Can Absolute Pitch be Acquired?

Understanding of absolute pitch

When discussing this issue, we first need to have a clear concept of absolute pitch. First look at the description on Wikipedia:

Absolute pitch refers to the ability to feel the actual pitch of the sound, which should include the following levels:

1. Able to distinguish two sounds of different pitches.

2. Can accurately imitate the sound heard.

3. Can know the actual pitch of the sound heard, and say the sound name.

4. Can directly sing the actual pitch of the score.

The first two indicate that you have good hearing and can sing exactly what you hear. The latter two must have a process of brain conversion, that is, the process of correctly converting sounds into concepts, or correctly converting symbols into sounds, and the mutual conversion between sounds and concepts can also be achieved through systematic and rigorous training.

After reading the above introduction, it can be said that you are still confused, and you will still have a lot of questions. Let's do some more detailed analysis on this.

Analyze

It can be seen that the No.1 and No.3 both classify the ability to receive sound, while the No.2 and No.4 classify the ability to sing out sound. In fact, those who can achieve the No.1 and No.2 can be said to have the most basic relative pitch, and those who can do all four can be said to have absolute pitch. Let's expand more about No.1 and No.2 and then take a vertical look at their essential differences. We assume that two sounds with different pitches are emitted at the same time, then two sounds with different pitches can be distinguished, indicating that your ears have the function of distinguishing sounds of different frequencies. With this function, you can make basic comparisons. That means you have the most basic relative pitch. I emphasize the most basic relative pitch here, because this is not what we usually think of as relative pitch, this is just a comparative ability, in fact, most people have this ability. But in order to develop what we usually think of as relative pitch, you need to have a little music theory foundation and be able to judge common intervals (for example, semitones, whole steps, minor thirds, major thirds, etc.), and I will talk more about relative pitch later. Regarding the third point, it should be understood separately. Being able to know the actual pitch of the sound you hear, and being able to say the name of the sound, is like being able to understand what you say and being able to read words. The former does not require knowledge of any theory, while the latter does. The No.4 is the most direct way to test the absolute pitch, but obviously you must have knowledge of music theory in order to understand the score and to meet the basic conditions required for a test.

do,re,mi,fa,so,la,si

Why do some people naturally sing without learning music theory? This is going to talk about relative pitch in detail. It doesn't matter what the concept of relative pitch is. Because of its simplicity, correctness and compatibility, its practice has gone deep into social culture, just like in many conventional chunks in dialects. It has not been recorded in the book, but many people are using it naturally, and they don't know why they can use it like that. But for better understanding, it is still necessary to know the concept. As mentioned above, those who can accomplish No.1 or No.2 have the opportunity to obtain relative pitch. This is because the relative pitch requires the ability to accurately sing the melody heard by roll-call in addition to the above-mentioned No.1 and No.2. The roll call here is the do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si that goes deep into modern culture. Whether you have studied music or not, you must have listened to music. Melodies in modern music that spread most widely are almost just results of permutation and combinations of do,re,mi,fa,so,la,si. do,re,mi,fa,so,la,si is like a brand, engraved in everyone's heart, encountering all the melody, your brain will unconsciously use it to make dynamic match and see how each melody fits in as much as possible, because you know it's going to be comfortable if it matches. This can also explain why some people think that classical music is boring, or hard for appreciation. In fact, it is because situations like out of tune in classical music are much more than that of popular music, and even a simple melody appears a few semitones. People who do not familiar with it will get lost and felt uncomfortable, so naturally they stopped listening.

Having said so much, the natural formation of relative pitch is the result of heavy reliance on do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si (hereinafter referred to as the major scale). The so-called relative pitch is that some are very sensitive to the relative relationship between sounds and can quickly distinguish the distance between different frequencies. The judgment of distance is heavily dependent on the scale of the major scale. Looking closely at the major scale, we can see that although it is only in a major scale, these seven tones have actually formed all the possible interval relationships in the twelve equal temperament.

