Open thread 4/26/22
This video says that about one in twenty people are tone deaf. That surprises me; I thought tone deafness was far less common:
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
This video says that about one in twenty people are tone deaf. That surprises me; I thought tone deafness was far less common:
Re Musk buying Twitter;
“The Left will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”
Anyone here dialed in to Illinois politics? I have no idea who to vote for in the primary.
For governor that is.
Definition of tone deaf from the dictionary: Unable to distinguish differences in musical pitch.
I found the video a bit silly. Can I tell if the 2 notes A and B are different? Yes. Can I hear an A picked out randomly on a piano keyboard and identify it without doubt as an A? No. Can I identify an A on a guitar? Yes, as that’s what I play and the overtones are very different. Can I hear the differences in the notes on the rising/falling sequence or in the major scale? Yes. Granted I’m not a professional musician or even someone with years of experience. The video seems directed at people with many years of musical experience and declares those who can’t pass such a test to be tone deaf, and then tries to sell a course at the end.
but will they, we saw what las vegas review journal did to adelson, for deigning to try to balance the tables, we saw what the doj did to conrad black, imprisoned him and parcelled the empire to barclay and the aspers, the left deems it must have absolute control to exalt their allies and annihilate their foes, and they enlist every agency, every nazgul to do so, ask general flynn, as atty general whitaker,
one large example
https://technofog.substack.com/p/durhams-latest-he-has-hundreds-of?s=r
I don’t know if my father was tone deaf, but he might as well have been. He also lacked a sense of rhythm. It was painful to hear him play, and he practiced a lot. My uncle, OTOH, was musically talented. Such is the luck of the draw.
the thing is everyone of those characters are still lying today, and it’s picked up like bad chow mein, those they defamed are in the wilderness,
I have what’s called relative pitch, meaning I can easily discern musical intervals once I have a reference. When I’m jamming with other musicians, I can usually very quickly pick up on what someone else is playing and follow, as long as it’s not overly fast and complex.
I’ve known several people with perfect pitch over the years. Such people can listen to almost any melody and instantly tell you want the root notes are, and if they had training in theory they could even tell you the precise chords even if they’re more obscure ones. The down side of perfect pitch is that if a tuning of an instrument is just a cent or so off, it can be intensely distracting to such people and negatively effect their enjoyment of the music. For example, they’re often bothered by first position D major chords played on guitar since a standard guitar is what’s called “equal temperment” which results in intervals that are very slightly off key
While I’m not tone deaf, there still isn’t a bucket big enough for me to carry a tune.
I’m not tone deaf. I know there are two songs.
One is Yankee Doodle. The other isn’t.
– kinda quoting Ulysses S Grant
Nonapod, Rick Beato is amazing to me how he easily picks up what is going on in a song so very quickly. Obviously very well-grounded in theory, as well as a “good ear”, and years of experience. I started playing 50 years ago in college, and then life…so dropped it until I retired and now spending the past 3 years trying to do 50 years of catch up. Fun diversion for about an hour every afternoon.
Having perfect pitch is not always a blessing…
Nonapod: “For example, they’re often bothered by first position D major chords played on guitar since a standard guitar is what’s called “equal temperament” which results in intervals that are very slightly off key.”
I have been messing around with guitar since my teens and was bothered by this for a long time. That D chord would just sound slightly wrong even though the guitar seemed to be in tune by semi-objective measures. Apparently that four-note interval between the G and B strings, vs. five for all the others, is a big part of the problem.
Out of curiosity and annoyance, I looked around for info and found a YouTube video called “Why the G String Is Always Out of Tune.” The explanation turned out to be pretty useless, having to do with subtle physical/mechanical differences. But in the comments on that video I found this:
“There is a completely different explanation for the G string being “out of tune” and it depends on Just Intonation versus Equal Temperament tuning. For those who do not know, Just tuning sets the intervals between notes according to the exact ratios of the harmonic series, while ET tuning makes every interval the same, a ratio of 1 to (the 12th root of 2) which is about 1.06. This is the ratio between two notes one fret apart. The interval between the third and 2nd strings is 4 frets which is 1:1.26. The exact interval between G and B should be 1:1.25 so there is an audible beat. All the other strings are tuned with an interval of a Perfect 4th, which in JI is 1.333 and in ET it is 1.334, which is indistinguishable. The best solution ( not necessarily the easiest to play) is to tune the B string just flat enough that it does not beat against the open G, and bend it slightly when fretting it. A different approach is to file the B nut slot back so that the open string is a fraction longer, ( therefore flat) but the fretted notes are in the correct place.”
