The more I listen to music and play it

I thought it a milestone when I realized I listened to just the guitar when I played my records.
this is a big part in the development of any specialized skill. what is happening is your acuity is changing.
you are seeing and hearing things you had not paid attention to before guitar.
sure we hear, but then we listen as well. big difference.
congrads on your journey. you are not the same as before.

my ear is appalling, but i know it will imrove with time. my brother in law however has "perfect pitch". he is very humble about it but i have never seen anything like it. i can play a note and he can tell me with no effort what it is. i would not believe it if i hadnt seen it.. he tells me i can "learn this"... but he has been able to do it from childhood... is it learnable or genetic??

he tells me i can "learn this"... but he has been able to do it from childhood... is it learnable or genetic??

As far as I know, it's generally thought to be 'genetic' in some way but nobody seems to know quite how and why. I believe that there are theories that we might all be born with it though, but that it gets pushed aside in some way by other aspects of childhood development. In a way it's quite odd that we don't all have better skills at it. I just read a fascinating book called This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitin, and he writes about talking to people with perfect pitch who can't imagine what it must be like not having it. He likened it to not being able to pick colours without needing to look at a reference 'red' , for instance, and then work our way to green from there. Yet even professional singers without perfect pitch may need to hear a reference pitch played before they start.

He pointed out that we're all pretty good at storing info about rhythm and intervals (even with some stuff we may actually make no effort at all to memorise) but not so hot at learning individual pitches. He did do some research though in which he got a fairly random selection of people to sing favourite songs. Somewhat to his surprise, even people with no obvious musical background were much better than he expected at singing their favorite song(s) not only in the right key (of the recording they liked) but also coming in pretty close on timing and length too. So we must be able to store at least some specific pitch info. So perhaps we can develop strategies to improve it?

I know that it's often suggested that we can help learn intervals by referring to songs we already know. Examples: Twinkle Twinkle Little Star goes up by a perfect fifth between the first and second twinkle, and Somewhere Over The Rainbow has an amazing jump of a whole octave in the very first word - "Some -where"... etc. So I wonder if trying to train yourself to store pitches as pairs might be useful?

This is Your Brain on Music

Chris

He likened it to not being able to pick colours without needing to look at a reference 'red' , for instance, and then work our way to green from there.

Green is an absolute color: it's the result of an even match of perfect blue and perfect yellow. The tone 'A' isn't an absolute sound: it might be at a whole variety of different frequencies, and they could all be 'A'. To the extreme (which happened with some odl pipe organs, for example) the A on one instrument could be closer to D on the other. We can't make it absolute by setting everything to A=440Hz or old recordings would be called 'Prelude in almost B-flat' or such. This relativiness is why in song analysis it isn't that important to know whether it starts on an Am or Bbm as long as you know if it's the I or IV or whatever.

This is sharp contrast with colors: red will be red no matter what you're going to do, red cannot be any other color then red and no color other then red can be red. Which is why a painter must be able to identify colors and a musician intervals.

I'm with Dogbite on this one - I've noticed the more I listen to music over the last few years, the more I single out the guitar(s) for my attention. (As a side note, this probably explains part of the reason I hate rap - no guitars!) (Ummm, at least no ORIGINAL guitar work.....)

Also, the more I've listened to music over the last few years, the more I want to join in - I don't hear everything as clearly as I'd like (triplets, ties, et al) but I can usually work out the chords to most songs - and I was BORN to be a rhythm guitarist.

And the more I listen to music, the more I love music - and the more I want to create music. I'll hear a riff, and think, "Ooooh! I wish I'd written that!" It inspires me to write something in a similar vein - not plagiarism, but just to create something similar.....

And the more I listen to music, the more I realise there is to music - one lifetime just isn't enough, is it?

:D :D :D

Vic

He likened it to not being able to pick colours without needing to look at a reference 'red' , for instance, and then work our way to green from there.

Green is an absolute color: it's the result of an even match of perfect blue and perfect yellow. The tone 'A' isn't an absolute sound: it might be at a whole variety of different frequencies, and they could all be 'A'.

...

This is sharp contrast with colors: red will be red no matter what you're going to do, red cannot be any other color then red and no color other then red can be red. Which is why a painter must be able to identify colors and a musician intervals.

Hi Arjen,

Sure, you can say that somebody somewhere has decided on a scientific definition of what 'perfect red' or 'perfect green' is, but that's not the point of his analogy. Unless you're colour blind, most of us can look at a wide range of greens - anything from a dark 'bottle green' that's heading towards black to vividly light greens - and say "that's green". And we can see anything from deep burgundy to something getting closer to pink or orange as still being 'red'.

What he meant was that I can look out the window at the leaves on the trees and say "green". I can also look at the grass, or my carpet and still say "green". What I don't need to do is go "yes, that's a colour - somebody show me a reference colour and I'll think my way across the chart until I can pick which one that carpet is.

