Thanks for the reference, Ed. It contains some interesting stuff, but limits itself to the rather crude ³recognition of a named pitch² as in ³This note is C, this is C#² 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: ³either you have it or you don¹t², meaning there isn¹t a spectrum of people who are ³close but no cigar.² 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 can¹t 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/20070829/c946a5a7/attachment.html
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