Synaesthesia and Tonality

It would be interesting if everyone here with perfect pitch went through each individual tone and identified a specific feeling or color associated with that tone. Just don't look at anyone else's thoughts before you post your own. I want to see how close these descriptions are.

Synthaesia and perfect pitch are two seperate conditions, not to knit pick but I've been thoroughly reamed out over the very same misconception.

Synaesthesia and perfect pitch are related if the person connects tones to images or feelings which is very common and likely among those with perfect pitch. I thought it would be interesting to see how close these connections are.

Alexander Scriabin had synaesthesia, I know he ar least associated all the notes of the chromatic scale with colors...go on wikipedia, that's where I first discovered it

I found that as well.. could anyone on YC that has perfect pitch describe any feelings/images associated with tones?

I read an in-depth article once that gave methods for learning how to acquire perfect pitch. I’m afraid I can’t remember the source of the article. However, it made a compelling case that perfect pitch is learned in the same way that we learn to associate names to colors. Everyone learns to associate names to colors because this is deemed important in general. However, the vast majority of people are not taught to associate absolute pitches with the names of notes. A large part of this is because absolute pitch isn’t deemed as important. The musical pitches are simply views as relative tones by most people.

The article actually went on to say that studies have shown that people who have learned to recognize absolute pitches often have can only recognize a limited number of them and actually still use relative pitch to recognize the names of adjacent pitches. Studies have also shown that people who have perfect pitch may not have as good of relative pitch as some people who can’t name absolute pitches.

In other words, the article concludes that having learned perfect pitch does not guarantee a person has any better musical skills than a person who has never learned perfect pitch. The people who argue against this the most vehemently are those who just coincidentally just happen to have both, a good sense of relative pitch, and have learned to recognize some absolute pitches by name.

One thing that is certain is that the ability to name absolute pitches necessarily must be learned and cannot possibly have been inborn. The reason for this is because the actual names of pitches are man-made and arbitrarily chosen. A person can’t possibly be born with the innate ability to recognize 440 hz as an A-note for example. This is because in nature there is nothing special about 440 hz. That frequency wasn’t chosen by nature, it is an arbitrary standard that was chosen by man. In fact, it wasn’t always even the standard. Over the course of history other standards had been used to define an A-note (i.e. 415 Hz, 435 Hz, and others).

Therefore the ability to have “perfect pitch” at birth is impossible. The article suggests that the ability to recognize absolute pitches to specific names is an innate ability of all humans. However, because the vast majority of people simply never paid it any mind they simply didn’t learn to do it, especially in their youth when it would have become intuitively ingrained.

So it is possible for anyone to learn to recognize and or produce absolute pitches. However, it’s going to take more of a conscious effort for an adult to learn this behavior than it would have taken them had they learned it during the developmental years as a young child. Learning it at that stage of their life it becomes ingrained and seems “intuitive” to them.

Finally, it’s been shown that having the ability to recognize absolute pitches by name does not enhance one’s musical abilities at all. If people with perfect pitch have good musical abilities it is most likely that they were musically inclinded early on to being with, and this is why they focused their attention on pitches in the first place. So, if anything, people who learned perfect pitch naturally in their youth did so because of their strong interest in their sense of sound, rather than the other way around.

Just thought I’d share this for anyone who is interested. In short, if you didn’t learn perfect pitch in your youth, attempting to learn it as an adult would probably not be beneficial in any way unless you want to do party tricks. It simply has no musical value. Music is all about having a good sense of relative pitch. And if you don't already have that, trying to learn absolute pitch isn't going to help you.

Amen. I know a lady who can identify 27 note cluster chords at a hundred percent accuracy and she doesn't have perfect pitch. I'm %100 honest about that. It's the most insane loving thing I've ever seen.

Granted some perfect pitch(ers) can identify shite like that but they end up sitting in the back of the hall cutting their forearms with vicous knives everytime they go to an acapella choir concert.

That's no way to live.

perfect/absolute pitch is not something special from my point of view. I don't have it... exactly. Give me a starting note and I can follow a lot of things. Dict

There's no real doubt to me that the ability to recognize absolute pitches is more or less innate, and far more common than developed perfect pitch. I certainly don't have perfect pitch, but if I spontaneously think of a tune (particularly one I've heard a lot), I often realize when I check that I was accurately in the right key. I've heard this described by a lot of people. One of my strongest experiences of a similar nature is when I went to a concert with some sort of chamber music by Brahms (really, I've forgotten what exactly it was... possibly a cello sonata?). The second movement begun with middle E-flat and G simultaneously in the piano, and I started, unexpectedly hearing what at first seemed to be Beethoven's "Lebewohl" sonata. The sensation was remarkably strong.

There's no real doubt to me that the ability to recognize absolute pitches is more or less innate.

Sure, it's innate to all human beings who are born with functioning ear drums. How well they develop it or focus on it is the real question.

Most people simply don't learn to discern and categorize absolute pitches because from a practical point of view there's no benefit in it.

Moreover, unless the person is exposed to music that is in a perfect concert pitch how could they develop absolute pitch? There's nothing magical about A=440 Hz. That's an entirely arbitrarily chosen human standard, and it's even a relatively modern standard. There's simply no way anyone could be born with "perfect pitch". That would be no different than claiming that someone was born already knowing the alphabet. (of course there will always be people who make these types of claims as well)

Having a good sense of relative pitch is an entirely differnet story though. All humans who have healthy hearing should be able to discern relative pitches, yet even so, many people simply never paid much attention to that ability and therefore they aren't very good at it.

Even things that we have an innate ability to do can be refined by focusing on them and practicing them. Or converserly they can be lost if we pay them no mind.

I started out with perfect pitch and lost it over a long time spent tuning a 12 string guitar. The only remnant comes from having memorized the exact pitch of an A440 tuning fork. I can still hear that in my head anytime and interpolate to determine when a pitch is true, but it is no longer an automatic function.

I also have synaesthesia, but I do not see notes as colors, but as textures. They are very distinctive, but are more similar to moire patterns than chips from a color wheel. As I have never seen language to describe those intricacies, it is pretty much useless to discuss this variation of sensory overlapping.