Neither of those solutions strikes me as useful, especially not the first! I just accept that I’m going to have to tweak the tuning a bit, at least if the song relies heavily on that chord.
physicsguy:
It doesn’t ask you to do that. The. A and B choices are not the notes A or B, but choice A or choice B of the two given in the question.
And then there are the “tone deaf” of a different variety…
…as myriads of Uncontested Election(TM) disciples, acolytes, monks and nuns will likely have to clamp their state-of-the-art truth-cancellation earphones way more tightly over their ears….
“Subpoenas formally issued for evidence in Georgia ballot trafficking case;
“Subpoenas ask election integrity group True the Vote and its researchers to turn over identities of ballot harvesters, John Doe whistleblower and suspected funding arms for 2020 ballot trafficking operation.”—
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/subpoenas-formally-issued-evidence-georgia-ballot-trafficking-case
Which is a follow-up story of:
“Investigators in Georgia ballot harvesting probe zero in on funding, eyewitness whistleblower;
“First subpoenas provide roadmap to investigation, with a heavy focus on John Doe witness and nonprofit funding.”
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/investigators-georgia-ballot-harvesting-probe-zero-funding-eyewitness
Ahh, but Neo, to determine if you’re hearing either the A or B requires being able to definitely know and identify either of those two notes across the 7 octaves of the piano keyboard. Within a given octave I can tell the difference easily between A, Bb and B, but to hear a randomly selected A or B from widely separated octaves and definitely label one as an A or a B, no I can’t do that. Nor, can I within a octave hear a random note and identify it by name. Probably more lack of experience of hearing a certain note over and over again and knowing the LABEL of that note. I was able to do OK on the note sequence test within a scale. With guitar I’m playing almost exclusively chords. I can easily identify a D chord vs say a Bm, but that’s what I know. So I fail their test, but don’t take much credence in it.
To physicsguy’s point,
I think the term “perfect pitch” gets exaggerated way out of proportion; either that, or I simply do not understand it.
If one plays a G# on a piano, or guitar, or bassoon… how many people would say, “Oh, that’s a G#?” Probably not many. Maybe that is 1 in 10,000.
But if you play two different notes and ask people which one is the “Oh” of, “Oh say can you see…” in the National Anthem, or “Take” in “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” or “Some” in “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” How many people could pick a note out and identify it as a specific note in a song they are familiar with? I think that’s W-A-Y more than 1 in 10,000. I’ll bet it’s more like 9 in 10.
The fact that 9,999 people out of 10,000 cannot identify G# or E natural is not because they have deficient pitch recognition. It’s because 9,999 out of 10,000 people don’t know what E natural is. But they know exactly what it sounds like when Paul McCartney sings the word, “Yesterday.”
Think about it. Human infants are brilliant at picking their mother’s voice out of a crowd. Hearing and comprehending pitch matters for survival. Why wouldn’t most of us have that skill?
And think of the beginning of the Beatle’s song, “Yesterday” and when you first hear Paul sing the word in the song. I’ll bet you can hear it precisely in your mind right now. And if someone played you samples of his voice a pitch above, or below, or spot on, you’d pick out the correct one. See? You have perfect pitch.
As physicsguy states, many of us don’t spend time “hearing” those things on different instruments. You may recognize Paul singing a note but would you recognize it on guitar? Piano? Flute? I can because I’ve played in a lot of bands and have experience hearing a lot of instruments. Just as you can recognize Paul’s voice and Joni Mitchell’s voice, if you spent time listening to saxophones or violas you’d recognize notes there also.
In one of my first bands I noticed before each practice the guitar player would mess around with a tuning fork and tuning his guitar (this was before the brilliant phone apps in use today). I came to understand that string instruments get out of tune rather quickly and I asked him about the process. He explained tuning to me and how the fork reproduces a pure tone he can use to tune one string, then, by holding down certain frets he could then tune the other strings from that string.
