Slashdot Mirror
Pitch Perception Skewed By Modern Tuning
The feed deliverers us news of research suggesting that the use of A as the universal tuning frequency has made our ears less discerning of the notes immediately around it. Here's the abstract from PNAS describing research with people possessing the rare quality of "absolute pitch."
I have pretty good pitch (not sure if you'd qualify it as "perfect"). Tuning to A (440 Hz) didn't really distort this ability though while I've been a musician. I do have a set of "reference pitches" that I can internalize and I can determine pitches relative to them. A440 is one of those pitches, but not the first one I use for reference, even though it is the "universal" tuning note. Could have something to do with it not being one of the notes I tuned my instrument to,and that I had a transposing instrument relative to concert pitches though.
Randimal: AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG-AT-CG-CG-AT-AT-CG-CG-AT-CG-AT-AT-CG
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
About 1939 A440 was adapted instead of the "French" A435 standard. In recent history some orchestras went to A445 but they are the exception. Modern piano scales are designed for A440. The length, diameter, and tension of the strings are all taken into the scale calculations. To raise pitch on a piano 5 CPS(Hz) is quite an undertaking and can add several hundreds of pounds of tension to the back (wooden part) and plate (big harp looking thingee made of cast iron and usually painted brass color) of a piano, A standard piano can have 11 tons, or more for grands, up to 20 tons of combined tension on the frame. The whole of the piano is designed to handle a certain amount of tension and can be stressed if too much tension is added. Same as letting a piano fall way below in pitch (pitch = tension) and bringing it up to pitch in one sitting. It must be done carefully & quickly to be effective. It isn't pretty to see a piano with the plate bolts sheared off and the plate bowing out from the rim. I'm a former piano technicain with 25+ years of piano tuning and rebuilding behind me so I've yanked strings on more than a few pianos, raising pitch and doing battle with aged instrments not kept in repair. Also have done complete restringing and rebuilding of all sorts of pianos.
Too lazy to create a sig...
I am not sure whether you really understood much here.
First, the "article" is not "weak on details". It's the abstract, if you want details, read the full article (link on the right-hand side, "Full Text (PDF)".
Second, "absolute pitch" or "perfect pitch" is sort of a innate ability. You can either have it or you don't, as the article shows that pitch accuracy is best in younger people. But there's different levels of the ability. If I hear a relatively clean note, I can pretty much identify what the pitch to within a semitone. However, I have problem just singing/humming a specific note as correctly without help. but I know a few people that can sing any note accurately without help and they can tell you whether your instrument is out of tune simply by their innate ability, without having to check with another instrument or tuning fork or some other gadget.
I've heard stories that it is possible to train to have the "perfect pitch" temporarily. Someone I know sang in the Stravinsky Mass, and they practiced so much that for a few months he was able to sing a B note correctly without assistance. But this is not permanent, they lose this if they stop "training" for it.
Now, what the article is reporting is that, people with perfect pitch, are starting to have this ability blurred due to the way orchestras inaccurately tune to a wide range of A. I assume this means they would have had exposure to such "tuning sessions" at the beginning of concerts and so on.
So this sort of the reverse of what you have written. AP is not trained, not acquired from accumulated experience, but it can be degraded gradually if you keep blurring their idea of what A should be.
The interesting part is, as per the abstract, they systematically get notes around A wrong, and more frequently than other notes:
"given as a pure tone, G# is as perceived sharp far more than any other tone, whereas errors in D occur infrequently"
"Interestingly, pure A# is most often perceived as flat, not in keeping with the other pitches,"
"A statistical analysis shows that G# is uniquely error-prone."
Thereminists discuss perfect pitch frequently, because a number of noted Thereminists have had it, and it's (falsely) rumored that perfect absolute pitch is required to play the instrument. (Actually, you just need very good relative pitch.)
People who have perfect absolute pitch tend to have always had it: it's a natural talent, or curse as the case may be. They find it painful to listen to tones that are "off key" - indeed, the family of the great Clara Rockmore tells us that she even hated touch tone telephones because the tones were not on-key notes and she didn't want to hear them.
While it is possible to train someone who has a pretty good sense of absolute pitch in the first place to refine it to become extremely good, they'll never reach that level of perfect absolute pitch which some have, in which they can't stand to even hear off key pitches. And someone who has a poor sense of absolute pitch may easily be able to develop their sense of relative pitch, but is unlikely to ever reach the level of being extremely good at it.
This makes perfect pitch that much stranger, because it means people have an innate ability to attune themselves to an artificial note naming scheme.
I don't believe perfect/absolute pitch is being born with the ability to simply hear a note and know that it's C#. Rather, you have to be trained at least once that a certain sound is Bb, but later, any time you hear it, you know it's Bb. And I doubt that they'd be limited to a 12-tone pitch system unless that was all you ever exposed them to.
