with perfect pitch, but some have developed close to perfect pitch and that was called Absolute Pitch.    Then there are different degrees of Perfect Pitch from any pitch close they can name it to some with perfect pitch to the absolute frequency.  One story I heard was a classical violinist who played in orchestras who ended up having to quit playing because the variations in pitch within the orchestra were getting to him.  He ended up making a living doing orchestra transcriptions from recordings.    

 

Read pitch is one of the hard because it is one of the most complex things to memorize.   

 

Another thing I've read was is believe all people are born with perfect pitch, but unless it is discovered and worked on between ages three to six it will go away.   

 

The thing I always wondered is how people with born with perfect pitch learn the letter names of the notes they identify.   No one ever seems to talk about that process of recognizing a pitch and what label to hang on it. 

 

For myself I don't have good ears, but I can remember timbres of sounds on records.   It used to freak people out especially when I worked in a record store I could hear one note of some song and identify the record.  I just could remember the timbre, but not the pitch.   

 

I remember an interview with Kenny Werner who was born with perfect pitch.   When he was young and just starting to play in bands he'd hear someone play a wrong note and couldn't understand why they didn't realize it.   Kenny thought everyone could hear like he did, he didn't realize perfect pitch was something special. 

 

Then working in recording ran into recording engineers that could hear sounds and tell you exactly what frequency it was.  They didn't know the pitch but knew exactly the frequencies to EQ to achieve it. 

 

Sound and pitch recognition are really interesting topic. 

[AROIOS]

1 minute ago, Docbop said:

...I remember an interview with Kenny Werner who was born with perfect pitch.   When he was young and just starting to play in bands he'd hear someone play a wrong note and couldn't understand why they didn't realize it.   Kenny thought everyone could hear like he did, he didn't realize perfect pitch was something special...

Hearing the "wrong note" most likely had nothing to do with "Perfect Pitch" and everything to do with "Relative Pitch" and perception of harmony; unless by "wrong", Kenny meant "out of tune".

[Docbop]

46 minutes ago, AROIOS said:

Hearing the "wrong note" most likely had nothing to do with "Perfect Pitch" and everything to do with "Relative Pitch" and perception of harmony; unless by "wrong", Kenny meant "out of tune".

It's been a long time since i heard the interview so i probably phrased it wrong, but basically how someone with perfect pitch had to learn not everyone hears like he did. 

[KuruPrionz]

6 hours ago, MathOfInsects said:

That source is conflating two separate things. Absolute pitch (as they have described it) means one thing, and it is not the same thing as perfect pitch. I am sorry, but you are not correct about this. It is not subject to opinion, and is not open to interpretation. It means something very specific. I am perceiving that there is a misunderstanding of what it means, but that misunderstanding is not just another truth. It is incorrect. I am sorry to be so direct, but it is important to me to keep the conversation in the realm of fact.

We are having conversation and while the post I put up may be incorrect it's not incorrect to discuss it. 

The second sentence is the one I guess I should have posted without the first sentence - "Also called perfect pitch.  the ability to sing or recognize the pitch of a tone by ear."

 

In the end, since modern music rarely has single notes with no pitch-shifting or ambience of any sort it's pretty irrelevant. Add in all the different approaches to music now that we are all in this small world together and yes, for some people specific notes have specific frequencies (probably scientists). That's really about all that can be said that's worth saying. I suppose of somebody played a monophonic synthesizer with a single oscillator and no effects they might find a use for what the frequencies were, them and the entire 3 people who listened to them play, once... 

[AnotherScott]

The reference to "absolute" pitch is to distinguish it from "relative." Relative pitch means you can figure out what a pitch is by hearing it relative to another known pitch, which presumably virtually every musician can do. Absolute rather than relative pitch recognition means you can identify the pitch by itself, without figuring it out relative to some other pitch, and that's typically what people mean by perfect pitch. Still, I expect that there are degrees... e.g. people who can vs. cannot tell when a note is, say, a quarter-tone off from the expected pitch when they identify it (and people who have grown up in cultures with common use of quarter tones would likely be better at this, I'd expect). It would be the difference between saying "that's an A" vs. "that's an A, but it sounds a bit flat." So like most things, there would be "degrees" of perfect pitch... not a simple you-have-it-or-you-don't.

