[__tsidewinder__]

Apparently, this guy says if I give him enough money, he'll teach me perfect pitch using CD's. I'm thinking its bogus. Any thoughts?

Perfect Pitch Ear Training Success Stories

[fireblade]

I love the way he's saving you £100 dollars. Sounds too good to be true.

[Fretsource]

I've never heard of anyone acquiring perfect pitch by any method. I don't believe it's possible.
And anyway, it's no great advantage. On the other hand RELATIVE pitch is everything. Every musician needs it and EVERY musician can develop their relative pitch ability FREE.
Save your money.

In almost 30 years of teaching, I've only come across one case of perfect pitch, a 9 year old Japanese boy, whose mother, a piano teacher, had taught him from a very early age.
But he lost interest in playing and studying music when he discovered Sony Playstations, etc. His mother asked me to give him a few guitar lessons to try and recapture his musical interest - but the Playstation had too strong a hold on him. Anyway, perfect pitch wasn't very useful for him, even before he lost interest.

[AX7221]

I was reading about perfect pitch on wikipedia here

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

Potential problems

Persons who have absolute pitch may feel irritated when a piece is transposed to a different key or played at a nonstandard pitch. They may fail to develop strong relative pitch when following standard curricula, despite the fact that maintaining absolute strategies can make simple relative tasks more difficult. For instance, transposition of music from one key to another may prove more difficult for an individual who interprets music as a fixed sequence of absolute tones rather than relative patterns of notes. Absolute pitch possessors have been known to find it difficult to play with an orchestra that is not tuned to standard concert pitch A4 = 440 hertz (442 Hz in some countries); this may be due to a perception of pitch which is categorical rather than freely adjustable

which makes perfect pitch less appealing if that is correct.

[__tsidewinder__]

I was looking further, and found a free lesson for perfect pitch. Cyberfret.com: Guest teacher series - Absolute Pitch

It seems more like a memory thing. My previous music teacher (taught me trumpet) drilled the C major scale into me, and I can think of a B in my head, and have it come very close to a B on the guitar. However, whenever I play a different note on the guitar, I have a hard time getting that B note back. So, no I definitely don't have perfect pitch.

[Fretsource]

Originally Posted by __tsidewinder__

I was looking further, and found a free lesson for perfect pitch.

I was interested to see a free lesson on perfect pitch attainment as I had never seen a free one before . It might have altered my belief that NONE are ever free because basically they're all scams. Of course you can gain a vague memory of specific notes, and with practice you can get fairly close, but that's not perfect pitch.

If it were possible to teach it, you can bet there would be plenty of free lessons and training tools scattered around the net, just as there are plenty of FREE 'relative pitch' lessons and trainers. And if perfect pitch was really a valuable and teachable skill, every music college in the world would be teaching it. (Some music colleges do in fact conduct research into it, but more out of scientific interest than anything else)

Anyway, as I looked further into the free lesson, I eventually found the final price - $97. So much for 'free'. I think 'free' means you get a few taster lessons free then you pay to continue.

Also I was put off by the claims being made for perfect pitch such as hearing some great music in your head and being able to write it down. So what? Anyone with good relative pitch ability can do exactly the same thing. The key might not be the same as the original, but that's completely unimportant - it's still the same music.

[allthumbs]

I bought that stuff years ago in the dawn of computers. It was on audio tapes. I never got anywhere with them. The guy assumed you would always have some one available to play notes on a piano for you to work with. It was also piano based. I did see one specifically for guitar but, it completely disappeared many years ago. I am assuming it bombed. The odds are not good with those things. Relative pitch is easier and much handier to develop.
Edit. I just looked deeper into this guys stuff. Your looking at many months of hard work with his stuff. It has been my experience that few people have the dicipline to stick with something like this. 97 bucks U.S. He uses some stuff that is allready out there free on the net. If I had money to burn, I might buy it out of curiosity.

[Doug]

I was reading about audio illusions a while back, just a sec - I'll wiki it... hmmm can't seem to find it now... Anyway, there is a famous auditory psycholigist who has studied the psychology of auditory perception. She found that the incidence of perfect pitch may be more prevalent than earlier imagined and that people who have tonal languages as a first language are much more likely to have perfect pitch. Tonal languages, like chinese, Japanese (to a certain extent), Greek ad others alter the meaning of words based on the inflection of the syllables.

[Doug]

Originally Posted by Doug

I was reading about audio illusions a while back, just a sec - I'll wiki it... hmmm can't seem to find it now... Anyway, there is a famous auditory psycholigist who has studied the psychology of auditory perception. She found that the incidence of perfect pitch may be more prevalent than earlier imagined and that people who have tonal languages as a first language are much more likely to have perfect pitch. Tonal languages, like chinese, Japanese (to a certain extent), Greek ad others alter the meaning of words based on the inflection of the syllables.

here it is....