So, after practice I found a keyboard and spent time playing the notes of a C scale and speaking them. I practiced singing and humming them. It didn’t take long, a few days really, until I could think of a note’s letter and the tone would be in my head, then I could hum to match what was in my memory. So, after that, the guitar player would tune to my memory of pitches. I am not writing this to brag. I honestly believe most people have the skill, they just don’t bother to take a few hours over the course of a few days to associate pitches with the appropriate letters.
Think of the “Alphabet Song.” “A-B-C-D… LMNOP…” and so on. You hear it correctly in your head. A and B have the same pitch, C and D have the same pitch, but it’s different from A and B. You know which pitch to associate with A and C and you know C’s pitch doesn’t match B’s, but matches D’s. If you can memorize pitches with those letters, why not the actual, musical scale?
If you repeated a C scale at a keyboard and hummed or sung along, after a few dozen tries over a few days you’d have the sounds of those letters locked into your memory also.
@mac, You may be interested to know that there are luthiers that actually make guitars that are “True Temperment” with squiggly frets that look like bad line drawings. A first position D major on such an instrument will side more “right” in one sense, but since so many songs have been played over the years with the “wrong” D chords, it oddly might not sound right to ears used to hearing that chord the wrong way.
I would have guessed that substantially more than 5% of people are tone deaf. Go figure.
That video was fine for what it was, but I expected at some point that it would play two tones a semi-tone apart and ask you to distinguish them. When I was a kid and tried that with my sister, she couldn’t.
> Neither of those solutions strikes me as useful,
The comment about intonation was the real answer, and it’s because music in the diatonic scale is fundamentally broken, and the understanding of that goes all the way back to Pythagoras. There is no way to tune an instrument that does not have some trade-offs in at least some keys. Musicians have struggled with this for millennia.
Here’s a question – in their last examples of rising and falling scales, my ears report that the intervals are not the do-re-mi of a major scale beginning on the tonic, but rather are crude approximations.
Admitted, that my ears have recently been diagnosed with ‘sudden hearing loss’, and when playing chromatic scales on fretted instruments, I hear some pitches as sharp by as much as more than one whole note, and of course the intervals are cockeyed in comparison with a well-tuned piano. Previously I’ve had a very good sense of relative pitch, made a living for some time as a musician by ear, not reading printed music at all.
So – are those demonstrator scales from a well-tuned piano, or not?
Regarding guitars and the d major chord some here have discussed, brass instruments have something similar.
I’ve just searched a bit online and haven’t found an article that explains it well, but this one sort-of covers it: http://www.ojtrumpet.net/resources/intonation/sanborn/
Because a valved brass instrument has fixed lengths of pipe associated with each valve and playing “open” (no valves depressed), AND the player uses different lip vibration speeds to play higher and lower notes using open position and those valves, there are some combinations of valve length and lip speed that are not pitch perfect.
The valves’ tube lengths are adjustable, but no matter which set up a brass player chooses for those valve adjustments he or she is slightly out of tune somewhere in the range.
Since a slide trombone does not use valves it does not, necessarily, have that issue, but only if the trombonist adjusts the slide positions based on lip vibration speeds.
I don’t know about reed instruments? My guess is they and the woodwinds have a similar problem with hole combinations and different octaves.
@physics guy: Yeah Beato is pretty impressive. I’m pretty sure that he said at some point that doesn’t have perfect pitch, just relative pitch. But he’s very well ear trained from decades of playing and producing music and has a deep understanding of theory (he has a degree in music from Ithica I think?).
Another very impressive music nerd Youtuber is Beato’s young friend Adam Neely. His super deep knowledge of theory is downright bewlidering to me.
> The video seems directed at people with many years of musical experience and declares those who can’t pass such a test to be tone deaf,
No, it doesn’t. You seem to be thinking that if you don’t have perfect pitch, you must be tone deaf, which is absolutely not true. There is an enormous range between being being minimally not tone deaf, which is all this video tests for, and perfect pitch, which is an incredibly rare skill that almost no musician has.
The video is fine test for tone deafness at a broad level, and threw in some very basic recognition of intervals at the end. And if you failed at the stuff at the end, it can be learned with a little practice.
Remember, it was after the fifth test that it said “If you got that right, you can be certain you are not tone deaf”… and then went on to do a few more things.
The video tests note recognition at the level of an elementary school child in his or her first month of music study.