[AROIOS]

26 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

...So like most things, there would be "degrees" of perfect pitch... not a simple you-have-it-or-you-don't...

Exactly, it's on a scale, and "Perfect" is a misnomer; defined by whom? to what precision?

Most humans have "Ok Pitch". If we tune a song more than 5 half-tones higher or lower, pretty much anyone would noticed it sounding different. People with so called "perfect pitch" are simply more sensitive to those changes.

Regarding "relative" vs. "absolute", animals are generally better at detecting changes/differences than determining absolute values, it's vastly more energy-efficient computation-wise.

[uhoh7]

I've listened to a bunch of interviews with composers, conductors and academics, by an interviewer who always asks about this. Almost all these people are also Music Professors at places like:

https://www.fhnw.ch/en/degree-programmes/music/schola-cantorum-basiliensis

 

What they all say:

There is relative pitch awareness. There is perfect pitch. They all use these terms the same way. They all have experience with students with perfect pitch, and some had to deal with it themselves. They all agree: perfect pitch is a curse for a serious musician. It's acquired in youth by the age of about 13, or earlier. In common usage in the musical world perfect pitch means A=440. Beato's son is an example of this. You don't see Rick tuning to A=435 and getting the same results. 

 

When these kids reach advanced training involving varied temperaments and tunings other than 440 they are distracted and frustrated, according to these folks. I have no clue myself. They either trained themselves out of perfect pitch or quit activities outside of A=440. Beato's son is not interested in being a musician, I don't believe. 

 

Relative pitch is commonly recognised as hearing the intervals between notes, and can be learned at any age, but it's alot harder of course for the elderly. It's a very useful skill according to all these same folks. Now those intervals increasingly also vary as meantone temperaments are resurrected....for the sweet thirds, which were preferred in 1700 over equal temperament harshness. Bach did not use equal temperament. But he was experimenting with various temperaments. The harpsichord is easy to change temperaments. The modern iron frame piano is extremely hard to change. There are youtube videos about this. 

 

Again, I'm not remotely qualified to have an opinion. I can report them though.   

 

In case you want to listen:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXgZOmjds9ElkoGMy7VCIgaA78nTd86VN&si=UgVbxj9KUeBzfpDF

 

The hype about perfect pitch feeds the general "talent" myth, I suspect. That guy is a born musician.... A linguist would reply: we are all born musicians. Civilization, a very late development, beats it out of most of us.

 

Why do we use 440? It was easy to broadcast those tuning tones via early radio. A=435 was impossible, supposedly. 

 

[funkyhammond]

5 hours ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

I just read that Wikipedia article.    I see nothing there (besides a lot of fancy words, i.e., bafflegab) to convince me that "absolute" or "perfect" pitch is essentially anything other than the ability to remember pitches at a certain frequency, or perhaps within a certain range of frequencies (i.e., an "A" somewhere around 440hz).    Nothing there explains exactly how some people are able to do it.       I said all this in my original post.    Why is there so much argument about this?   I don't get it.

 

Sorry, what argument? I thought I was just giving information. In reply to the U of Chicago article that I cited, you wrote: "...The range of hertz/cents is the thing I questioned."

 

And in your original post, you wrote: "I wonder if anyone has researched whether a pitch-memory person can identify both an A=440hz and say, an A=435hz tone as being different from each other.  Or, identifying an A440 note as being different from an A439 note."

