How would you learn absolute pitch?
post by Thomas Sepulchre · 2022-01-29T23:26:42.368Z · LW · GW · 9 commentsThis is a question post.
Contents
Answers 5 gareth 4 Jemist 2 ChristianKl 1 Jalen Lyle-Holmes 1 Elmer of Malmesbury 1 miceu None 9 comments
Absolute pitch is the ability to correctly identify any musical note. It is close to another ability, relative pitch, which is the ability to identify any interval correctly, although relative pitch is usually described as the ability to correctly identify any note, once the subject has been given a "reference tone". An important fact here is that relative pitch is not as rare as absolute pitch, which may hint that absolute pitch is harder to acquire/train.
What kind of learning procedure would you design to learn absolute pitch?
In particular, I have two strategies in mind, and I don't think either would work. The first one is simple: a computer produces a note, the user identifies the note, the computer corrects the user. This is flawed because the first note in pair with the correct answer given by the computer provides a reference tone, therefore, after the first note, the user only trains his/her relative pitch. The second strategy would be to not correct the user immediately, but instead wait for example 10 notes before correcting. This seems flawed too, because of how crucial a quick feedback is to learning. Note that, with either strategies, it is not possible to make long learning sessions anyway, because it soon becomes a relative pitch training strategy.
Any clever idea?
Answers
Relative pitch and absolute pitch are 2 different skills. While most people can learn relative pitch, some people say that absolute is genetic and can’t be learnt. I don’t believe this is true (at least in my case). My technique is to learn songs that start on a specific pitch (C for example) and internalise the pitch, imagine the sound and try to sing it before comparing with the original. Try this exercise every morning, take notes and see if you improve over time.
↑ comment by Nicole Dieker (nicole-dieker) · 2022-01-30T01:21:27.392Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
That's how I've done it, too. Once you know what pitch your favorite song starts on, for example, or what key it's in, learning pitches becomes much easier.
This assumes that you can recall music from memory in its original key, of course. If you can't, your first step might involve strengthening that kind of recall.
↑ comment by Bezzi · 2022-02-02T14:22:56.591Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Relative pitch and absolute pitch are 2 different skills. While most people can learn relative pitch, some people say that absolute is genetic and can’t be learnt.
I am one of those people. Fact is, I've spent ten years in a conservatory, surrounded by dozens of people heavily selected for music-related skills, and basically all of them agreed on absolute pitch being genetic. In a conservatory, relative pitch is considered a very important skill, taught to students of all courses through specific exercises, and some mandatory exams are almost impossible to pass without a decent relative pitch. Absolute pitch is treated the opposite way: no one tries to teach it to you and absolutely no exam requires it. The majority of my professors claimed to not have absolute pitch themselves (the choir director always carried a tuning fork with her, being unable to recall the exact frequency of 440 Hz necessary to intone the choir). These people have spent their entire lives practicing and teaching music at high levels for countless hours, and still don't have absolute pitch. I would be truly shocked if it turned out that you can learn absolute pitch through simple practice.
From my experience as a singer, relative pitch exercises are much more difficult when the notes are a few octaves apart. So making sure the notes jump around over a large range would probably help.
There are a variety of apps available on Google's Play store. Do you have tried them and found them to fail?
Otherwise I can imagine creating a bunch of Anki cards for different notes that are mixed into your normal Anki cards.
Chris Aruffo has done some work on this: http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/
There is one dubious study about sodium valproate making it easier to learn AP: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/
As a fallback plan, you can measure and remember what's the lowest pitch your voice can reach. It's not totally stable, but it can be helpful in some extreme emergency situations.
↑ comment by Huera · 2022-01-30T07:07:36.633Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Could you elaborate on why this study is dubious? Is it because of the small number of participants? Is the test that was used to assess recognition of notes deeply flawed? Or maybe valproate just can’t possibly increase neuroplasticity?
I’m asking because I read this around a year ago, and to this day I’m puzzled as to why no one tried to replicate the findings.
Replies from: Elmer of Malmesbury↑ comment by Malmesbury (Elmer of Malmesbury) · 2022-01-30T21:32:33.162Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Mostly sample size. Also the study has a cross-over design and they only found an effect in one arm. But it could be a fun biohacking project, at least the outcome is easy to quantify and valproate's side effects are well known.
Assuming that, in order to learn perfect pitch, one must train differently than to learn relative pitch:
- Minimize the benefit of a reference tone by keeping the musical interval (distance between notes) big enough.
- Add pauses and noise between notes, to remove the reference note from memory. Spread the training over the whole day.
- To allow for immediate feedback, change other characteristics of the sound (e.g. harmonics) to make relative pitch less effective.
- Add wrong tones to the exercise. Learn to find the correct note out of a sample with wrong tones. Start with learning a single note.