Nonapod,
Thanks for the photo of true tempered frets. Cool! I did not know those existed!
While researching my prior comment I’ve learned some brass players play 4 valved horns to give them a different tube length to help overcome the pitch issue. I didn’t know that. I know many slide trombonists play with 1 valve (a thumb trigger) to help with quick slide jumps.*
*But I always found that a bit of a “sissy” move. Why not just add 2 more and call it a baritone?
> my ears report that the intervals are not the do-re-mi of a major scale beginning on the tonic, but rather are crude approximations.
The series of rising or falling notes used a number of different intervals. They were not all a whole note apart like do-re-mi. In fact, most of them had significantly larger intervals. They were also not “crude approximations” of anything. They were regular notes from the major scale.
For a musician relative pitch seems incredibly useful. I suppose perfect pitch could be also, but it seems like relative pitch is what would really matter.
Musicians often need to take things up or down a few steps to match a singer or a specific instrument; especially studio musicians. That’s a “relative pitch” skill, right? Identifying the note’s name is nice, but knowing what sound to play and how many intervals up or down to play the next sound is what matters.
To use my example with “Yesterday,” if I have perfect pitch I can reproduce it in McCartney’s key, but what if I’m in a band with a singer with a range different than Sir Paul’s? Relative pitch is better in that situation. I hear the singer’s pitch and play “Yesterday” in the singer’s register.
Or maybe I don’t understand what the terms mean.
Rick Gutleber @ 1:29pm,
That’s what I heard also.
> Yeah Beato is pretty impressive. I’m pretty sure that he said at some point that doesn’t have perfect pitch, just relative pitch.
That’s definitely true, although apparently one of his kids has perfect pitch. The child’s ability to recognize chords is also absolutely insane. Doug Helvering is another musician I watch regularly who does some serious analysis. He might have perfect pitch, but that’s far from being a prerequisite for understanding music theory, which Mr. Helvering knows as well as Mr. Beato. Both of those guys are amazing to watch and learn from.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIji04fTwe8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFVpSjRUD2E
> For a musician relative pitch seems incredibly useful. I suppose perfect pitch could be also, but it seems like relative pitch is what would really matter.
You’re right. Millions of successful musicians make amazing music without perfect pitch, but I find it hard to believe any of them could do much without the ability to recognize relative pitch.
physicsguy:
All you are asked to do in the first part, which supposedly determines tone deafness or not, is to say whether a note matches choice one or choice 2. No need to actually identify the notes.
In the last part, with the scales, and being asked to identify which note on a scale, that’s a rest for relative pitch and not tone deafness.Relative pitch can be learned with a lot of practice by people who are not tone deaf. Rick Beato has a course that teaches relative pitch, as do the people making the video.
Perfect pitch cannot be learned and the video doesn’t deal with it at all. But it’s the ability to identify by letter name a note played randomly with no other frame of reference.
I have relative pitch, which is what I need to sing successfully in an ensemble. Give me the starting note, and I can do it. Someone who has “perfect pitch” will know if it’s the correct starting note. As Barry Meislin says, that’s not always a blessing. For those who have it, singers or instruments who are even slightly off-pitch will be, for them, like listening to fingernails on a blackboard.
Neo, well if that’s a definitive test then I must be tone deaf…
And as has been pointed out, I also lack the basic knowledge of a young child only studying music for a month. Time to sell my guitars.
I have a friend who is truly tone deaf; that is, she would be unable to tell notes “A” and “B” apart in this video. She also has trouble learning foreign languages, because she cannot distinguish some of the different sounds.
Not tone deaf and did pretty well on the relative pitch – if I had a bit more time to work it out, would have gotten those, too. I play guitar and sing every day, so that surely has something to do with it.
Rufus T. Firefly at 1:16 pm
The standard modern orchestral French horn is properly called a double horn. F and B-flat horns combined into one. The reason for it is because a few of those higher harmonic notes on the F horn are a bit off in pitch. Those notes are played on the B-flat horn. Sometimes single horns are still used but it is uncommon.
So many people here who seem to understand what they are talking about claim perfect pitch is extremely rare. Either I don’t understand it, or I have it. I have little problem recognizing sounds and, once I took the time to memorize notes associated with the sounds, I can typically name them when I hear them and reproduce them when needed.