 

Okay, so from the wikipedia article: 

Quote

Possible problems

 

Musicians with absolute perception may experience difficulties which do not exist for other musicians. Because absolute listeners are capable of recognizing that a musical composition has been transposed from its original key, or that a pitch is being produced at a nonstandard frequency (either sharp or flat), a musician with absolute pitch may become confused upon perceiving tones believed to be "wrong" or hearing a piece of music "in the wrong key". The relative pitch of the notes may be in tune to each other, but out of tune to the standard pitch or pitches the musician is familiar with or perceives as correct. This can especially apply to Baroque music, as many Baroque orchestras tune to A = 415 Hz as opposed to 440 Hz (i.e. roughly one standard semitone lower than the ISO standard for concert A), while other recordings of Baroque pieces (especially those of French Baroque music) are performed at 392 Hz. Historically, tuning forks for concert A used on keyboard instruments (which ensembles tune to when present), have varied widely in frequency, often between 415 Hz to 456.7 Hz.

 

Variances in the sizes of intervals for different keys and the method of tuning instruments also can affect musicians in their perception of correct pitch, especially with music synthesized digitally using alternative tunings (e.g. unequal well temperaments and alternative meantone tunings such as 19-tone equal temperament and 31-tone equal temperament) as opposed to 12-tone equal temperament.[citation needed] An absolute listener may also use absolute strategies for tasks which are more efficiently accomplished with relative strategies, such as transposition or producing harmony that is microtonal or whose frequencies do not match standard 12-tone equal temperament. It is also possible for some musicians to have displaced absolute pitch, where all notes are slightly flat or slightly sharp of their respective pitch as defined by a given convention.[citation needed] This may arise from learning the pitch names from an instrument that was tuned to a concert pitch convention other than the one in use (e.g. A = 435 Hz, the Paris Opera convention of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as opposed to the modern Euro-American convention for concert A = 442 Hz). Concert pitches have shifted higher for a brighter sound. When playing in groups with other musicians, this may lead to playing in a tonality that is slightly different from that of the rest of the group, such as when soloists tune slightly sharp of the rest of the ensemble to stand out or to compensate for loosening strings during longer performances.

 

I don't see any "bafflegab" there beyond normal musical terminology. I thought it was speaking to the issue of variations in what we call "A" and how it pertains to people with absolute pitch. If that's not at all relevant to the things you mentioned about ranges of hertz, then I misunderstood.

[Floyd Tatum]

7 minutes ago, funkyhammond said:

 

Sorry, what argument? I thought I was just giving information. In reply to the U of Chicago article that I cited, you wrote: "...The range of hertz/cents is the thing I questioned."

 

And in your original post, you wrote: "I wonder if anyone has researched whether a pitch-memory person can identify both an A=440hz and say, an A=435hz tone as being different from each other.  Or, identifying an A440 note as being different from an A439 note."

 

Okay, so from the wikipedia article: 

 

I don't see any "bafflegab" there beyond normal musical terminology. I thought it was speaking to the issue of variations in what we call "A" and how it pertains to people with absolute pitch. If that's not at all relevant to the things you mentioned about ranges of hertz, then I misunderstood.

My comments were not directed at you.   The bafflegab comment was not directed at you.

 

The thing about the articles you posted (which was helpful, thank you) is that they raise the same kinds of issues I brought up in my original post, but offer no answers.

[funkyhammond]

21 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

My comments were not directed at you.   The bafflegab comment was not directed at you.

 

The thing about the articles you posted (which was helpful, thank you) is that they raise the same kinds of issues I brought up in my original post, but offer no answers.

 

No problem. You had quoted my response to you, so that's why it seemed directed at me. The bafflegab comment was clearly directed at the wikipedia page, so that didn't bother me.  But since I was the one who brought it up, it seemed natural to follow up on it.

 

I thought there were some answers in those articles but maybe not the exact thing you were looking for. Anyway, lots of people have replied now. Do you still have a burning question that hasn't been answered? 

