[CAUT] Pitch recognition

[Fred Sturm]

What I wrote below was from reading the study. On the home page,  
http://perfectpitch.ucsf.edu/ppstudy.html is a far more "normal  
person friendly" account of the study.
Regards,
Fred Sturm
University of New Mexico
fssturm at unm.edu



On Aug 29, 2007, at 8:39 PM, Fred Sturm wrote:

> Thanks for the reference, Ed. It contains some interesting stuff,  
> but limits itself to the rather crude “recognition of a named  
> pitch” as in “This note is C, this is C#” rather than the finer  
> distinctions we have been talking about. I guess a study to focus  
> on those fine distinctions would have to go to a great deal of  
> trouble in identifying and recruiting subjects, rather than the  
> broadband approach of this study. Those who know 440 from 442 and  
> the like are a small subset of a small subset.
>     A couple interesting conclusions in the study:
> “either you have it or you don’t”, meaning there isn’t a spectrum  
> of people who are “close but no cigar.”
> G# and A# tend to be misidentified as A more often than any other  
> notes are misidentified.
> And the thing about age causing perception to go sharp (to identify  
> notes as sharp of where they are when older).
>     Quite a morass of jargon to wade through. Why can’t academics  
> learn to write clearly?
> Regards,
> Fred Sturm
> University of New Mexico
>
>
> On 8/29/07 4:35 PM, "Ed  Sutton" <ed440 at mindspring.com> wrote:
>
>> An extremely important study on absolute pitch has been done by  
>> the University of California, testing over 2000 subjects.
>> See the report at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703868104v3
>> Piano technicians who deal with musical authorities (such as  
>> teachers and conductors) need to read this report.
>> Accuracy of absolute pitch deteriorates with age.  No one over the  
>> age of 51 in this study was able to attain a perfect score in a  
>> test of 36 tones, and many people 50 and older reported that they  
>> were aware that their pitch perception was drifting sharp.  This  
>> is probably due to age changes in the inner ear which effect all  
>> of us.
>> Many of the situations we deal with may involve hearing changes in  
>> middle aged people.  I once had an aging choir director claim I  
>> was cheating her by charging for a pitch raise because the piano  
>> sounded "right on pitch" to her. My ETD measured the piano as over  
>> 20 cents flat.
>>
>> Ed Sutton
>>
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.moypiano.com/ptg/caut.php/attachments/20070830/4f4f5f1d/attachment.html