I just don’t see what I’m doing as different from what I see lots of other people doing. It doesn’t seem rare to me.
Think about the song, “Doe, a Deer” from “The Sound of Music” (I just verified it is in the key of C. I assumed it would be.) Think of Julie Andrews singing it. I’ll bet most of you can hear her sing, “doe,” and “re” and “sew…” (In the key of C those happen to correspond to the notes C, D and G.) If someone sampled Julie Andrews’ voice with a keyboard* and played her singing, “sew” and played the note a few below the actual song (D, for example), a few above (B, for example), and the one right on (G), I’ll bet most all of you could pick the correct one.
You can accurately distinguish the pitch Julie Andrews sings when she sings the word, “sew” in the song, “Doe a Deer.” You just don’t know that pitch is a G. It seems to me most people can recognize and distinguish pitches, they just haven’t spent time associating those pitches with one of the 11 notes in the scale.
*A sampling keyboard can take a recorded sound (in this case Dame Julie singing, “sew”), associate that true sound with a specific key, then associate all the other keys with the appropriate intervals of that same sound that correspond with all the other keys on the keyboard. This video shows this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-9j7ap-WUzQ
There are stories of some prodigies attending concerts as children and returning home and writing the entire scores. From memory. After only hearing the scores once.
That is inconceivable to me!
Rufus T. Firefly, the difference is that I can sing along with Julie Andrews beginning with any note you give me (that is within my range). But I cannot tell, without a piano or pitch pipe, exactly what note we’re starting with. What you’re describing is relative pitch. A person with perfect pitch can tell exactly what note it is, without any pitch instrument.
Query:
Does the perfect pitch afflictee, upon hearing Asub4 in 435 Hz immediately exclaim “Ach, nein! Dass ist kein Asub4! Nur 440 Hz können ein Asub4 sein.” Or likewise with Asub4 in 451 Hz? Or what?
Kate,
I understand relative pitch, and I understand if someone starts the song off in any key you can do the proper intervals to sing along. This happens with many of us most any time we are at a Birthday party. Someone starts the song off and many of us quickly slide up or down to adjust to the general pitch we hear in the room, and then we sing the relative intervals from that point.
But I’ll also bet $100 if we did my experiment with the sampling keyboard and I played keys programmed to reproduce Julie Andrew’s voice you would pick the actual, correct note G when you hear it.
In the experiment you are not looking at the keys. No one is telling you “this is Julie’s voice in C, this is Julie’s voice in A…” Your back is turned to the keyboard and keys are struck that reproduce Julie’s voice electronically. When the G is struck (middle G, likely, or maybe an octave higher) I’ll bet you would pick it as Julie’s “sew” note in that song.
If I’m right, then you can actually tell a G from a B, it’s just that you never took the time to lock the sounds in, in association with the note names.
Listen to the first 20 seconds of this video: https://youtu.be/QDWKzG5oaog
Think about it. Play it again. Think about it. Play it again and sing the notes you hear along with their pitches, “C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C-C-B-A-G-F-E-D-C.” Do it ten or twenty times. An hour later sing the song. I’ll bet you are very close to the actual frequencies. Do it twenty times tomorrow. In a few days the pitches in association with the note names will be locked in your memory. You’ll be able to think of the A pitch and reproduce it, or very close to it. I just watched the video and I’m doing it mentally now.
Can’t you hear Paul McCartney sing, “Yesterday” in your mind? Joni Mitchell singing, “Help Me?” Etta James singing, “At Last?” I’m sure most people can recall the sounds mentally and would be able to recognize them if they heard them. If Rick Beato took his soundboard and played you the Beatles’ “Yesterday” two intervals lower you would know it’s not the key you have heard them sing it in. You’d even guess it was lower than the originally recorded key.
My belief, based on observation and experience, is that most humans can hear and remember pitch, they just don’t associate those pitch memories with note names. It also seems logical that, like vision, taste, smell and touch there would be a range of how fine tuned one’s hearing is. My sense of smell, for example, is not very good. But, like anything, most people can certainly improve their senses with practice.
sdferr,
If he or she speaks German and has memorized the associated frequencies… Dann glaube ich, Ja!
Heh, Rufus T.
