A Drug To Acquire Perfect Pitch? And Other Things About the Ability

[Cato]

An interesting article in today's (June 12, 2017) about Perfect Pitch:

Salient excerpts:

...can perfect pitch, also known as absolute pitch, be learned?

It's complicated. One expert, Joseph P. Bradley, an otolaryngologist and assistant professor at the Washington University Voice & Airway Center, sounds out the question, with a look at neuroplasticity and the upside of speaking Mandarin.

...while many people believe they have a good ear, few actually do. The professor himself is a trained singer, and took a test online to check his pitch—"which was worse than I thought, given my music background," he says.

Name That Tune

Studies have shown that perfect pitch is at least in part linked to genetics, Dr. Bradley says. Early exposure to music and musical training are known to help tune the ear to hear subtle tonal shifts, especially if they occur around age 3 or 4 through about age 7, a period of extreme neuroplasticity when the brain is particularly pliable.

...Until recently, no evidence of an adult acquiring perfect pitch had been documented. But a 2013 study published in Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience showed adults could gain the trait with the help of valproic acid, a drug used to treat seizures and migraines.

"The evidence suggests the medication restores the brain's plasticity to that of a child, and then adults can train to learn perfect pitch," says Dr. Bradley. It is unknown whether the effects are lasting once people come off the drug, he adds, "and the medicine has its fair share of side effects," such as hair loss and dizziness.

...At least one study has shown that native speakers of tonal languages—such as Mandarin or Vietnamese, in which changing pitch alters the meaning of the same sounds—who also train in music at a young age, can translate the precision they hear in spoken sounds to musical ones.

In that study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2006, 60% of Beijing natives who began taking music lessons before age 5 passed a test for perfect pitch, while only 14% of Americans did. But because all the participants were ethnically Asian, says Dr. Bradley, "the evidence doesn't clearly point one way or another whether the trait is genetic or learned."

See:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-perfect-pitch-be-learned-1497178800

The article's link to the perfect-pitch test goes nowhere.  Here is a test I found via Google, which is a little different from hearing raw tones: one hears "tunes" with (possibly) a wrong note or two.

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunestest/take-distorted-tunes-test

[Karl Henning]

Fascinating!

[Mahlerian]

The article's link to the perfect-pitch test goes nowhere.  Here is a test I found via Google, which is a little different from hearing raw tones: one hears "tunes" with (possibly) a wrong note or two.

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunestest/take-distorted-tunes-test

I fail to understand why people find perfect pitch such a holy grail for musical understanding.  I don't have it, but talking to others who do, it seems like something of a curse at times, so I don't feel the need for it, either.

[PerfectWagnerite]

Anyone know whether these folks known for their aural acuity have (or had) perfect pitch?

Szell
Reiner
Toscanini
Boulez

[Maestro267]

I fail to understand why people find perfect pitch such a holy grail for musical understanding.  I don't have it, but talking to others who do, it seems like something of a curse at times, so I don't feel the need for it, either.

It's only a curse because of the HIPPsters who decided that A wasn't A anymore and decided to play it as A flat.

[Mahlerian]

Anyone know whether these folks known for their aural acuity have (or had) perfect pitch?

Szell
Reiner
Toscanini
Boulez

I don't know about the others, but Boulez seems very likely.  His sense of pitch was so laser-sharp that it scared people.

In reference to the test linked in the OP, I've taken it before and it's very easy.  I don't think it has anything to do with perfect pitch.

[Cato]

I don't know about the others, but Boulez seems very likely.  His sense of pitch was so laser-sharp that it scared people.

In reference to the test linked in the OP, I've taken it before and it's very easy. I don't think it has anything to do with perfect pitch.

Not possible right now, but I will look around for another one: I do recall finding one some years ago which tested one's ability with Harry Partch's 43-tone scale!  As someone who has composed quarter-tone music in 19-tone scales, I had to practice that one for a while!

I fail to understand why people find perfect pitch such a holy grail for musical understanding.  I don't have it, but talking to others who do, it seems like something of a curse at times, so I don't feel the need for it, either.

It can be "something of a curse."  It is the main reason why so much "pop" music annoys me, since very few of the "artists" can hit a note correctly.

I have told the story before: when the Beatles first performed on television (the famous Ed Sullivan Show premiere), my grandmother (an excellent pianist, professional "lounge/night-club" pianist in the Roaring Twenties and beyond) listened for a few minutes and turned to me and said:

"Those guys are terrible."

