That's about the geekiest, nerdiest thing I've ever heard anyone do with music. Yet for some reason, I'm impressed and also slightly jealous...fyffer wrote: But can he f*rt to match a pitch?
Gross story coming, but if you've read this far, you obviously can handle it.
In college (some of the stuff I did in college, I still don't believe), we were serious music major dorks. We would randomly break into three- or four-part harmony at any time (most often under the influence of something), but a particular talent I discovered is that I could often f*rt "in tune".
If I felt one coming on, I would tell my two roomates who would then sing an interval (3rd, 6th, 4th, whatever), and my charge was to complete the triad, in whatever inversion was presented to me. More often than not, we made very nice triads.
I don't think it qualifies me to get on Letterman, but we thought it was quite a hoot (or should it be "toot").
Sorry if that was gross, but you brought it up.
The Secret To Perfect Pitch
-
chrisoff
- Posts: 2123
- Joined: Sun Oct 30, 2005 5:11 am
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 8
- Location: Aberdeenshire, Scotland
- Contact:
-
Jerry Freeman
- Posts: 6074
- Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2002 6:00 pm
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 8
- Location: Now playing in Northeastern Connecticut
- Contact:
-
Jerry Freeman
- Posts: 6074
- Joined: Mon Dec 30, 2002 6:00 pm
- antispam: No
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 8
- Location: Now playing in Northeastern Connecticut
- Contact:
-
fyffer
- Posts: 1032
- Joined: Mon Jan 17, 2005 11:27 am
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Rhode Island, USA
- Contact:
Eww.
I just took that stupid test, and completely convinced myself that I do not have perfect pitch, or absolute pitch or whatever.
It takes me longer than 3 seconds to determine a pitch, and I just got way too stressed out trying to do it in that short span.
Give me 10 seconds for each note, and I'll get it (because I have to compare it to my inner reference pitch).
Still doesn't make my "curse" go away though ...
I just took that stupid test, and completely convinced myself that I do not have perfect pitch, or absolute pitch or whatever.
It takes me longer than 3 seconds to determine a pitch, and I just got way too stressed out trying to do it in that short span.
Give me 10 seconds for each note, and I'll get it (because I have to compare it to my inner reference pitch).
Still doesn't make my "curse" go away though ...
___\|/______________________________
|___O____|_O_O_o_|_o_O__O__|_O__O__|
|___O____|_O_O_o_|_o_O__O__|_O__O__|
-
jileha
- Posts: 79
- Joined: Fri Mar 02, 2007 2:56 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: California
genes or environment...
Genes or enironment? Nature or nurture? The age-old question...
There has been another study that comes to a different conclusion:
Could it be that cellist Yo-Yo Ma owes his perfect musical pitch to his Chinese parents? While we may never know the definitive answer, new research from the University of California, San Diego has found a strong link between speaking a tone language – such as Mandarin – and having perfect pitch, the ability once thought to be the rare province of super-talented musicians.
The first large-scale, direct-test study to be conducted on perfect pitch, led by psychology professor Diana Deutsch of UC San Diego, has found that native tone language speakers are almost nine times more likely to have the ability.
Results will be presented Nov. 17 at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego.
Perfect, or absolute, pitch is the ability to name or produce a musical note of particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple “red.” While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000.
Tone languages – Mandarin and Vietnamese, among many others – are those in which words take on entirely different meanings depending on the tones in which they are enunciated. In Mandarin, for example, the word “ma” means “mother” when spoken in the first tone, “hemp” when spoken in the second tone, “horse” in the third and a reproach in the fourth. (Tone is not to be confused with shades of meaning imparted by intonation; saying something sarcastically, for instance, or rising at the end of a sentence to indicate a question.)
Deutsch and her co-authors measured the prevalence of perfect pitch by means of a direct, on-site test in two populations of music students: a group of 88 first-year students enrolled at the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, and a group of 115 first-years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, none of whom spoke a tone language.
