Does Perfect Pitch Ear Training Work?

[Endrik]

Not about perfect pitch but relative... but still kinda funny.

Years ago I was with a friend of mine and his father, driving around. Both musicians and with a very good hearing. My friend's father was driving and the car was brand new. After we stopped at their place the father wanted to hear how the car horns sound like. So he pressed the wheel and we heard the sound. Suddenly both of them looked like wine tasting experts.
"Pretty nice tonality"
"Yeah, that septim (7th degree interval) gives a good ring to it"
"Exactly"
blah blah blah

I was like what the fuck

[skintaster]

All interesting info, but has anyone here ever tried this course? Not trying to sound rude, I'm just curious.

[Trussrod]

all interesting info, but has anyone here ever tried this course? Not trying to sound rude, i'm just curious.

[tonemonster]

Not about perfect pitch but relative... but still kinda funny.

Years ago I was with a friend of mine and his father, driving around. Both musicians and with a very good hearing. My friend's father was driving and the car was brand new. After we stopped at their place the father wanted to hear how the car horns sound like. So he pressed the wheel and we heard the sound. Suddenly both of them looked like wine tasting experts.
"Pretty nice tonality"
"Yeah, that septim (7th degree interval) gives a good ring to it"
"Exactly"
blah blah blah

I was like what the fuck

now that is fukkin FUNNY!!!!!!!

[Jacksons Shred]

I think too many people throw around the term perfect pitch. I'd say that 80% of people that "say" they have perfect pitch, really don't. It's just a ego thing.

[micha]

Perfect pitch = hearing the note in your head without any frame of reference.
Relative pitch = hearing a note from a device such as a tuning fork and working out the note in your head from that reference point.

I always thought it was the following way;

relative pitch: beeing able to hear wether the melody or chord made a third or a quint for example

absolut pitch: beeing able to tell a B from a C

perfect pitch: beeing pissed about every music you hear since one instrument is always not tuned to A=440 but to A=339,5 for example.

I have a fairly good relative ear, absolut I'm at about 4 out of 5 or something.
I do have some friends with great absolut pitch, one can even tell three random notes at once played on a piano, but I never met someone with perfect pitch, and actually I don't see a reason why this should be something one would like to have.


actually there are these days when I wish I never even touched an instrument and my ears would be as stupid as everyone elses.
sometimes I'd just like to take the blue pill and enjoy the BS coming out of the speakers on a party as much as everyone else in the room, who usually don't give a fuck about what's played anyway.

[javert]

actually there are these days when I wish I never even touched an instrument and my ears would be as stupid as everyone elses. sometimes I'd just like to take the blue pill and enjoy the BS coming out of the speakers on a party as much as everyone else in the room, who usually don't give a fuck about what's played anyway.

I used to do research in audio compression and I did tons of informal and formal listening tests (I participated in MPEG4 listening tests as an expert listener, for example), and I ended up being very skilled at picking up even very minor differences and artifacts that normal hearing people would not pick up on and even some special ones that even other experts would not detect (due to the specific problems I was working on). Needless to say, this is not necessarily a good thing as a lot of old mp3 files sound like crap now.

This actually also happens to normal listeners (non-experts) when they've been exposed to a certain kind of artifacts for an extended period of times. This is exactly why expert listeners are used in evaluating these kinds of things.

[javert]

I always thought it was the following way;

relative pitch: beeing able to hear wether the melody or chord made a third or a quint for example

absolut pitch: beeing able to tell a B from a C

perfect pitch: beeing pissed about every music you hear since one instrument is always not tuned to A=440 but to A=339,5 for example.

Your definitions of relative and aboslute pitch are fine, but perfect pitch is not. Consider that standard tuning has changed over time, it used to be 420. Therefore, there can be no such thing as "perfect pitch" in your sense. What there can be is in the sense of absolute pitch according to your definition plus an over-training to modern standard pitch--this would cause the preference for 440 over 339,5.

[micha]

maybe my example was weird...
I meant that even the smallest difference in frequency are noticed and disturb the listener.
I wasn't really about the modern standart pitch.
I don't have perfect pitch, but I'm sure that people with that pich can live with different tuning standarts, as long as every involved instrument is tuned to that pitch with zero tollerance.

and my last paragraph was more about the music itself.
I meant that popular music just sucks most of the time and gets boring after the song is half way done.
I actually prefer a crappy recording of good music over this highly produced, repetative BS you hear in radio, pubs etc most of the time.
I got picky for the content over the years. I'm now at a point where I don't really care all too much any more what kind of music it is, as long as it doesn't bore me to death.

so, different aspect of hearing. kind of offtopic, isn't it?

[javert]

Micha, I hear you. I didn't notice the "one instrument" phrase, my bad. But in the sense that you're writing it there, I would say that's relative pitch then. I think in normal (scientific) terminology, absolute and perfect pitch refer to the same phenomenon.

To add some to the statement in my previous reply: there are actually examples I've seen cited where people prefer standard tuning to others, but like I said, there's nothing special about our standard tuning, it's just a convention, so they only developed that preference due to exposure.

I think as a musician, one focuses perhaps even more on the idea behind the music than stuff like production. That's not to say that we don't care about production.

And, yes, we have wandered into different aspects of perception, but I think we're still staying as much on topic as the average JCF thread

[Pointy]

So... a classically trained singer can sing any note you ask them without reference, right? That means they can also identify them. That much can be trained.

I have also heard stories claiming that a conductor can stop a rehearsing orchestra and point to one specific violin out of dozens, telling them exactly what they are doing wrong - and that means in terms of "feeling" or something, nothing so crude as a wrong note.

Definately off-topic but i can't resist: i wonder how age and the reduction of the range of audible high frequencies that comes with it affect the perceptions of harmonics, timbre, etc

[Spivonious]

So... a classically trained singer can sing any note you ask them without reference, right? That means they can also identify them. That much can be trained.

There are lots of classically-trained singers who don't have perfect pitch. I guess it can be learned, but I've never seen that happen. I will say that when I was playing my trombone more, I could hear a Bb (the trombone's basic tone) before I played it, but I was never that confident in it, and I was playing my trombone 2 hours minimum every day.

[Endrik]

I used to do research in audio compression and I did tons of informal and formal listening tests (I participated in MPEG4 listening tests as an expert listener, for example), and I ended up being very skilled at picking up even very minor differences and artifacts that normal hearing people would not pick up on and even some special ones that even other experts would not detect (due to the specific problems I was working on). Needless to say, this is not necessarily a good thing as a lot of old mp3 files sound like crap now.

Isn't that called timbre hearing?
Good for musicians for developing a good tone and getting a great sound.
Usually producers and audio engineers have really good ears in that category.

[javert]

Isn't that called timbre hearing?
Good for musicians for developing a good tone and getting a great sound.
Usually producers and audio engineers have really good ears in that category.

I don't know, I haven't heard that term before. I can imagine that producers and audio engineers are good at that. It's quite amazing what people can hear when they become trained.

Sometimes you develop a preference for certain artifacts (like overly smooth rather than rough). People working on some type of coders would prefer one type of artifact while others would prefer others. The result is that when you do listening tests, you get different clusters of scores, depending on what people used to work on.

[MikeStrat]

I don't know about the whole "Perfect Pitch" thing but I'd sure like to have the money that guy has spent over the years in magazine advertising. He's been doing that since the 80's.