 

[Adam Burgess]

I've always been able to hear a chord and get it 90% of the time correct. Single notes usually 100% if I'm having a good day.
I sometimes reference what, for example, an F# looks like on paper, sometimes I just feel an F#, sometimes it's correlating it with an F# if I was sitting at a piano.

If I'm wrong, it's a fifth out. Some harmonic filtering going on? Don't know.

Singing a pitch on command, I can't do. I can tell it's wrong, but I think it's just 'cause I'm a crappy singer. I get bored long before I've slid up and down to be happy with it.

I have massive synesthesia, too. Sometimes this F# maybe a certain shape and colour on the 4D space that seems to exist in my head. One strange quirk is that if I wear shades, my hearing drops by about the same level as my eyes… Not volume level, but it its perception. Think that's one of the important words in this thread.

I wouldn't say I had perfect pitch at all, and can't say whether it's learned, in-built, or other, as I've hit keys for as long as I can remember. But, I'm good at it after 40 years of having a connection between touching something and hearing it. If I wasn't a piano player, I doubt I would be able to do it, even if I knew WHAT it was I was trying to do!

[Threadslayer]

1 hour ago, Adam Burgess said:

If I'm wrong, it's a fifth out.

I feel you on that one. My pitch recognition engine is just as happy classifying a note as itself or its fifth. Particularly noticeable when singing BGV. I never know when I'm a fifth out until I get the stink eye from one of the other vocalists. 

[mauriziodececco]

17 hours 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.

 

I do not have perfect pitch; i cannot give a name to a note; but i cannot improvise on a transposed keyboard; my hand fell in the wrong place, somehow my brain connect 'pitch as perception' to the physical reality of a key (more that visual, i play melodica with closed eyes usually :). This make me think that the perception behind pitches is a very complex and articulated phenomena.

 

And by the way, just to make things more complex: even if you stick to physical definition,  pitch  is not strictly frequency of oscillation; it is, if you have a sine wave; if you have a piano, with three strings generating a lot of almost but not completely harmonic partials, it is something a lot more complex to define, mathematically speaking.

 

Maurizio

[funkyhammond]

2 hours ago, mauriziodececco said:

And by the way, just to make things more complex: even if you stick to physical definition,  pitch  is not strictly frequency of oscillation; it is, if you have a sine wave; if you have a piano, with three strings generating a lot of almost but not completely harmonic partials, it is something a lot more complex to define, mathematically speaking.

 

 

It's actually not that complex to define, physically. It's simply the fundamental frequency, i.e. the lowest frequency partial/harmonic of all the harmonics in the complex waveform. It's cool that brains can pick that out and correlate that with perceived pitch. It's also very cool that our brains perceive the addition of harmonics as just adding some kind of "tone colour" to that pitch.

 

But I guess there are exceptions even with the fundamental. Like if the fundamental and next harmonic up are at about the same amplitude. I notice that when playing with the drawbars on an organ. If I take the current lowest drawbar that is pulled out and slowly push it back in, at what point does my brain shift into perceiving that the sound now has a different fundamental (i.e. the next lowest drawbar)? I'm guessing something similar is going on in the personal examples mentioned by others above about sometimes hearing the fifth as the fundamental instead of the actual fundamental. Considering that our brains are doing some crazy computation to be able to pick out various sound sources happening simultaneously, and all the fundamentals of those various sources, and filtering out background sounds we're not interested in, it's no wonder that sometimes our brains might get it a bit wrong on occasion. It's frankly amazing that we don't get it wrong way more often.

 

EDIT: And philosophically speaking, if we did get it wrong a lot more often, we probably would have never created music.

[MathOfInsects]

42 minutes ago, funkyhammond said:

 

It's actually not that complex to define, physically. It's simply the fundamental frequency, i.e. the lowest frequency partial/harmonic of all the harmonics in the complex waveform. It's cool that brains can pick that out and correlate that with perceived pitch. It's also very cool that our brains perceive the addition of harmonics as just adding some kind of "tone colour" to that pitch.