Could be a point through which to tunnel down into the chamber music of neurological resonance then, for there’s a nice bundle of various wet facilities in operation there. Hook ’em up to the MRI, pump in the stimulation and watch the neuronal dance of auditory sensory processing, recognition, memory verification (This! Not that!), and etc. light up the screen.
I’m likely beating a dead horse here, but, as I wrote, I dedicated about 15 minutes over the course of several days playing a C scale and mentally associating note names with the sounds I heard. Later in those same days I spent 5 or 10 minutes remembering the sounds I had heard earlier in the day and thinking of the note names. Then, the next day I’d think first and see how close I was before hitting a key to start the rote memorization and association over again.
Have any of you who claim you don’t have perfect pitch ever done that? 45 minutes over 3 days? I think the people who have perfect pitch have two things going for them; they are not tone deaf, and they spent some amount of time associating pitches with note names.
In the past I would occasionally meet people who can tell what day of the week a date falls on. For years I was amazed by it. One day I looked it up online and found a guy who had written 5 rules on the topic. Some of the rules are a few words long. Some are maybe seven words long. Very simple rules. He called it the “D Day” method.
I spent 15 or 20 minutes looking at a calendar and thinking about the way the rules worked, then I spent about 5 minutes memorizing the rules. Now I amaze people when they mention a date and I tell them what day of the week it falls on*. I’ll be in a business meeting and someone will say, “Let’s meet again in three months on the third Friday. Can someone get out their calendar to see what date that is?” And faster than anyone can produce a calendar I’ll state the date. Or someone will mention their birthdate, six months from now, and I’ll say, “Hey, that’s a Saturday this year!” They pull up a calendar on their phone and then stare at me.
It amazes people (just as it used to amaze me) because almost no one has spent the 15 minutes required to think about how the month lengths divide by seven (and 365 and 366 divide by seven) and memorizing 5 fun, rote rules that don’t even make math necessary. They assume I most have some bizarre, savant ability, but literally anyone with an average IQ can learn to do it, forever, in a few minutes. Was I born with some amazing, savant, “calendar pitch” that only 1 in 10,000 humans have? No, I spent 10 minutes memorizing something.
How do you know you can’t remember note names and their sounds if you haven’t spent 45 minutes over the course of 3 days trying?
*I only do the current year and one or two prior and after. There is an additional set of rules to deal with historic dates and I haven’t bothered to memorize those. Leap days make that a little more challenging, but even without memorizing those rules I can keep up with a few years on either side of the current year.
Rufus T. Firefly:
Perfect pitch is when someone plays a single note out of the blue on a piano – not a tune, just an isolated note – the other person can name it without looking. The person can name the notes in any chord played in isolation as well.
What you are describing doesn’t sound like that to me. Most musicians do not have perfect pitch although training and practice can give them relative pitch..
According to wiki, perfect pitch is a pretty high bar:
___________________________________
Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities, achieved without a reference tone:[7]
* Identify by name individual pitches played on various instruments.
* Name the key of a given piece of tonal music.
* Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass.
* Name the pitches of common everyday sounds such as car horns and alarms.
The allied ability to sing a note on demand, which by itself is termed “perfect pitch,” appears to be much rarer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
Is there such a thing as as “tone mute”? Asking for a friend.
Well that’s not fair huxley. To actually look it up. (joke)
Since we now have a definition, I’ll relate my boring but slightly strange (to me) story. In college I was encouraged to take formal instruction on my instrument as an elective that would be covered by my tuition. So I got this hot-shot instructor, which was cool.
A couple months into our sessions, I walked in and the instructor tells me to face away from the piano and he says, “I’ll play a note and you play the same note on your instrument.” Immediately, I think “Oh sh_t, he’s testing me on perfect pitch. I don’t have perfect pitch.” I said something like, “I don’t think this is going to work.” He said, “Relax. Just give it a try.”
He played the first note, and with more than a little trepidation I am trying to rationally think what that note is. An A? A C? No clue. I play some note and it’s wrong. That process repeats a couple times.
Then I thought, he told me to relax. Let’s try that. I blanked my mind, focused on the sound of the piano, and let my body respond by playing a like note. It didn’t work all the time, but I hit about 50% of the notes correctly.