The author was saying that he thinks it's kind of odd that most of can label colours even if we only see a single example, but that we have trouble picking a C# from a D or an F if we only hear a single tone. This applies even for a specific instrument that we're familiar with - i.e the middle C on my piano always sounds like middle C. We can't make it absolute by setting everything to A=440Hz or old recordings would be called 'Prelude in almost B-flat' or such. I understand what you mean, but we can make it absolute and I still can't pick it. Unlike the range that you talk about in your description of how an A might vary, they are actually fixed on my digital piano, which never goes out of tune, uses equal temperament, and always stays accurate. So why aren't I better at picking it??

As soon as I have a reference then I can pick it by comparison though. I can even do things like close my eyes, put my fingers down completely at random, run them up and down and then identify which one is the C. But I can only do that because I know that all the white keys are in the 'key of C' and that if I improvise with my eyes closed the melody will 'want' to resolve back to the root. I can pick the C with my eyes closed every time like that - but I still can't pick it in isolation. I've not given up yet though... :mrgreen:

Chris

PS I think Levitin's analogy actually falls down because he's dividing our visual range up using one method, and the auditory range using a different method. If you use the same method for both ranges then both tasks are hard. I'd still like to have a better ear for specific pitch though....

Derekslide, I can relate. I find I appreciate music the more I listen over the years and can hear where parts are. Not the notes, just likely where they are on the guitar.

Great to know that you can able to hear the 'notes'. Congrats and hope you are able to visualize the staff as well someday while listening to the music.

Sure, you can say that somebody somewhere has decided on a scientific definition of what 'perfect red' or 'perfect green' is, but that's not the point of his analogy. Unless you're colour blind, most of us can look at a wide range of greens - anything from a dark 'bottle green' that's heading towards black to vividly light greens - and say "that's green". And we can see anything from deep burgundy to something getting closer to pink or orange as still being 'red'.

If you use colors in that sense they are just as relative: if you call an almost-orange color 'red' it just means that you think it's closer to perfect red then perfect yellow. That's more like hearing in what octave a note falls. And that's the big point: humans develop their general skills through evolution based on what's life-expectancy enhancing and what's not. Distinguishing colors is important: picking fruits and berries would be tremendously lethal for the early humans if they couldnt tell colors apart. Similarly being able to hear different vocal timbres is important. We are very much able to hear if someone yells out of surprise, anger or joy because it can be very painfull if we mis-interpretate it. But if someone comes running for you screaming in rage we can't hear if he's screaming a perfect A or not because there's not a whole lot of use for knowing it. Remember that your digital piano (or any other electronically tuned instrument) hasn't been around for too long and there's no music use in recognizing a certain frequency if everybody tunes their harp slightly different. Note that in many other parts of the world our radically fixed A=440Hz isn't common at all.

If you use colors in that sense they are just as relative: if you call an almost-orange color 'red' it just means that you think it's closer to perfect red then perfect yellow. That's more like hearing in what octave a note falls.

I think that you're exactly right about it being closer to hearing which octave a note falls in.

Levitin seems to be quite well thought of as a writer and researcher (He is currently running the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at the department of psychology at McGill University in Canada). Levitin Wiki and McGill summary. I've seen him use the colour analogy several times in his writing, but I do agree with you that it doesn't really stand up to close comparison with sound. As I said above, he's using two different measuring systems. The auditory range doesn't divide into 12 divisions that match the chromatic scale, but contains the scale many times over. So picking a C# is a task that's much closer to being given a colour swatch with 12 somewhat different shades of green on it and being asked to say where a single one fits, when you can't see the other 11. Tough task. I image 'precise colour recognition' is probably as a rare as 'perfect pitch' if you divide colours into a s many subdivisions as there are pitches that we can discriminate one from another. Perhaps Levitin missed the point, but I think he was just trying to find a way of saying how odd it seems to be to those who DO have perfect pitch, that the rest of us don't. He still writes a very interesting book though, and maybe there is a way that we can use the similarity of one octave to another to help pick notes? :)
And that's the big point: humans develop their general skills through evolution based on what's life-expectancy enhancing and what's not. Distinguishing colors is important: picking fruits and berries would be tremendously lethal for the early humans if they couldnt tell colors apart. Similarly being able to hear different vocal timbres is important.

My guess is that we had much better auditory skills back then, because it would have been extremely important to know what was rustling in the bushes - a friendly tribesman or an enemy; a rat or a sabre-toothed tiger; the size, distance and direction of the creature, etc. There would probably have been a great many sound clues about the environment generally that we don't really need to bother about any more. We seem to have become increasingly reliant on visual cues.