The test consisted of 36 piano notes spanning a three-octave range, generated by a Kurzweil synthesizer. To minimize the use of relative pitch (a much more common ability where listeners rely on reference notes for help), all intervals between successive tones were larger than an octave. Perfect pitch was defined as a score of 85 percent correct.
“We found a very clear difference between the two populations,” Deutsch said. “In Mandarin speakers, perfect pitch appears to be not rare, but rather a readily acquired ability.
“We also found a striking effect of age of onset of musical training,” she said.
In both groups, the earlier an individual began music lessons, the more likely he or she was to have perfect pitch. But the incidence was substantially higher in the Chinese Mandarin speakers of the Central Conservatory.
For students who had begun musical training between ages 4 and 5, approximately 60 percent of the Chinese speakers tested as having perfect pitch, while only about 14 percent of the U.S. nontone language speakers did. For those who had begun training between 6 and 7, approximately 55 percent of the Chinese and 6 percent of the U.S. met the criterion. And for those beginning between 8 and 9, the figures were 42 percent of the Chinese and zero of the U.S. group.
The discrepancies were greater when the researchers allowed for semitone errors (that is, giving the subjects credit for a note missed by a half-note, or answering “C” for “C sharp”): Fully 74 percent of the Chinese students had perfect pitch if they had started musical training between ages 4 and 5.
There were no differences depending on gender, in either group or any subgroup, Deutsch noted. Also, all those who were asked to participate, did, thereby eliminating the self-selection bias which plagues survey studies.
The study results, Deutsch said, “are very like what you would expect if you were dealing with a speech-related system. Tone appears to be analogous to vowel quality and other linguistic features acquired during infancy.
“The findings support the notion that babies can acquire perfect pitch as part of learning a language, which can later generalize to musical tones,” Deutsch said. “Indeed, the results for acquisition of absolute pitch in tone and nontone language speakers reflect a very similar picture, in terms of timeframe, to the critical periods inferred by linguists for acquiring first and second languages.”
In other words, Deutsch suggests, perfect musical pitch functions much like a second language to tone speakers: If you’re fluent in Mandarin, learning the tones of Cantonese – and perfect pitch – will be much easier than if you’re an English speaker.
The study follows up on one Deutsch led in 1999, which found that native speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin exhibited a “remarkably precise and stable form of absolute pitch in enunciating words,” leading Deutsch to hypothesize then that pitch was an extra-musical ability.
Deutsch’s coauthors on the present study are: Trevor Henthorn, also of UCSD; Elizabeth Marvin, professor of music theory, Eastman School of Music; and HongShuai Xu, graduate student, College of Music, Capital Normal University in Beijing.
The study, with graphic figures of the results and sound files of the test, is available at http://www.aip.org/148th/deutsch.html.
A top authority on musical perception, Deutsch is the editor of “The Psychology of Music” (2nd edition 1999) and is the founding president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Her past research has explored the way we hold musical information in memory and how we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. Deutsch has discovered a number of musical illusions and paradoxes, including the tritone paradox, which established that different cultural groups often perceive identical notes of music differently.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/DeutschTone.asp
I also remember a TV program I watched many years ago where they found out that birds apparently have perfect pitcht as they start they individual songs always on the same pitch, never sharp, never flat.
There has been another study that comes to a different conclusion:
Could it be that cellist Yo-Yo Ma owes his perfect musical pitch to his Chinese parents? While we may never know the definitive answer, new research from the University of California, San Diego has found a strong link between speaking a tone language – such as Mandarin – and having perfect pitch, the ability once thought to be the rare province of super-talented musicians.
The first large-scale, direct-test study to be conducted on perfect pitch, led by psychology professor Diana Deutsch of UC San Diego, has found that native tone language speakers are almost nine times more likely to have the ability.
Results will be presented Nov. 17 at the meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Diego.