I think the same thing can happen with color. Some people (tetrachromats, I think) have a very sensitive ability to discern and remember colors, such that they could see paint swab at the store and know if it matches the paint on the wall at home.
I know I don't have perfect pitch myself, but I play piano. Now suppose I sit down at the piano at the beginning of the day, having not listened to any music, I can almost always tell what the note I'm about to hit first will sound like. In fact, sometimes I'll play a game and try to hum the sound before playing the first note. Sometimes, though, I'm off by up to a whole step. Someone with perfect pitch would probably never make that mistake.
Some studios change the speed of recordings without correcting pitch because it sounds better (apparently) - I'm a musician (rock, not classical) and I often have to retune my guitar to play along with recordings even though I have a decent electronic tuner set to A4=440. I've often wondered (maybe because I don't have that gift) who gets to say what 'perfect pitch' is: is it just people who happen to have an inbuilt sense of A4=440; should be people with an inbuilt sense of A4=415 be called 'perfect dystonics' or something ?!
Far more useful is a very good relative pitch - being able to instantly recognise all the intervals and sing/play harmonies without thinking about it will make a far better musician than someone who happens to be able to tune their instrument to concert pitch without a reference note.
The most common studio (and live, these days, they're rack mountable) pitch corrector is the Antares Auto-Tune...it can be tuned to a wide variety of scales (all your regular scales, plus a few chromatic variants) but as far as I know all the Automatic mode ones are equal tempered. However, it can be set up with manual pitch correction, and so it is possible for a skilled producer with an unskilled vocalist to produce vaguely authentic music in unusual keys.
You can demonstrate perfect pitch to a bystander that's butchering something if you can whistle a good solid tone and so can they.
Not sure if it's uncommon or not, but I can match another person's whistle to the cycle, and it has an interesting effect. Ask them to whistle a good pure solid tone and not waver or drift. Be sure to tell them to NOT STOP whistling, even if they feel they're not whistling anymore.
If you can lock onto their whistle quickly, (before you run outa breath!) you can beat them cycle for cycle, and it has the effect of zeroing out the tone. When you are near perfect, the sound where the whistle originates will change. Instead of hearing it from yourself and your friend, it will appear to be coming from somewhere between where the two of you stand. (be sure you're a good 5 ft apart) This is very unsettling because for a time during the duration you can't hear yourself or the other person whistling and it tends to influence one or both of you "move" a little bit up or down just so you can hear yourself again.
People standing off to the side will get the weirdest look on their face as they can hear the whistle slowly drifting back and forth between the two of you, as your pitch is 1/8 cycle or so off from each other, causing it to nearly zero beat. You can of course perfectly match them but that's no fun as the perceived origin of the sound does not drift between the two of you, it merely stops somewhere in between.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
I'm not sure what your point is, but I don't think we're really in major disagreement. Of course A 440 Hz is an arbitrary standard. Come to that, 440 Hz as a number is dependent on an arbitrary definition of the length of a second, the use of the base ten number system, etc.
What isn't arbitrary is the relative pitches of notes in the Western scale - that is the ratio between pitches - which as I was trying to explain above, is related to real physics and is not at all arbitrary.
There are plenty of alternative tuning systems, though I don't know if a "metric" tuning has been done (though I wouldn't be surprised at all if someone had already tried it). Just as an example, Javanese Gamelan music uses two different tuning systems, both of which (iirc) divide the octave unevenly between five pitches. In any event, I think that our current tuning system is really quite a reasonable one. Ignoring the fact that A is the note commonly tuned (this, I think, is more of a historical accident based on the fact that this is an open string on a violin) the frequencies of the "home note", C, are actually all powers of 2. Middle C is 512Hz, an octave above it is 1024Hz, an octave below it is 256Hz etc. That strikes me as being a lot neater than a "metric" system anyway. Oh, and I think that the reason it's called an octave has to do with the fact that the eighth note of the traditional Western scale is the repeated one. E.g. C D E F G A B C
I think the grandparent makes a sensible point about tetrachromats having an enhanced sensory response to different colors, which probably translates to better cognitive abilities related to color.
In terms of spectroscopy, normal human vision divides the whole spectrum of visible light into three bands, while tetrachromats have four bands. So I wouldn't call it an extra dimension (though it's true in a way), but rather simply increased resolution. Compare this to spectrometers, which usually have hundreds of bands.
From what I've read, tetrachromats have the extra band in addition to the usual three of RGB, so the four are not equally spaced. IIRC, the fourth is usually very close to R or G, so the extra sensitivity is not spread throughout the spectrum.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This may just be me, but if you use A to tune all the time wouldn't you become more accustomed to its pitch and therefore notice more often if it was sharp or flat?