 

But I guess there are exceptions even with the fundamental. Like if the fundamental and next harmonic up are at about the same amplitude. I notice that when playing with the drawbars on an organ. If I take the current lowest drawbar that is pulled out and slowly push it back in, at what point does my brain shift into perceiving that the sound now has a different fundamental (i.e. the next lowest drawbar)? I'm guessing something similar is going on in the personal examples mentioned by others above about sometimes hearing the fifth as the fundamental instead of the actual fundamental. Considering that our brains are doing some crazy computation to be able to pick out various sound sources happening simultaneously, and all the fundamentals of those various sources, and filtering out background sounds we're not interested in, it's no wonder that sometimes our brains might get it a bit wrong on occasion. It's frankly amazing that we don't get it wrong way more often.

 

EDIT: And philosophically speaking, if we did get it wrong a lot more often, we probably would have never created music.

Yes, all natural sound (i.e., the sound we evolved to perceive) is complex. About as close as nature gets to a pure sound like a sine wave is the cursed mosquito.

In fact, because of that, it's simple sounds we have the most trouble processing. We use intra-aural phase and time differences to make sense of the sounds we encounter. Complex sounds give us all kinds of information to work with. Simple sounds--particularly those whose waves are smaller than our heads, defeating the intra-aural cues--are very difficult for us to locate and parse. That's why we used to think any cell phone ring from anywhere could be ours from right here. Simple sound with very little locational information.

We even have trouble with complex sounds if there is no attack; attack is where most of the timbral information is conveyed. You can find clips of a series of different instruments with attack removed, and when presented only with the "Decay" state, they are surprisingly difficult to tell apart.

 

As for the perception of the fifth...almost all the musical traditions we know about have some version of an octave and a fifth, so we clearly noticed the relationships there. Our own tradition very specifically grows out of the subconscious perception of the fifth being reflected back to us in huge stone cathedrals; we figured out that we could deploy this second tone without subverting the purity of the first, and voila, our polyphonic tradition was born. If you have a 5th, by definition you have the thing it is the 5th OF, and that little bit of cause and effect ended up as our tonal tradition.

[Floyd Tatum]

15 hours ago, funkyhammond said:

I thought there were some answers in those articles but maybe not the exact thing you were looking for. Anyway, lots of people have replied now. Do you still have a burning question that hasn't been answered?

 

I never had a burning question to begin with.   I don't want to re-hash the back-and-forth of this thread, but if you read my original post, you'll see that all I did was express my view on the subject of the naming of the ability some call "perfect pitch", but which, I think, should more accurately be called "pitch memory".

[AnotherScott]

I think it's interesting that we can have trouble playing on transposed keyboards (part of our brain feeling like we're playing the "wrong" chord), but I'd bet that those of us who play guitar have no comparable issues playing with capos. There's something about thinking about chords on a guitar that makes the chord positions easily and naturally felt as simply being relative to each other, as opposed to absolute, but we think differently on the keyboard... then the particular chords may be seen as having an absolute rather than relative location. And it's not a brain thing (i.e. some of us thing relative, others thing absolute), it's an instrument thing (we may think absolute on the piano, relative on the guitar). I think it is probably related to the fact that the relationships of the strings remain constant no matter where you place the capo, whereas, on the piano, the different black and white key combinations mean that we associate different hand/finger positions with playing in different keys; and/or the fact that almost every note on a guitar can be played in more than one location, whereas each keyboard note is uniquely located (there's only one place you can play middle C). Whatever it is, pitch on a guitar does not psychologically seem tied to a specific physicality the way at least some of us find it to be on a piano.

[MathOfInsects]

44 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

I never had a burning question to begin with.   I don't want to re-hash the back-and-forth of this thread, but if you read my original post, you'll see that all I did was express my view on the subject of the naming of the ability some call "perfect pitch", but which, I think, should more accurately be called "pitch memory".

