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AP, the missing category ? [long]

Not being a scientist, I am unable to provide scientific references, but in my experience, there is a third, larger category, that of the [for want of a better term], "tone deaf".

I have had students who after two years of ear-training still identified ascending intervals at slightly above random probability, and descending intervals were from another universe. An ascending major third does not sound like a descending major third, and this is a RP problem, possibly exacerbated by music notation.

We are all aware that our memory of what happened ten minutes ago is not the same as our memory of what will happen ten minutes from now. Students are surprised to discover that the Beethoven Fifth begins with a major third, and that Happy Birthday starts on the dominant.

Most of my experience in ear-training (which is almost all RP) has been with 'older' (over 18) students. My experience also is that the older the student, the more difficult it is for them to learn intervals. A number of "keen" students in their late-50s to early 70s [probably only about 10 or 15 people] spent many hours every week for years trying to get intervals. They didn't.

My experience with a younger population [18 - 28, many hundreds for more than one year each], is that RP is difficult, but that [based upon those I've seen / heard], while AP is very very rare in the population I dealt with, RP is not the norm.

I understand that in the scientific community introspective research is frowned upon, but living in the compositional community, any other form of research is suspect, so I note my own hearing development. As a RP person, my 'hearing' had stabilized by about the age of 13. At the Conservatoire, I was moved from first to fourth year in five weeks as it was evident that the 'basics' were too easy for me. But then my hearing development stopped for 45 years.

Following a car accident last year, my hearing 'jumped' forward. [My head line also changed but palmistry isn't on this list.] I was able to much more easily hear the (relative) pitch structures of 7 to 10 note chords. In atonal music I was also freed from having to use scale degree referents; I had developed a second form of RP.


The third category of hearers has held a particular fascination for me, the tone deaf who can't carry a tune in a bucket and can't tell notes apart beyond some sense of 'difference', or 'higher /lower'. One of my older students (now 77) as an opthamologist told me that red/green color blind people cannot distinguish between red and green, but he had no idea what they do see.

I know a composer who through an accident lost his 'musical hearing'. It was described to me as being in a place where all 'meaning' had been transposed or lost. An example of this is the sentence: "Thisaway isagogics aardvark transposon sententia". Take the sentence -- "This is a transposed sentence." and use the adjacent words in the dictionary. The two most famous cases of this are John Cage is a musician he said because it is the word right after mushroom in the dictionary. He is an expert on mushrooms. The most famous is the computer HAL in the film 2001, HAL being a retrograde transposition of I.B.M.

For me this relates to the proposition of 'late life transposition' in AP. Benjamin Britten heard the C major opening of Meistersinger in C# major. The proposition I read here is that the basilar membrane had stiffened and the resonant modes (place theory) had been moved, so hairs which had sent the message "C", now were on the resonant spot of "B".

This theory is interesting, and brings up my other question as to, if this is the explanation, is it possible to have different AP in each ear? I have a color shift between my two eyes, (opacity of one lens), and if I am doing critical pitch matching, while I prefer to use both ears, given my 'druthers' {I'd rather}, I favor my right ear. But the proposition is that the magic decoder ring for pitch perception is not in the organ of corti.

If I could find out what the non-RP, non-AP person did hear, I might be a little further ahead. But I have had ways of doing this, and that is because I teach electroacoustics (electronic music for those of us over 40), I have had students who are non-RP, non-AP, and they have created compositions. But that's for another time.


FWIW, this thread was on this list in 1999-2000 and the sentiment at that time (the only citation I recall is Huron) was that AP is learned / trained, not genetic.

Best wishes

Kevin



We appear to have two different phenomena:

A: A moderately precise memory for pitch that can be learned by adults and
that shows normal distribution of performance in a tested group.
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/1467-9280.03432

AND
B: A highly precise memory for pitch that cannot be learned by adults and
that shows bimodal (all-or-nothing) distribution of performance in a tested group.

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703868104v1

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Martin Braun
Neuroscience of Music
S-671 95 Kl=E4ssbol
Sweden
web site: http://w1.570.telia.com/~u57011259/index.htm


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Date:    Sat, 8 Sep 2007 16:42:42 +0200
From:    Henkjan Honing <honing@xxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Absolute pitch discussion

Although I have to be modest in my claims, not being an expert in pitch, I find AP actually not such a special phenomenon. Although we could agree in dividing the phenomenon in degrees, or levels of preciseness on a more continuous scale, in the end we have to also see that Relative Pitch is far more special. While we might share AP with some animals, RP is far less common, arguably making AP in humans less special.

hh

__________________________________________________

Dr H. Honing
Universiteit van Amsterdam
http://www.hum.uva.nl/mmm/hh/

Music Matters: http://www.musiccognition.nl/blog
__________________________________________________

Date:    Sat, 8 Sep 2007 17:24:53 +0200
From:    Martin Braun <nombraun@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Absolute pitch discussion

Dear Henkjan and list:

..... in the end we have to also see that Relative Pitch is far more 
 > special. While we might share AP with some animals, RP is far less common,
 > arguably making AP in humans less special.

I fully agree. RP is a much bigger challenge for neuroscience than AP is. To
my knowledge, we do not even have the faintest trace of a hypothesis how a
brain could accomplish RP.

Martin

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin Braun
Neuroscience of Music
S-671 95 Kl=E4ssbol
Sweden
web site: http://w1.570.telia.com/~u57011259/index.htm

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