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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."
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A440 is important because an orchestra is supposed to follow the first violin, and the main string on a violin is the A string, tuned at 440. The fine tuning cacophony you hear before a concert starts quite often has a plain A repeated at intervals throughout it -- this being the first violin letting others know what to tune against, if it isn't a standard 440. Sometimes it isn't, due to other instruments that might be hard to tune, like a concert piano (which can be 440, 442 or 452 Hz depending on where you are) or an old pipe organ (in which case all bets are off). Luckily, a violin is relatively easy to tune, and it's (in theory) the job of the first violinist to ensure he has a working A, which others then can tune their instruments to.
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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.
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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."
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.
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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.
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