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
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