FT, it's been explained to you a fair number of times, in a number of ways, that that is not what perfect pitch is. "Pitch memory" is a thing, but perfect pitch is not pitch-memory. I'm curious why it's so important to you to dig in on that incorrect point? Is it just pride at this point?

 

[Floyd Tatum]

1 minute ago, MathOfInsects said:

FT, it's been explained to you a fair number of times, in a number of ways, that that is not what perfect pitch is. "Pitch memory" is a thing, but perfect pitch is not pitch-memory. I'm curious why it's so important to you to dig in on that incorrect point? Is it just pride at this point?

I could ask you the same thing.

[MathOfInsects]

7 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I could ask you the same thing.

What would you be asking me? Why it's important to stay in the realm of fact about this? I believe I covered it in a few responses, but it's a topic near and dear to me not only personally, but academically as well. I've been trying to help get you away from that initial incorrect assumption, since I took you at your initial word that you were truly asking how it worked. Was it a fake-out?

[Docbop]

36 minutes ago, AnotherScott said:

I think it's interesting that we can have trouble playing on transposed keyboards (part of our brain feeling like we're playing the "wrong" chord), but I'd bet that those of us who play guitar have no comparable issues playing with capos. There's something about thinking about chords on a guitar that makes the chord positions easily and naturally felt as simply being relative to each other, as opposed to absolute, but we think differently on the keyboard... then the particular chords may be seen as having an absolute rather than relative location. And it's not a brain thing (i.e. some of us thing relative, others thing absolute), it's an instrument thing (we may think absolute on the piano, relative on the guitar). I think it is probably related to the fact that the relationships of the strings remain constant no matter where you place the capo, whereas, on the piano, the different black and white key combinations mean that we associate different hand/finger positions with playing in different keys; and/or the fact that almost every note on a guitar can be played in more than one location, whereas each keyboard note is uniquely located (there's only one place you can play middle C). Whatever it is, pitch on a guitar does not psychologically seem tied to a specific physicality the way at least some of us find it to be on a piano.

 

I played guitar over 60 years and I did own a capo never used it once, capo aren't the same thing as a transpose setting.   Capos are about except for beginners about playing a guitar part that uses open strings as part of the tune.  So if the you have to play that tune in a different key you can use a capo to play the song in another place on the neck and the open strings are in correct.   So kind of a transpose but mainly in order to use open string chord voicings or lines.   

 

Using open strings on guitar to some guitarist is an amatuer hour type thing, but they can come in very handy for trying to do close voicing on guitar.   The way the guitar is tuned it's weird matrix of notes and that make close voicing very hard to do.   But great guitarist like Jim Hall and a lot of Country player can use open strings for cool sounds and trick licks.   Jim Hall liked to use open strings when playing tune in flat keys because the open string would all be dissidences he would throw in. 

 

So a capo really isn't like a transpose knob, but many beginner will use one to transpose.    

 

[Floyd Tatum]

Just now, MathOfInsects said:

What would you be asking me? Why it's important to stay in the realm of fact about this? I believe I covered it in a few responses, but it's a topic near and dear to me not only personally, but academically as well. I've been trying to help get you away from that initial incorrect assumption, since I took you at your initial word that you were truly asking how it worked. Was it a fake-out?

 

I believe further conversation on this topic, in this forum, would not be constructive.   If we ever had a chance to discuss the subject in person, that would be fun.

[MathOfInsects]

Just now, Floyd Tatum said:

 

I believe further conversation on this topic, in this forum, would not be constructive.   If we ever had a chance to discuss the subject in person, that would be fun.

Then why did you come back to restate your initial position? Why not just let the thread run its natural course?

[funkyhammond]

1 hour ago, Floyd Tatum said:

 

I never had a burning question to begin with.   I don't want to re-hash the back-and-forth of this thread, but if you read my original post, you'll see that all I did was express my view on the subject of the naming of the ability some call "perfect pitch", but which, I think, should more accurately be called "pitch memory".

