Video about perfect pitch and how adults can't develop it...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I have synesthesia as well as paradolia (google it). Also, legality depends on what state you live in.

Lol

Strike three. Priceless.

[cuttime]

I have synesthesia as well as paradolia (google it).

I just saw Abraham Lincoln in his funeral train in a bit of frost on a raccoon's butt. Unmistakable.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

I have synesthesia as well as paradolia (google it).

I just saw Abraham Lincoln in his funeral train in a bit of frost on a raccoon's butt. Unmistakable.

That's nothin, man. I see an Atari ST every time you post. What's THAT about... lol

[stubbsonic]

if pitch recognition is more akin to color recognition

Now we're talking synesthesia, and a very real phenomenon.

If I was referring to synesthesia, it was unintentional. When I said "akin to color recognition" I didn't mean that one saw colors when they heard sound. Perfect pitch is often described that way, where the difference between pitches is recognized with the same certainty as the way non-perfect-pitch-people experience color.

With perfect pitch, we're told, one hears each note as a tonal "color" (i.e., it's still a sound, but with the pitch itself having a unique quality). The comparison is made that F# sounds as different from E as brown is different to yellow (or whatever). Not that the person sees those colors, or connects to actual colors.

I recall hearing about "piano pitch" when I was in college (many years ago). It was the phenomenon where pianists could recall notes by imagining playing the keys and some brain connections would allow them to guess the notes with a fair amount of certainty. I suppose I have both "guitar" and "trombone" pitch because I can sometimes remember how a chord or a trombone pitch sounds. I know I don't have anything resembling perfect pitch. And as I recall, the kids who had "piano pitch" didn't think much of it.

[solex]

Actually color recognition and pitch recognition are not that different. The human brain is able to distinguish between 150 different subjective color tones/shades (wavelengths between 430 and 650 nm). But we're not able to look at only one color and tell the exact wavelength of this color. We need a reference. That is similar to relative pitch recognition. Of course you can train your perception and a person working with colors everyday is better in disinguishing a color than a regular person most of the time.

There's also a difference between color shades and pitches, and form and sound, which are always associated to objects that are engraved in our memories through experience.

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Sound and color are both (over simplifying alert - lol) vibrations.

[stubbsonic]

Sound and color are both (over simplifying alert - lol) vibrations.

Perceived by different organs and different parts of the brain.

I do love though the idea of taking the frequencies of color "down many octaves" until you can roughly assign colors to the musical scale. I don't know how scientific those ideas are. What happens when you reach "an octave" of color?

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Kandinsky did that. Check out his approach to color and how it relates to sound. Tomorrow’s lesson: don’t get framed by rates.

[mikehalloran]

Now we're talking synesthesia,

Ha!

My daughter's very much into it to the degree that Masters Thesis was about synesthesia and Schumann. I hope to read it someday (maybe when I retire). Never occurred to me that there was a word for it and not everyone experienced the phenomenon — or that it was a phenomenon.

Other than that, G is orange, A is white and C is red. Just sayin...

[MIDI Life Crisis]

Am = red
Bbm= maroon
Dm= orange
Em= shades of grey

[mhschmieder]

I didn't have perfect pitch when I was younger; I had relative pitch. That is, if one refers to perfect pitch as being able to name the note. This was due to playing a transposed instrument (Bb Clarinet). After that ceased being my main instrument, I was no longer confused.

What I do have is pitch memory: I always remember the exact notes of a piece of music I've heard or played (or written) as opposed to a potentially transposed version whose note relationships are the same.

Recently, I played Bach's Christmas Oratorio and had to decide which one to listen to. My pitch memory got confused by the "modern pitch" version and everything just felt more "right" with the baroque pitch recording from John Eliot Gardiner. So once I heard it in that version, it became locked in my mind and outcompeted the others for my pitch memory. Yet we don't know for sure what the pitch was when and where Back wrote it. But the harmonies and everything else seem to "work" better for me at "barpque pitch".

I've never tried to analyze it, except to see if I can discover something that might be useful for training others. And I still don't know if what I have is correctly termed "perfect pitch". I just remember how jealous I was of my mom growing up, as she had it, but I "didn't" -- due to my confusion of NAMING notes after clarinet became my main instrument. And yet I was aware of my perfect "pitch memory".

I guess as kids, we think in terms of "passing tests". But I suspect the "pitch memory" aspect is more relevant to what it REALLY means to have "perfect pitch".

But let's throw a monkey wrench into the works, by bringing up non-western scales -- and not even the quarter tones of middle eastern music but the 23-note scale of North Indian Classical Music.

I haven't read ANY of the other posts yet, as I multi-tasked writing this up while preparing leftovers for dinner. If any of what I wrote seems redundant with what has been said, I'll wordsmith it later tonight.

[mhschmieder]

There's a guy obsessed with this stuff who quit his day job to write a whole bunch of semi-redundant books about how the piano has ruined our sense of pitch, and how only choral music can re-train our ears properly. He's on a crusade to change the world. It has to do with temperament. I suspect his is not so good.

[mhschmieder]

Interestingly, now that I am back to playing a lot of transposed instruments fairly frequently, my "note naming" ability is diminished significantly, but still no effect on my actual pitch memory per se.

If I don't "think about it" though, I can still write musical ideas during my daily train commute, without a pitch pipe handy (though I pack one in my bag "just in case"), and tune instruments with only a sanity check here and there. But I'm still hesitant to describe what I have as "perfect pitch", and still tend to think of that term as "bragging rights" rather than something that defines us or is advantageous.

Back to the OCD guy mentioned above, he actually thinks it gets in the way of properly understanding the "necessary pitch" within the context of the overall musical arrangement. I can see how in 100% pure vocal music with no pitched instruments involved, he might have a point. It's partly for this reason that he considers Gregorian Chant the most advanced form of music.

[solex]

Sound and color are both (over simplifying alert - lol) vibrations.

Perceived by different organs and different parts of the brain.

I do love though the idea of taking the frequencies of color "down many octaves" until you can roughly assign colors to the musical scale. I don't know how scientific those ideas are. What happens when you reach "an octave" of color?

Light and sound are quite different in the world of physics. First of all, light behaves sometimes as a wave, sometimes as a particle, but is neither.But if you'd look at it as a wave, it would be an electromagnetic wave which means, it doesn't need a medium to travel through, unlike a soundwave. This also means, that, even if you'd transpose a frequency of light many many many octaves down, you'd never be able to hear it.

[stubbsonic]

I was just speaking about transposing the frequencies, not actually "hearing" the light. But you make a great point. Whether the medium is air or the electromagnetic field, can we still say that color and sound have "frequencies" i.e. rates of fluctuation, the former being variations in air pressure, the latter being variations in electromagnetic energy?

Then one would need to transduce the electromagnetic vibrations (once transposed) to sound in the air.