No, I don’t have perfect pitch, but I was beating the odds of randomness, which surprised me. The fact that rational concentration made it worse really surprised me. Or maybe it was the trepidation that blocked it.
neo and huxley,
neo’s definition seems to match #’s 1 and 4 on huxley’s list. I can do that. I’m not always spot on. I usually am, but when I’m not I’m within a note. I remember after taking the 3 days to memorize the note names of the diatonic scale sounds I heard an alarm. I think it was a microwave timer. I wondered if I could name the note. I thought of my diatonic scale. It sounded a little higher than F but a little lower than G. F#? I grabbed a chromatic harmonica and played F#. Yup!
And I contend many, many people could do the same if they practiced. (More on this in another comment.)
2 and 3 in huxley’s list do seem hard. Regarding key, I can often recognize C major and D minor, but I haven’t worked on this much. I’ve recently started messing around with this with one of the instruments I play and am definitely improving, but I have to think about it. I haven’t tried 3 much, but I can do the ones I play most often. I would think it’s the same for most musicians.
I thought about this a lot while I prepared and ate dinner. Here are two things I came up with.
Thing One
It would make sense that hearing would be like sight and smell/taste. Some people have 20/20 vision, some have better than 20/20, some worse. Some can see shades of colors, others cannot, etc. Some people can smell and/or taste much more deeply and richly than others. Wine tasters, beer tasters, food tasters… People are certainly born with abilities and can learn to refine them. Why would sound be any different?
A in the middle range is 440 hertz. The next note on a diatonic scale is B, which is about 54 cycles per second faster. That’s 12% faster. The note above A on a chromatic scale is A# (or Bflat) which is 26 cycles per second, or 6% faster than A. Like vision and smell/taste, some folks’ hearing is likely more sensitive than others. Many can distinguish between 12% more vibrations in a second and some can even distinguish between 6% (and a few can’t even do 12%).
So, a part of pitch recognition is how good are your ears at sensing vibration speeds? It’s a physical thing. As neo indicated in today’s vision post, one can only read whatever line(s) on an eye chart one can read. Our visual systems are all limited and can vary based on physical constraints. Hearing is the same.
Thing Two
I think most folks have very good pitch recognition but many are either unfamiliar with musical notation and terminology and/or have not spent time associating sounds with that terminology.
If you heard three different Frank Sinatra impersonators you would not only be able to distinguish if one was singing a bit higher or lower than Frank’s range (pitch), you’d be able to judge the accuracy of his intonation, tone, emotion, timbre, vibrato… People’s hearing is so incredible we hear much more than pitch. I could play you a recording of 50 women reciting “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and you’d recognize your own mother’s voice. Even if half the other women had a similar pitch.
Unfortunately, he’s seemed to stop recording new episodes, but Frank Caliendo and John Holmberg’s podcast https://www.thefrankcaliendocast.com/ was often quite funny, and they would often dissect impersonations of famous people. It is fascinating to hear the two of them break down a voice into unique characteristics. They’ll even say things like, “to get this guy you do Barack Obama but a little higher and further back in your throat.” They have all kinds of terms for producing human voice I’ve never thought about. They make their living at it and have put a lot of time into it.
If we had physicsguy or one of the other guitarists strum an E major chord a few times and a C minor chord a few times, and you hummed along and concentrated on them you would quickly be able to pick them out the next time you heard one strummed. So why not an A major or E minor? Seventh? Suspension? Diminished? Augmented? I think most folks who were introduced to the different chord types (minor, diminished…) and spent some time attempting to internalize them would be able to recognize different types when played later. Picking out the root note is an additional skill and fewer would likely be good at that, but note and chord names are not innate.
Think of it this way. I know very few color names. If you show me a paint swatch that is burnt umber* and another that is chestnut* I would likely refer to each as “brown.” My eyes see two different shades, but I simply lack the words to distinguish them. If you show me both together I might say one is lighter or darker, or shinier or flatter? (This is similar to the aural exercise in neo’s post video.) If I spent 10 minutes looking at brown paint swatches and memorizing which names to associate with which swatches I would speak more accurately the next time I saw them.
My vision has a limit (for example, my wife and I quickly learned that she sees more variations of color than I do), but my vocabulary also has a limit (my wife also has a much more advanced color vocabulary than I do). I can’t do much to improve the first part, but I can do something to improve the second part.
Most people haven’t worked on the looking at swatches and memorizing color names part of “perfect pitch.”
*I literally had to google “shades of brown” to get those two names. I have a very limited color vocabulary.
