<story><title>Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible</title><url>https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/03/355933</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psychometry</author><text>Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are.&lt;p&gt;First, someone with &amp;quot;untrained&amp;quot; AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn&amp;#x27;t be in a position where they&amp;#x27;d be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there&amp;#x27;s only rhythm to figure out.&lt;p&gt;While it can be momentarily distracting when music doesn&amp;#x27;t match its normal key due to transposition or tuning issues, I can move past it without too much effort, although I am continually aware of the discrepancy. It&amp;#x27;s like the visual illusion where the ballerina can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise depending on your perspective.&lt;p&gt;The biggest benefit is being able to identify the key without having to do the initial hunt for the tonic by testing notes. This is very useful in an accompaniment situation.</text></item><item><author>tunesmith</author><text>Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It&amp;#x27;s occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other.&lt;p&gt;Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it&amp;#x27;s useful for is recognizing what key it&amp;#x27;s in. If I hadn&amp;#x27;t been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later.&lt;p&gt;I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn&amp;#x27;t important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; relative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>torpidor</author><text>Color &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; overrated &lt;i&gt;in a world where most are colorblind&lt;/i&gt;.  Red means danger or stop because you have seen a lot of stop signs.  In a world of colorblind people, stop sign colors are chosen by the colorblind, based on something like &amp;quot;is this a cheap metal&amp;quot; rather than design language (which no longer exists for color).  Instead we would use reflectivity or something to indicate danger.  As to whether or not the varying-colored stop signs leads to a statistically significant number of color-sighted people blowing through them it is hard to say, but does seem a legitimate safety concern.&lt;p&gt;And this is the situation in music; keys are chosen based on the technical details of the musician rather than a design language.  Meanwhile, we do have a design language based on relative pitch (e.g. a 5&amp;#x2F;7 chord &amp;quot;leads&amp;quot; to the tonic).  Of course you can see that the same way you can see a purple stop sign, but you may lack some of the pattern-matching intuition of your peers.&lt;p&gt;As a musician with relative pitch and the child of a musician with perfect pitch, I have watched them get puzzled a lot navigating a design language that is very obvious to me.  Perhaps you are a better musician than they are, or perhaps you avoid areas where the design language dominates.  Either way, I would not trade places with you, unless the rest of society did also.</text></comment>
<story><title>Acquiring absolute pitch in adulthood is difficult but possible</title><url>https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/07/03/355933</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>psychometry</author><text>Your comment is analogous to a colorblind person telling everyone how overrated red and green are.&lt;p&gt;First, someone with &amp;quot;untrained&amp;quot; AP (I assume you mean no musical training) wouldn&amp;#x27;t be in a position where they&amp;#x27;d be needing to transcribe a Bach chorale, would they? Any AP possessor with musical training--I am one--finds transcription trivially easy since there&amp;#x27;s only rhythm to figure out.&lt;p&gt;While it can be momentarily distracting when music doesn&amp;#x27;t match its normal key due to transposition or tuning issues, I can move past it without too much effort, although I am continually aware of the discrepancy. It&amp;#x27;s like the visual illusion where the ballerina can spin both clockwise and counterclockwise depending on your perspective.&lt;p&gt;The biggest benefit is being able to identify the key without having to do the initial hunt for the tonic by testing notes. This is very useful in an accompaniment situation.</text></item><item><author>tunesmith</author><text>Perfect pitch is overrated. In college as a music student with excellent relative pitch, I routinely outscored peer students with perfect pitch when taking classical ear training courses. Perfect pitch is more of a parlor trick. It&amp;#x27;s occasionally useful when trying to tune a stringed instrument by yourself, and distracting if your ensemble starts to drift off key while remaining in tune with each other.&lt;p&gt;Also, trained relative pitch is better than untrained perfect pitch. For instance, if my instructor played four bars of a four-part bach chorale on the piano (sixteen quarter notes, perhaps a couple of eighth-note passing tones), I could fully notate it within three repetitions, sometimes on first listen - &lt;i&gt;if&lt;/i&gt; I were initially told what key it was in. Someone with untrained perfect pitch would be able to tell if the instructor was lying about what key it was in, but they wouldn&amp;#x27;t be able to notate it. So in that scenario, the only thing it&amp;#x27;s useful for is recognizing what key it&amp;#x27;s in. If I hadn&amp;#x27;t been told, I could have just notated it in C and then transposed it to the right key later.&lt;p&gt;I would later learn that being able to notate a bach chorale by ear is nothing compared to the kind of ear skills you need as a jazz musician - but again, there, perfect pitch isn&amp;#x27;t important or super useful. We learn chord relations - it&amp;#x27;s &lt;i&gt;all&lt;/i&gt; relative.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>aczerepinski</author><text>Agreed. I had a special ear training class at Berklee for all the incoming freshman who aced placements, and if I recall correctly everyone in the class had perfect pitch. Transcribing was trivial across the board. I transcribed solos for jazz magazines as a side gig, and filled notebooks with solos in my personal practice.&lt;p&gt;Without a doubt, relative pitch and learning theory are important skills too, but they aren&amp;#x27;t mutually exclusive.</text></comment>