The tritone paradox is an auditory illusion created by Diana Deutsch (creator of a number of auditory illusions) based on an earlier suggestion published by Roger Shepard[1]. In the illusion, two Shepard tones separated by exactly half an octave, an equal-tempered tritone, are played alternately. For example, one tone might consist of a roughly 160-Hz sine wave accompanied by sine waves at the higher octaves (320 Hz, 640 Hz, etc.) and lower octaves (80 Hz, 40 Hz, etc.) with energies falling off as a gaussian function of the frequency difference in octaves from 160 Hz. The other tone might consist of a 110-Hz and a 220-Hz sine wave with equal energies, again accompanied by the higher and lower octaves (440 Hz, 55 Hz, etc.) with a gaussian energy distribution.

Shepard predicted that the two tones would constitute a bistable figure, the auditory equivalent of the Necker cube, that could be heard ascending or descending, but never both at the same time. Diana Deutsch later found that perception of which tone was higher depended on the absolute frequencies involved: an individual will usually find the same tone to be higher, and this is determined by the tones' absolute pitches. This is consistently done by a large portion of the population, despite the fact that responding differently to different tones must involve the ability to hear absolute pitch, which was thought to be extremely rare. This finding has been used to argue that latent absolute-pitch ability is present in a large proportion of the population. Deutsch also found that British and Californian subjects consistently resolved the ambiguity the opposite way.

[Doug]

Originally Posted by Doug

Deutsch also found that British and Californian subjects consistently resolved the ambiguity the opposite way.

funny, eh?
I wonder what that tells us... maybe it's the climate

[__tsidewinder__]

They must get quite a few people to buy their stuff though. 'instantly' and "easily' gaining music mastery like beethoven and chopin? Increasing my IQ in only hours? What a deal!

but it sounds much too good to be true. I'm glad to hear perfect pitch isn't all its supposed to be. Makes me a feel a little less inadequate.


"She found that the incidence of perfect pitch may be more prevalent than earlier imagined and that people who have tonal languages as a first language are much more likely to have perfect pitch. Tonal languages, like chinese, Japanese (to a certain extent), Greek ad others alter the meaning of words based on the inflection of the syllables."

Thats from this article:
Absolute pitch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Apparantly perfect pitch is also more prevalent with people with certain disorders:

"Among autistics and savants, the incidence of absolute pitch rises considerably. Absolute pitch is common among those with Williams syndrome."

Heres an online quiz: UC Absolute Pitch Study

I couldn't complete the quiz, no sound came out. Everything on my internet is updated etc. Oh well. I already know the results.

[__tsidewinder__]

whoops, must have been typing that post at the same time you were doug.

So, I don't think I quite understand. Gaussian? Necker cube? Maybe I should look this stuff up.

So if we all have a dormant absolute pitch ability inside us, is it worth trying to unlock? I mean, it'd be easier to carry a pitch pipe around wouldn't it? Isn't that all perfect pitch is?

[Stratrat]

Originally Posted by Doug

...with energies falling off as a gaussian function of the frequency difference in octaves from 160 Hz...

I was doin' pretty good right up till there - but ya lost me from the 'gaussian function' onward.

Guess I'll live with my 'imperfect pitch' and figure it out via the fretboard....seems a lot simpler than Shepard tones, gaussian energy distribution, bistable figures, Necker cubes and the like.

[Fretsource]

Despite what Wikipedia says, I'm not convinced by the claim that people who speak tonal languages such as Chinese are more likely to have perfect pitch as a result of their native language ability. Having listened to a lot of tonal language speakers in Asia over a number of years (I even got quite fluent in one), I concluded that the rises and falls of the vowels are governed by relative pitch, not perfect pitch - and everyone speaks in different 'keys' (for want of a better word) depending on their age, size, gender and lifestyle choices, especially in the case of Bangkok Ladyboys who sound like they're speaking with the vocal equivalent of a capo at the third fret (overheard from a distance of course)

It's similar to the way we use relative pitch differences in English to express feelings, or ask questions, (e.g., Yes? and YES!!!)

[737blues]

Originally Posted by Fretsource

Despite what Wikipedia says, I'm not convinced by the claim that people who speak tonal languages such as Chinese are more likely to have perfect pitch as a result of their native language ability ....

Five minutes in any one of the Karaoke bars that are so popular throughout SE Asia would be all you need to dispel Wikipedia's notion on that ......