:P
Also, as someone who has been told they have perfect pitch (I haven't done any official tests so I'm not 100% sure), when I'm listening to music that may not be precisely on-key it doesn't bother me or sound "wrong", it just sounds different. That is, as long as the instruments are all tuned together; if it's just one instrument that's out of key from the rest of them, it does bother me.
'Loyalty, trust, faith and desire carry love through each darkest fire' - Octavarium by Dream Theater
I've used Antares AutoTune and Celemony Melodyne, two of the popular pitch-correctors, and both default to equal-tempered. I never looked to see if they'd support alternate tunings, since it wasn't relevant to the music I was working on.
There is arguably no one alive today in the west that is culturally conditioned to prefer just intonation. Just intonations is "just", meaning it's mathematically correct - intervals are the ratios of small integers. Other intonations are not. I'm sure peoples' ears can be conditioned to expect anything.
I'm a barbershop singer, and we have to deal with oddities such as having to sing an ascending third sharper than we think it should be when the melody is moving up by that interval, yet when singing the third as part of a harmony, it will have to be flatter to be in tune.
If you want to hear a correct third, just get 50 guys in a room and have them all sing the same vowel, in the intervals root/fifth/root. The third will just jump out and wail away without anyone singing it.
From http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?stor
"Press to test."
(click)
"Release to detonate."
Since about six people have all responded to this in the same way, I'll point out that while there is a mathematical basis for a twelve tone system, there's nothing intrinsic about the idea of only twelve tones. If you extend the idea of harmonics beyond the 12 tones most people stop at, you end up with different numbers of tones, like 19 or 31. See also: microtonal music, which a music composition friend of mine in college was really into.
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Spending so much time arguing about what is the 'right' tuning is a bit silly. When an orchestra tunes (or any ensemble) what is arrived at is an agreement on a relative reference. (Yes, by convention A-440 is the target, but as has been pointed out, ensembles often use different references to achieve different results)
That being said, as soon as the tuning has finished, the reference to A-440 is absolutely useless (and in a sense, absolute pitch is useless and even a hindrance). When the performance starts, intonation is a negotiation among the ensemble (and if you want to extend this, it is also affected by environmental factors such as a hall that has some nasty acoustical characteristics or a vengeful HVAC system that keeps things too hot or too cold (or changes the temperature randomly))
I suppose that this is the right place for a physics or psychology discussion of pitch, but in ensemble performance, intonation (perhaps defined as playing the 'right' pitch) is a social matter.
My hearing aids frequency shift everything down to around 1000hz, the range I can actually somewhat hear in.
The brain gradually learns what high pitch and low pitch is. With hearing aids, I can hear the 8khz band being tweaked on an equalizer, whereas without the hearing aids I can't tell the difference when the 1khz or higher is adjusted.
With a cochlear implant, with time the brain learns to adjust and distinguish frequencies, but never has the same degree of sensitivity.
Yeah, the bastards should of used the 256 Hz Scientific Scale
Many practitioners of early music tune to an A415 (hence the term 'Baroque Standard' for such a thing). Antonio Stradivari, builder of the famed Stradivarius violins, was known to tune to A415 (actually A414.97 was what his reference fork measured when found). Most owners/players of Stradivarius violins tune to an A415 and claim it is like having a completely different instrument, in term sof how the violin responds at the tuning it was designed for.
You'll also find that many guitarists (acoustic guitarists particularly, but others too) tune to A415 (or 'a half step down' as you'll hear it referred to). It tends to open up the instrument and also seems to 'sit' better key wise (at least IMO).
The A440 is a new standard, only nearing 70 years now. When decided upon very little was taken into account, though the story goes that the string section was pleased at being noticeably louder at A440 than at lower 'A's. A415 has a much longer history and several heavy hitters backing it up (the entire Bach family, Vivaldi, Mozart, Scarlatti, et al).
Amusingly, some from the Romantic period were fond of tuning up for a more 'intense' timbre...sometimes as high an A462 (which comes out to be about a half step higher than A440)!
Back on topic...I think the inexcusable lack of music education is the reason people have trouble with pitch recognition, not an arbitrary reference for musicians. For example, if you went through life never being trained to discern colors you'd be a visual moron - painting (as it were) is very broad strokes ('it's reddish') rather than having the subtlety to see real differences in similar colors (bright red, brick red, maroon). It's even worse for music, since we are not necessarily penalized for not being astute listeners (in the sense of pitch and timbre). I mean, how many times has someone said "is that a major or minor chord?" to you, or what you thought of a chord grouping in an arrangement? Now when was the last time someone asked your visual opinion? Sadly this is even true for musicians...being trained from a young age to hone sight and speech, but not listening. Hell, I know "musicians" who cannot solfege a simple major scale (you know - do re mi fa sol la ti do) & hit all the notes. Just starting from a note and moving up in a major scale pattern relative to the starting note. And man, relative pitch is so much more important than perfect pitch.