Perfect, or absolute, pitch is the ability to name or produce a musical note of particular pitch without the benefit of a reference note. The visual equivalent is calling a red apple “red.” While most people do this effortlessly, without, for example, having to compare a red to a green apple, perfect pitch is extremely rare in the U.S. and Europe, with an estimated prevalence in the general population of less than one in 10,000.
Tone languages – Mandarin and Vietnamese, among many others – are those in which words take on entirely different meanings depending on the tones in which they are enunciated. In Mandarin, for example, the word “ma” means “mother” when spoken in the first tone, “hemp” when spoken in the second tone, “horse” in the third and a reproach in the fourth. (Tone is not to be confused with shades of meaning imparted by intonation; saying something sarcastically, for instance, or rising at the end of a sentence to indicate a question.)
Deutsch and her co-authors measured the prevalence of perfect pitch by means of a direct, on-site test in two populations of music students: a group of 88 first-year students enrolled at the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, and a group of 115 first-years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, none of whom spoke a tone language.
The test consisted of 36 piano notes spanning a three-octave range, generated by a Kurzweil synthesizer. To minimize the use of relative pitch (a much more common ability where listeners rely on reference notes for help), all intervals between successive tones were larger than an octave. Perfect pitch was defined as a score of 85 percent correct.
“We found a very clear difference between the two populations,” Deutsch said. “In Mandarin speakers, perfect pitch appears to be not rare, but rather a readily acquired ability.
“We also found a striking effect of age of onset of musical training,” she said.
In both groups, the earlier an individual began music lessons, the more likely he or she was to have perfect pitch. But the incidence was substantially higher in the Chinese Mandarin speakers of the Central Conservatory.
For students who had begun musical training between ages 4 and 5, approximately 60 percent of the Chinese speakers tested as having perfect pitch, while only about 14 percent of the U.S. nontone language speakers did. For those who had begun training between 6 and 7, approximately 55 percent of the Chinese and 6 percent of the U.S. met the criterion. And for those beginning between 8 and 9, the figures were 42 percent of the Chinese and zero of the U.S. group.
The discrepancies were greater when the researchers allowed for semitone errors (that is, giving the subjects credit for a note missed by a half-note, or answering “C” for “C sharp”): Fully 74 percent of the Chinese students had perfect pitch if they had started musical training between ages 4 and 5.
There were no differences depending on gender, in either group or any subgroup, Deutsch noted. Also, all those who were asked to participate, did, thereby eliminating the self-selection bias which plagues survey studies.
The study results, Deutsch said, “are very like what you would expect if you were dealing with a speech-related system. Tone appears to be analogous to vowel quality and other linguistic features acquired during infancy.
“The findings support the notion that babies can acquire perfect pitch as part of learning a language, which can later generalize to musical tones,” Deutsch said. “Indeed, the results for acquisition of absolute pitch in tone and nontone language speakers reflect a very similar picture, in terms of timeframe, to the critical periods inferred by linguists for acquiring first and second languages.”
In other words, Deutsch suggests, perfect musical pitch functions much like a second language to tone speakers: If you’re fluent in Mandarin, learning the tones of Cantonese – and perfect pitch – will be much easier than if you’re an English speaker.
The study follows up on one Deutsch led in 1999, which found that native speakers of Vietnamese and Mandarin exhibited a “remarkably precise and stable form of absolute pitch in enunciating words,” leading Deutsch to hypothesize then that pitch was an extra-musical ability.
Deutsch’s coauthors on the present study are: Trevor Henthorn, also of UCSD; Elizabeth Marvin, professor of music theory, Eastman School of Music; and HongShuai Xu, graduate student, College of Music, Capital Normal University in Beijing.
The study, with graphic figures of the results and sound files of the test, is available at http://www.aip.org/148th/deutsch.html.