Roll Call	Relationship
si,do	Semitone
do,re	Whole Tone
la,do	Minor Third
do,mi	Major Third
do,fa	Perfect Fourth
fa,si	Augmented Fourth
do,so	Fifths
la,fa	Minor Sixth
do,la	Major Sixth
la,so	Minor Seventh
do,si	Major Seventh

Note: Each group of sound names above is arranged from low to high, which means that they are not necessarily in the same octave.

If you like singing or listening to music, you have come into contact with the major scale and are very familiar with it, you have actually mastered a universal interpretation tool for music. In the world of twelve equal temperament, you already have been able to deal with all the interval relationships, even if they are out of tune, it will only make you uncomfortable or confused for a moment. This confusion is just because you haven't done enough training outside the major scale. If you calm down and compare carefully, you can still find out the relation.

Misunderstanding of the "Absolute"

First, absolute pitch and relative pitch are always discussed separately. In fact, people with absolute pitch must have relative pitch, so they are not two unrelated concepts. The difference is in the cognition and quantification of sound. Many people take the meaning of the word "absolutely" too seriously. Absolutely sound is just a term, and it does not mean that "absolute". There are also good and bad abilities among those who have absolute pitch. Some people are so sensitive to frequencies that they can hear the slight difference within a semitone, while others are only sensitive to pianos and have difficulty judging the sounds of other timbres, which means that the timbre (waveform) that affects their ability to distinguish pitch (frequency). Some people can only roughly judge the range within a whole tone or a third, and cannot achieve precise positioning.

Therefore, the absolute pitch itself is still a trend rather than a critical point. When the accuracy of your judgment reaches within a semitone, it is generally regarded as the absolute pitch. If some people are a little not close enough, it cannot be said that they have no absolute pitch. It should be possible to improve the accuracy through training. When the accuracy can fall within a semitone, it is an absolute pitch in the general sense.

Determining Factors in Childhood

Why do some people are pointed out by teachers that "your child is a genius and has absolute pitch, better go to learn music", while some people receive "only have relative pitch"? My guess is that people's perception of music is different when they are young, and some children can quickly feel that music of different tones can form a set of scales, so they continue to use scales to interpret all the music they heard later. Other children's sense of scales did not grow so fast. They could only find that the distance between each key was a semitone, so they gradually memorized each note. Children's learning ability is very scary, and they can quickly memorize the feeling of each note of the 88 keys. If there is no guidance, it is very likely that the child has chosen his own direction of relative pitch or absolute pitch due to his own understanding. People who naturally form a relative pitch can use the “movable do” method (major scale) to fit into any tonality, but it will be invalid once they encounter the out-of-tune situation. Due to the inability to immediately identify the tonality, it is impossible to immediately analyze the basic information of the received music in terms of tonality. If a composer has a macro arrangement in the control of the tonality, people with only relative pitch are often unable to perceive this kind of information. On the other hand, people who naturally form an absolute pitch treat all notes and scales equally, they can capture the position of each note at any time, and can easily sing all the notes in fixed keys (very uncomfortable for relative pitch guys), but because of this, there is no instantaneous reflex (no feeling of getting lost) for out-of-tune situation as well as ambience change point. For the emotion part of music, they are often not as good as those who only have relative pitch. However, the time when the tonality is in a stable state in mainstream music accounts for an absolute majority, which is why the music education community advocates the cultivation of relative pitch. They think that people with relative pitch have a good sense (intuition) of music . In my opinion, relative pitch and absolute pitch should complement each other, and the pitch that is formed only by nature must be defective. At this time, a teacher is needed to detect which way the child has deviated to, in order to make up for the knowledge and practice on the other side.

How to approach absolute pitch from relative pitch (enhanced version of fixed key)

When you have some basic knowledge of music theory (meaning that in addition to the major scale, you also know the concept of sharp-flat and semitone), you will find that it is impossible to sing all the notes comfortably using only the major scale, because Sometimes you obviously know that some sounds have sharp and flat, and there is no good way to deal with the off-key modulation. If you always sing without sharp and flat, you will feel a bit awkward, but in a fast rhythm, always sing the sharp and flat will result in a serious impact on the rhythm. So what is the solution to this problem? You actually need a better naming system than the major scale. In this regard, the vocal VST that comes with my Roland electric piano gives the answer. In short, you need to start with the original major scale roll name and extend it to sharp and flat with two additional sets of roll names.

flat	original	sharp
.	do	di
ra	re	ri
me	mi	.
.	fa	fi
se	so	si
le	la	li
te	ti	.