However, because it's always in exactly the same tune, my rather nice Roland digital piano does seem to offer an oportunity to try and improve not only my relative pitch sense, but also to see if I can devise ways of picking specific pitches. There must be some way that I can store a reference pitch - perhaps I already have some, but they aren't specifically linked to an instrument? I know that I could quickly tell my baby son's cry from all the others in the hospital soon after he was born, and I was walking down the corridor to see him and my wife. Not sure how I did that. Pitch? Timbre? Baby voodoo? Who knows.... :mrgreen:

Chris

One of the cheesy ways I use(d) to train PP is by learning what the lowest and highest note is you can sing comfortably. They are notes you can remember, you can 'mentally' sing them and you'll know when you've reached rock-bottom. Then just use that as reference for the note you want to learn. But still, why would you want it? I quite practicing after I got somewhat reasonable at it and noticed it didnt seem to serve any point at all, it was just a waste of my time I should have spend on relative hearing skills. Maybe I'm missing something here...

Well, I disagree about the evolution thing (don't believe in that), but it is known that most people with perfect pitch started playing music at a very early age, usually less than 7 years old. Now, we are exposed to colors from day one, so this is why people can easily distinguish colors. But very few people including musicians can distinguish musical notes perfectly. I think I have a pretty good ear, one of my few natural strengths when it comes to music. I can usually identify a few notes, D and G especially, and often E. Everything else I kinda guess at. But I can distinguish intervals pretty good.

When I started guitar I spent all my time learning from listening to recordings and copying them. And I was pretty darn good at it from the start. I especially listened to the bass, that was always a good guide. The bad thing about learning like this was that I focused completely on the guitar. I realized I knew how to play probably hundreds of songs, and hardly knew the words to any of them. Not too good. Now I try to tell myself to listen to the whole song and hopefully learn the lyrics while I'm learning the music. :D

One of the cheesy ways I use(d) to train PP is by learning what the lowest and highest note is you can sing comfortably. They are notes you can remember, you can 'mentally' sing them and you'll know when you've reached rock-bottom.

Yes, I've been experimenting to see if there's anything like that I can use. Some sort of pitch that feels either top, bottom or just 'natural' in some way. Haven't got much accuracy with it though. More practice needed yet.

The main reason that I want it because I've read that only about 1 in 10,000 people have perfect pitch (not including me) so being a cussed old bastard I want to see if I can buck the system. I don't think it would help much with playing (apparently research showed that people without perfect pitch were actually a little better at picking whether two melodies were really the same one but just in a different key - or a different one - than the PP guys were). I guess it could be handy for jotting down bits of songs that you heard on the radio or whatever, but probably more of a 'party trick' than anything.

I was looking through my hard drive the other day to see if I'd already downloaded any guides to improving relative pitch, and I found one that started like this....
Forget about perfect pitch. Only wankers care about that so they can brag about it to their non-musical friends. Relative pitch IS vital, but there are many ways to learn it. One of the key things for me was associating each interval with the opening notes of a tune I know well. For example, the first two notes of 'I wish you a merry christmas' (the 'I' and 'wish' notes) are a perfect fourth interval. Sing it. Play a note on your guitar and use that as the first note, then sing the second note. Play the first then sing and play the second. Take a different first note, on another string, and repeat. Take your time, don't get frustrated.

If it works, take another song. The national anthem, nursery rhymes, the more 'burned into your soul' the better. Focus on the intervals of the major scale first. Associate all of them with songs. Learn to sing all intervals. Learn to play all intervals. This will take months, be prepared for that. Take ONE interval every week. As soon as you got two intervals down go to http://www.musictheory.net and open the interval ear trainer. Select only the intervals you've practiced. Have it play an interval and think which of the two songs it is. Practice it 30 min every day, even if you think you know it by heart. Start by using intervals that are very different, like an octave and a major second. Slowly fill in the gaps and don't rush it. Your ears will need time to really differentiate between it all, your auditory cortex needs time to develop. When this is done you'll have mastered melodic intervals. Take your time, this is the #1 music skill you need to learn and unlike most other things there is no shortcut at all. None.

After that you need to learn harmonic intervals, two intervals played at the same time. Don't bother trying it now, it's hell to do if you haven't mastered melodic intervals. This will take more months, and will be very slow again. After that comes chords, first melodic then harmonic. After a year of daily practice you should be able to identify intervals and most chords, both harmonically and melodically, with about 90% accuracy.

Now I wonder where I found that?....... :wink: Sounds good though. I've started work along those lines (I have a book that suggests a bunch of reference songs for learning the intervals). If I can find a way to fake perfect pitch along the way I'll be sure to brag about it - both to my non-musical and musical mates. :mrgreen:

Chris

Some seek knighthood
Others seek brotherhood
While bros take the hood,
Chris seeks wankerhood.