[boneyguy]

I hope you don’t mind me grilling you with questions but I find this to be very interesting and a nice opportunity to explore PP. I hope you feel the same way.

Originally Posted by daves561

Well, who doesn't mind talking about themselves?

For starters, my introduction to music instruction was piano lessons at age seven. It took about a year before my teacher realized I had perfect pitch. This is interesting because I remember specifically being surprised that *everyone* couldn't do it. The reason I mention this is only to point out that as best as I can tell, I always had it, and never spent any time developing it. (Unsurprisingly, pianists who learn at an early age have the highest rate of AP1.) (Also, the Chinese have a much higher rate across the population, because the language is based heavily on pitch. My understanding of Chinese is that the same "sounding" word can have multiple meanings depending on the pitch it's spoken at!)

What was your experience of having PP before you ‘knew’ you had it? Before you were told you had it.

How did you identify pitches when before you learned names for them? What I mean is before you learned some music rudiments on the piano, before you had that language, you already had PP. Right? So before you had the language to say to yourself “That hinge is squeaking at F#” how would you have experienced that experience? “That hinge made the same sound as the Chickadee I heard yesterday” or something like that perhaps? Does this make any sense?

You mention two examples that to me strongly suggest that PP is a learned skill. Pianists who begin at an early age have the highest rate of PP and natural speakers of Chinese have unusually high rates of PP. Both these examples simply sound like perfect descriptions of ‘skill acquisition’ or, in other words, learning. If it were simply a mysterious talent or a genetic attribute why should it matter that a pianist begins at a young age or as an elderly person? Again, if it’s simply a matter of genetics or random brain wiring why would a pitch based language such as Chinese have such a positive influence over the statistical average of people having PP? Shouldn’t PP be spread more evenly amongst all languages if it were merely a matter of genetics or 'raw talent'. Why would it favour pitch based languages? To me these are both strong arguments in favour of PP acquisition.

As for what it "feels" like, I've been thinking about this since you posted, and it seems to be getting more difficult to describe as I get older, so I'd better get crackin'...

This is interesting because I was more inclined toward wondering what the experience of PP ‘sounds’ like rather than how it ‘feels’. But I would guess given your own words that there is a component of ‘feeling’ a pitch. Is that correct? Are you more aware of ‘feeling’ the pitch than of ‘hearing’ the pitch? Do you ‘feel’ different pitches in different locations of your body? How does that work? How does the interplay of ‘hearing’ and ‘feeling’ work for you? Does one come before the other? Also you mention later on that you don’t have synesthesia but that is what is implied by your words. Feeling something that you hear is a form of synesthesia.

Unfortunately, the color comparison, as vague as it is, seems to be the best place to start. When you see green, you know it. You don't have to compute anything. As long as you've known that the word for that color is "green," you can recall it instantly. So when I listen to a note, it just has an identity associated with it. There's no derivation or secondary step. It just is. Blech. Sorry to have dispersed another useless attempt to describe matters...

On the contrary I think you’re giving really elegant descriptions of a very slippery and nebulous process.

Colors even resemble pitches in how we've been taught to quantize them. If you look at a color in between blue and green, you're likely to call it something about as uninteresting: blue-green, or maybe turquoise (which you probably just reduce to blue-green anyway, like when we Americans try and get used to km/h or degrees Celsius in other countries). Because I was raised in a twelve-tone society, I have very acute hearing for those 12 notes. When I hear something between an F# and a G, if it's closer to an F#, I say it's north of F#, and if it's closer to a G, I say it's south of G, and right in between is just, well, FsharpG. It's definitely not either note, but just like blue-green, I don't really have an intuitive feel for it either. It doesn't have its own innate "character" like the two "proper" notes surrounding it. I have to distill it to its components. (I realize I'm laying the groundwork for admitting that maybe this is something you can learn.)

This is interesting. Burge discusses this sort of thing in his course as well if I recall correctly.

The fact that your PP has a cultural bias, so to speak, is again for me an indication of a process that is plastic and malleable and not some kind of hardwired “you gotta be born with it” type of thing. I have to wonder that if it was only genetics than wouldn’t you have popped out hearing everything equally?

I also notice that you’re still mixing sensory systems in your descriptions above. It seems that ‘feeling sound’ is a large part of this skill you have. I wonder if you would be willing to elaborate on that process?

I should point out that this is only a metaphor. I do not have synesthesia. Musical tones don't evoke colors or tastes or anything else for me. Each one has its own character, and seems to inhabit a spectrum of feeling that I'm doing a bad job describing. What is also interesting is that two adjacent notes don't share a "closeness" of character. B and C feel as different as F and C. It isn't like B is a little less C, or C is a little more B. The relationship of their frequencies is an orthogonal concern. I've never really considered that before. That's probably the most useful insight I've had into this. It's like PP is an extra dimension for measuring. (Ever read the book Flatland? Great book.) So if a relative pitch "measurement chart" looks like two dimensions, time on the X axis, and frequency on the Y-axis, so that the relationship between any two notes across time is always easily discernible, there's a Z axis which most people can't see, and this Z axis measures the "character" of the note, one of twelve values, which define a set whose members aren't really "ordered": B has B-ness and Ab has Ab-ness but they can't be compared. Maybe instead of one Z axis there are in fact 12 Z axes for each note, each orthogonal to the others, so the entire thing is a 14-dimensional system. (Sorry for the tangent; I do a lot of math during the day.)

Based on what you’ve written I suggest that you have a ‘hear/feel’ kind of synesthesia. You may not experience it as such but your writing strongly implies it. Often the process of synesthesia happens so quickly it seems like only a single sensory event when in fact it isn’t. Based on my experience I might make a guess that you are identifying and naming a pitch with your hearing and then confirming it by getting a ‘yes’ feeling. This is a very common synesthesia strategy. Does this seem to fit for you? Again, I’m only guessing based on a bit of information so I could be dead wrong or it may only bea part of a more complex process.

This is a good jumping off point for where the color metaphor falls short, because there is this bizarre cyclic thing: an F# sounds distinctly F#-like in every octave. As we all know, an octave up is just a doubling of frequency, so it would seem that the perfect-pitch brain works like all brains in filtering out factors of two. (Think about it: why does F#3 sound like F#4? Yeah yeah, consonance, Pythagorus, blah blah blah, but really: they're different notes, coming into your ear at different rates! Yet you collapse them to the same note, a specialness not enjoyed by any other harmonic ratio.) With all of this stuff, it is impossible to isolate the influence of our environment, so perhaps we're all subjects of the ancient-Greek system of harmonics. Maybe in some alien world a perfect-pitcher would hear F#3 and F#4 completely differently. Nah, probably not. :^)

I haven't even begun to discuss the harmony stuff: what happens when you hear something as a minor third and as C-Eb at the same time. Let me chew on that for a while and I'll continue with this craziness later.

Great. I’d like to hear more about it.

If you're still reading, cool, and thanks. Any thoughts/concerns/criticisms are welcome.

You’ve got my attention.