I'm confused. In your original post you mentioned the "pitch memory" term, but you also wondered what is going on in the brain, and also if there has been research in the accuracy of people with "perfect pitch". And you added "It's a fascinating subject, fer sure."

I thought you wanted some discussion on those points, no? I thought the links I provided were trying to give answers to some of that. I guess I'm unclear now on what discussion you were trying to have. On the specific point about the term "pitch memory", relative pitch also involves memory, so I'm not sure how that term would help clarify anything about the distinction between perfect/absolute pitch versus relative pitch. 

[Floyd Tatum]

20 minutes ago, funkyhammond said:

I'm confused. In your original post you mentioned the "pitch memory" term, but you also wondered what is going on in the brain, and also if there has been research in the accuracy of people with "perfect pitch". And you added "It's a fascinating subject, fer sure."

I thought you wanted some discussion on those points, no? I thought the links I provided were trying to give answers to some of that. I guess I'm unclear now on what discussion you were trying to have. On the specific point about the term "pitch memory", relative pitch also involves memory, so I'm not sure how that term would help clarify anything about the distinction between perfect/absolute pitch versus relative pitch. 

I guess in future, I should try to develop the habit of naming sections of my posts, such as:

MAIN POINT:

    etc etc etc etc

IDLE SPECUTION/QUESTIONS, NOT GERMANE TO THE MAIN POINT:

    etc etc etc etc

😁

[MathOfInsects]

You asked a series of questions. In true KC style, a whole bunch of folks took time and tried to answer them for you. The gracious response, IMO, is "thank you."

[funkyhammond]

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

Yes, all natural sound (i.e., the sound we evolved to perceive) is complex. About as close as nature gets to a pure sound like a sine wave is the cursed mosquito.

 

Ha, I've always thought of flying mosquitos as annoying sawtooth waves. Of course, that is only after I discovered synthesizers and even knew what a sawtooth wave was. What about a wind being pushed almost perfectly through some sort of hole in a stone structure that emphasized the "howling" and filters out almost all the noise? Wouldn't that be something close to a natural sine wave?

 

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

We even have trouble with complex sounds if there is no attack; attack is where most of the timbral information is conveyed. You can find clips of a series of different instruments with attack removed, and when presented only with the "Decay" state, they are surprisingly difficult to tell apart.

 

If a complex sound doesn't decay very much (like the kind of thing you can do with synthesizers and organs, for example), then I guess that is an exception where the sound is still maintaining enough of the harmonics and complexity through the decay/sustain portion that it would still be easily identifiable. In nature, I guess your mosquito example is as good as any.  No decay there, except when they finally buzz off or get slapped ("bet you didn't see the sudden release of that envelope coming, did you, mosquito?")

 

1 hour ago, MathOfInsects said:

As for the perception of the fifth...almost all the musical traditions we know about have some version of an octave and a fifth, so we clearly noticed the relationships there. Our own tradition very specifically grows out of the subconscious perception of the fifth being reflected back to us in huge stone cathedrals; we figured out that we could deploy this second tone without subverting the purity of the first, and voila, our polyphonic tradition was born. If you have a 5th, by definition you have the thing it is the 5th OF, and that little bit of cause and effect ended up as our tonal tradition.

That's really interesting about cathedrals. I would have guessed that we would have discovered simple root-fifth harmony through the use of singing/chanting first. But who knows what humans were doing before written records.

 

[funkyhammond]

37 minutes ago, Floyd Tatum said:

I guess in future, I should try to develop the habit of naming sections of my posts, such as:

MAIN POINT:

    etc etc etc etc

IDLE SPECUTION/QUESTIONS, NOT GERMANE TO THE MAIN POINT:

    etc etc etc etc

😁

Well, no, I didn't mean that. But in your responses to me, you also sometimes referred to the secondary points, so that's why the confusion.