↑ comment by Wbrom (Wbrom42@gmail.com) · 2022-01-30T02:04:10.810Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
It’s been done. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31550277/
Replies from: miceu↑ comment by micchr (miceu) · 2022-01-30T22:23:54.634Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I was surprised, that my brainstorming could have actually been tried before, so I looked into the paper, but I could only find that they used different instruments and added noise. Clearly, 1000ms of noise is not much. I think I could remember a note after hearing 1000ms of noise. Nonetheless, if volunteers with a limited amount of time and motivation can show an improvement, somebody with dedication and lots of time, can learn it too. I heard an anecdote of an old punk band lead singer who claimed, that after 30 years of playing, he finally learned absolute pitch. But that wasn't the question. The question is, how to make learning more efficient.
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comment by Yair Halberstadt (yair-halberstadt) · 2022-01-30T10:55:33.812Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Why not learn relative pitch, and then learn to reliably produce a single reference note. Combined you would effectively have absolute pitch, or does that not count?
Replies from: benjamin-j-campbell, phil-scadden↑ comment by benjamin.j.campbell (benjamin-j-campbell) · 2022-01-31T01:51:59.302Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I think your suggestion is effectively what everyone with absolute pitch is actually doing, if the reports from the inside I've heard are accurate. It's definitely how I would start converting my relative pitch proficiency into absolute
↑ comment by Phil Scadden (phil-scadden) · 2022-01-31T01:03:58.455Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
An unhelpful suggestion would be grow up playing the violin or trombone. However, I think Yair's suggestion is a good one. I am not confident of developing absolute pitch if you havent mastered relative pitch. Musical examination often have a "aural" session which is all about relative pitch. As a result, there is a lot of teaching aids for learning and practising. A good start with a LOT of online resource is learning to sight-sing (assuming you can already read music). Just google sight-singing.
comment by paragonal · 2022-01-30T10:08:27.989Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I am quite skeptical that hearing like a person with absolute pitch can be learned because it seems to be somewhat incompatible with relative pitch.
People with absolute pitch report that if a piece of music is played with a slightly lower or higher pitch, it sounds out of tune. If this feeling stays throughout the piece this means that the person doesn't hear relatively. So even if a relative pitch person would learn to name played notes absolutely, I don't think the hearing experience would be the same.
So I think you can't have both absolute pitch and relative pitch in the full sense. (I do think that you can improve at naming played notes, singing notes correctly without a reference note from outside your body, etc.)
Replies from: benjamin-j-campbell↑ comment by benjamin.j.campbell (benjamin-j-campbell) · 2022-01-31T01:55:30.470Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I gave this an upvote because it is directly counter to my current belief about how relative/absolute pitch work and interact with each other. I agree that if someone's internalised absolute pitch can constantly identify out of tune notes, even after minutes of repetition, this is a strong argument against my position. On the other hand, maybe they do produce one internal reference note of set frequency, and when comparing known intervals against this, it returns "out of tune" every time. I can see either story being true, but I would like to hunt down some more information on which of these models is more accurate
Replies from: paragonal↑ comment by paragonal · 2022-01-31T13:31:06.474Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Rick Beato has a video about people losing their absolute pitch with age (it seems to happen to everyone eventually). There are a lot of anecdata by people who have experienced this both in the video and in the comments.
Some report that after experiencing a shift in their absolute pitch, all music sounds wrong. Some of them adapted somehow (it's unclear to me how much development of relative abilities was involved) and others report not having noticed that their absolute pitch has shifted. Some report that only after they've lost their absolute pitch completely, they were able to develop certain relative pitch abilities.
Overall, people's reported experiences in the comments vary a lot. I wouldn't draw strong conclusions from them. In any case, I find it fascinating to read about these perceptions.
comment by npostavs · 2022-02-02T17:03:53.153Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
This guy claims to have done it in 30 days: https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch-in-30-days-at-24-years-old-7e2e78b8c26b
Replies from: Bezzi↑ comment by Bezzi · 2022-02-03T09:27:06.898Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I would claim that this guy essentially goodharted himself into passing this online test. If you train for a month using always the same small set of clean single-note audio samples, of course you'll end up distinguishing them. This is like building a neural net which solves just MNIST and writing "we achieve full handwritten characters recognition" in the headline.
Also, note that the online tool he uses doesn't let you hear the next note until you've correctly guessed the previous one, and this sort of feedback makes the exercise significantly easier (after the first note you could basically achieve near 100% accuracy with relative pitch alone).
comment by philip_b (crabman) · 2022-01-30T03:24:15.701Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
Since you suspect that your proposed scheme is cheating, I've come up with another cheating scheme which you can employ in most situations to avoid needing absolute pitch. Remember what approximate notes your lowest and highest singing frequencies are. Then when you want to identify a note, hum or quietly sing one of them or both and compare the note you want to identify with them.