TommyJay,
Fascinating story!
If he played a piano note could you hum it? I’ll bet you could, or at least get real close. Thing of everything that’s going on with humming; vocal chord speed, jaw position, breath control… Almost certainly more complicated than playing the instrument you held in your hand. But most of us develop incredible vocal skill. Speaking, singing, humming, whistling… those are extremely complex mechanical/biological processes. And, like you discovered, the less we think about it the more accurate we are.
What you were doing wasn’t perfect pitch, per se, but ear playing. Some great musicians never learned to read music but they knew where every sound was on their instrument and how to reproduce it. They can hum or sing with their instrument.
There are two instruments I’m most adroit with and one I play completely by ear and the other is all sheet music. It’s a long story why they evolved that way with me, but I recently started working on playing the second one (the all sheet music one) by ear and, as you discovered with your teacher, it’s coming along better than I anticipated and the less I think about it the better I do.
TommyJay,
Regarding your joke about looking up the definition, I intentionally didn’t do that because I was trying to reason it out. There’s no question “perfect pitch” as it relates to hearing ability has a natural, DNA component. But I also wonder how many people have really tried, and of those who have tried, how many have spent any time associating note names with sounds?
I imagine fewer than 1 in 10,000 people can read Icelandic. But it’s also true fewer than 1 in 10,000 people have ever tried to read Icelandic.
I’ll bet if a 3rd grade music teacher did what your music teacher did with a piano for 5 minutes at the start of each class, saying the note aloud as she strikes it and having the class sing the note name back to her; 50% or more of the class would be accurate regarding the diatonic scale 80% or more of the time.
TommyJay, Nonapod:
If Rick Beato says he doesn’t have perfect pitch, and I do recall him saying that at least once, then I suspect professional musicians have a very high bar for perfect pitch.
To make it professionally as a musician requires an insane amount of talent and hard work.
(Today I was listening to an HD version of “In the Court of the Crimson King” and noticing how incredibly precise Michael Giles’s drumming was. As well as the precision of the other Crimson players when it came to perfect melodic and contrapuntal figures.
A shame they couldn’t produce other albums IMO as interesting beyond impeccable musicianship.)
Rufus,
Oh yeah, I could definitely sing the note or whistle it dead on pitch. I could not name it. What’s weird is that when I played the note correctly, I didn’t know what note I had played either, until I backed out what I had done.
Normally, you think the note, choose the fingering, and play it. In this case, my fingers did something and I played it. What fingering was that? Very strange.
I like your last paragraph. I concur.
My favorite scene from the film Amadeus is where Mozart plays a Salieri composition for the Emperor after having heard it only once. The latter part of his playing is pure improv. Of course, it’s only Hollywood.
Shorter good copy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK3OUCw0H8Y
Longer with context. Poorer copy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5n0pkNpDWY
TommyJay,
I don’t find it strange at all. You had played a lot of notes on that instrument. Just like with singing or whistling there was a biological, muscle memory link. You had just never thought of it that way before. Assuming the instrument involved your mouth and fingers; they knew what to do when they heard the note, you just had to learn to relax and let them.
And doing it more makes the muscle memory connection stronger.
I’m amazed by folks who can hear a song in a certain key (that’s the part you wrote about it, hearing then playing), and then instantly transpose to another key (that’s the mental part; note names and fingering). I get how people can read music and I get how people can think pitches and reproduce them, but to use both parts of the brain simultaneously?! Incredible!
On the show, “Who’s Line is it, Anyway” they often do song improvisations. A comedian is given a topic and a style of music and has to compose song lyrics on the spot, instantly. It’s an amazing conglomeration of those multiple, different areas of the brain. Sing along with a piano player; hit pitches, think about tempo, number of measures… But, create lyrics on the fly. AND, structure the lyrics into a poem that ends with a punchline based on the topic!! Comedian Wayne Brady is especially good at this style of comedic improv. He must have a big brain!
Now I have to go listen to 21st Century Schizoid Man. Thanks huxley.
TommyJay:
Glad to be of service! How did “Schizoid Man” go, if you got to it?
“Crimson King” was another of those prog albums which seemed to come out of nowhere and reflect a new genre going from strength to strength. However, prog turned out to be a tougher music to make and to keep an audience with.