I: "They sound flat most of the time."

She: "Yeah, why does anybody think they can sing?"

As we know, the haircuts had a great deal to do with it! 

[BasilValentine]

I fail to understand why people find perfect pitch such a holy grail for musical understanding.  I don't have it, but talking to others who do, it seems like something of a curse at times, so I don't feel the need for it, either.

Do people think perfect pitch is a holy grail for musical understanding? I haven't heard that. But it has great utility in a number of situations, like improvising with others, transcribing music by ear, proofreading parts and scores, and accurate sight singing. I haven't met the people who think it's a curse yet.

[ritter]

I don't know about the others, but Boulez seems very likely.  His sense of pitch was so laser-sharp that it scared people.

There was an interview with Boulez in the Dick Cavett Show in 1972, in which the issue of absolute pitch came up. Cavett asked a band member to play a random note, and Boulez correctly identified it as G flat . The episode is mentioned in Joan Peyser's book, and I myself have seen the clip (but cannot for the life of me find it on the web). More a circus act than anything else...

[ComposerOfAvantGarde]

Perfect pitch would be extremely annoying to have, wouldn't it? My friends who have it find baroque music and music which uses any other tuning system rather difficult to have to deal with their mind trying to transpose everything or correct their tuning to something more standard.

[Pat B]

Here is a test I found via Google, which is a little different from hearing raw tones: one hears "tunes" with (possibly) a wrong note or two.

https://www.nidcd.nih.gov/tunestest/take-distorted-tunes-test

Very, very different. I do not have perfect pitch but this test was easy for me. (And the wrong notes here are not just slightly out of tune. They are completely different notes.)

[aleazk]

I don't have it. Should I commit suicide and end this miserable charade of a life?

[Cato]

I don't have it. Should I commit suicide and end this miserable charade of a life?

No!   

The article both states (in the website's headline) and implies (in the article) that Mozart had perfect pitch.  I do wonder, however, how well it would have developed, if it had not been fertilized by the early training from his father.  Perhaps it would have been there anyway, despite the musical education.

[Mahlerian]

Perfect pitch would be extremely annoying to have, wouldn't it? My friends who have it find baroque music and music which uses any other tuning system rather difficult to have to deal with their mind trying to transpose everything or correct their tuning to something more standard.

I do find it annoying going directly from one to the other, especially when the pitch is in-between the notes of the A=440 equal tempered scale.  Juxtaposing things like this...

https://www.youtube.com/v/BEKUUnkbZMA

with this...

https://www.youtube.com/v/d5UHKFI25YE

...bothers me much more because of the tuning difference than the style of playing.

[Maestro267]

Perfect pitch would be extremely annoying to have, wouldn't it? My friends who have it find baroque music and music which uses any other tuning system rather difficult to have to deal with their mind trying to transpose everything or correct their tuning to something more standard.

Yes, this. On the other hand, it does making learning music by ear a bit easier.

[Karl Henning]

♫ I want a new drug,
One that does what it should,
One that helps me sing a perfect fifth
So its tuning is real good.

[Cato]

You know what I say to 'perfect' pitch?


MICROTONAL... 

Here is your chance! 0:)

Note this is an ear trainer!  You are not expected to recognize the notes immediately!

http://www.chord-book.com/ear_training/harry_partch/harry_partch_ear_trainer.php

[amw]

I've actually come across more than a few people with minimal musical training who have absolute pitch—e.g. my mom, who doesn't know the names of notes she's listening to but knows when they're off pitch by even a few cents (and finds it rather annoying).

You can't teach yourself to have absolute pitch but you can acquire relative pitch that's good enough that you won't notice the difference. I've found with testing that I can generally tell pitch with a margin of error of about a semitone each way, which is good enough for practical purposes (as a non-singer, obviously). Plus I can enjoy microtonal music and HIP performances, so there's a definite upside. :p

[PerfectWagnerite]

I don't have it. Should I commit suicide and end this miserable charade of a life?

If I say yes will I get in trouble?

[Karl Henning]

You can't teach yourself to have absolute pitch but you can acquire relative pitch that's good enough that you won't notice the difference.

Exactly.  Ear-training builds the skill of relative pitch.  Parenthetically:  Whenever I'm in an ensemble intensively working on any given piece, my inner ear does have an anchor pitch "etch-a-sketched" in there, which is not the same as ingrained, instantaneously accessible absolute pitch, but . . . does the job.