Note: because the new roll name of sharp so overlaps with the original si, the original si has been changed to ti , Baidu Encyclopedia said that because the abbreviations of so and si are both "s", they were changed to ti, but after reading this new roll call Naming, do you feel that this is a more reasonable explanation? You can also see that the flat roll call of re has become ra because re is already occupied. There are still some vacancies, because they can be replaced by another roll call, for example, flat do is ti, sharp mi is `fa, and so on. This rule is very obvious on the piano. The sharp and flat roll call is only on black keys, and the vacancies are all on white keys.

Finally, singing all 12 notes with only sharps would look like this:

do,di,re,ri,mi,fa,fi,so,si,la,li,ti(low to high)

Conversely, the way to use only the flat sign is:

do,ti,te,la,le,so,se,fa,mi,me,re,ra(high to low)

So much has been changed. Is there any way to remember it?

It is not difficult to find that the flat roll call, whether it becomes _a or _e, has a tendency to open mouth larger compared to the original roll call ( Except la, I don't know why, maybe because la is the origin of all things). Instead, the sharp roll call _i has a tendency to narrow the mouth into a slit. Imagine when you whistle, there is less and less room in your mouth to make a higher pitch. Let's compare the vowels that appear in this set of roll names, arranged in descending order according to the largeness of mouth opening, namely i , o, e, a. A further rule of substitution is used, where a is used if e is not available. In this way, the entire contents of this table can be derived.

What is the purpose of training this roll call?

It allows you to skip the sharp-flat conversion process in your brain. After training, you must be able to discard the sharp-flat thinking and sing all the notes with just roll call. What's the benefit of doing this? I can only find a less universal analogy. For example, why does Python run slower than programs written in C, because it is a runtime compiled programming language and does a lot of extra work such as type checking at runtime. The C language is compiled before running, and all variable types are static, everything is very straightforward. It's like when we sing a note, we need to think about its sharp and flat, which takes extra time, and even just sings the sharp or flat, there are two words, which is very inconvenient. And if it is stipulated before singing that the roll name of all the sounds are monosyllabic, the troubles are solved in the front, and it will be easy to use later. At the same time, this set of nomenclature also contains certain information. It can let you intuitively feel the trend of rising and falling through the opening and closing of the mouth when pronouncing, which is somewhat similar to the programming proverb code is comment. Mastering this singing method can relieve the symptoms of momentary compulsion when the tune is changed to a certain extent.

In addition to theory, how to operate

We already have a more comprehensive roll call system, which is a more perfect scale (chromatic scale), and this scale needs to be aligned with the C key. Everything should be based on this key, which is the first step towards absolute pitch. Absolute pitch is inseparable from constant training and verification. It does not mean how many hours of solfeggio training you have to spend in the music room every day. This practice can be integrated into your life. For example, sometimes you hear a song, or some unscrupulous driver suddenly whistles outside your window, you can select a certain tone, memorize it, guess the approximate range first, and then download some virtual piano software on the piano or mobile phone to verify it. Don't be afraid to guess wrong, you can guess a very large range at first, so large that you can be sure that you will be right, and it doesn't matter if you are wrong. Imagine that you hear a deep voice, you will not think this voice is in the high-pitched area, this is a successful training. Then the next thing to do is to keep trying to narrow the scope of your guesses. This process is where talent and time are really needed. Even if you don't end up narrowing it down to within a semitone, you can still get a lot out of it.

Epilogue

These are just summaries of my self-learning experience for these years, who have never studied music theory systematically. Maybe what I said was in a corner of professional textbooks many years ago, maybe what I said was completely Incorrect. My personal experience and summary have not been strictly verified, and mistakes are unavoidable, but if I can arouse the resonance of some amateur music lovers and spark everyone's discussion, it will be great.