A top authority on musical perception, Deutsch is the editor of “The Psychology of Music” (2nd edition 1999) and is the founding president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Her past research has explored the way we hold musical information in memory and how we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. Deutsch has discovered a number of musical illusions and paradoxes, including the tritone paradox, which established that different cultural groups often perceive identical notes of music differently.
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/DeutschTone.asp
I also remember a TV program I watched many years ago where they found out that birds apparently have perfect pitcht as they start they individual songs always on the same pitch, never sharp, never flat.
-
Cynth
- Posts: 6703
- Joined: Tue Nov 30, 2004 4:58 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Iowa, USA
That was interesting. It has always seemed to me that being able to duplicate a tone without a reference tone is not really a musical ability but an ability which, in my particular culture, would be identified most readily in those who had musical training since that is the main thing my culture does involving tones. The absence of perfect pitch does not hamper technique or musicianship as far as I have ever known. I didn't, however, realize that languages spoken in China used absolute tones. I thought that if the tone were raised or lowered it would be relative to the general tone of a person's voice I guess. I didn't realize that everyone speaking one of those languages says a word with a tone of the exact same wavelength---I guess that is what the article is saying.
Diligentia maximum etiam mediocris ingeni subsidium. ~ Diligence is a very great help even to a mediocre intelligence.----Seneca
-
BillChin
- Posts: 1700
- Joined: Tue Aug 05, 2003 11:24 am
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Light on the ocean
- Contact:
The sample may be flawed, leading to a flawed conclusion. Getting into the Beijing school is probably an order of magnitude more difficult than getting into the Rochester school because of the number of applicants. This alone might be enough to account for the differences in test results, language aside. Testing a broad sample of average people would be a more useful test to see if language is the reason for the separation.Deutsch and her co-authors measured the prevalence of perfect pitch by means of a direct, on-site test in two populations of music students: a group of 88 first-year students enrolled at the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, China, all of whom spoke Mandarin, and a group of 115 first-years at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, none of whom spoke a tone language.
-
falkbeer
- Posts: 570
- Joined: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:52 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
- Contact:
A415 is the standard tuning for early musictalasiga wrote:Darling Westerners (and others)
Which A is absolutely perfectly pitched
A415
A435
A440
A444
?
Hmmm?
A435 is, i think, the old "chamber tuning" (don´t know the correct english)
A440 is the current standard A
A444 that´s me singin in the bathtub!
-
falkbeer
- Posts: 570
- Joined: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:52 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
- Contact:
Re: genes or environment...
It seems that dogs also have perfect pitch. I conditioned my dog to A440. I used to hit the A440 on the piano and then gave my dog a treat every time. But never when I hit any other note. Dr. Pavlov would have been proud! After a couple of month Milou (my dog) came running for the treat only when I hit A440.jileha wrote:
I also remember a TV program I watched many years ago where they found out that birds apparently have perfect pitcht as they start they individual songs always on the same pitch, never sharp, never flat.
-
falkbeer
- Posts: 570
- Joined: Wed Mar 15, 2006 1:52 pm
- Please enter the next number in sequence: 1
- Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
- Contact:
I wonder how the chinese do when they sing? Very few indo-european languages are tone languages. As far as is I know only swedish is to some minor extent a tone language. There are a few words that can´t be properly understood, exept in a context, when singing. One is the word "tomten" which could mean either "Santa Claus" or "ground/piece of land", depending on the tone used.Cynth wrote:That was interesting. It has always seemed to me that being able to duplicate a tone without a reference tone is not really a musical ability but an ability which, in my particular culture, would be identified most readily in those who had musical training since that is the main thing my culture does involving tones. The absence of perfect pitch does not hamper technique or musicianship as far as I have ever known. I didn't, however, realize that languages spoken in China used absolute tones. I thought that if the tone were raised or lowered it would be relative to the general tone of a person's voice I guess. I didn't realize that everyone speaking one of those languages says a word with a tone of the exact same wavelength---I guess that is what the article is saying.