
Want Perfect Pitch? You Might Be Able To Pop A Pill For That - bane
http://www.npr.org/2014/01/04/259552442/want-perfect-pitch-you-could-pop-a-pill-for-that?sc=ipad&f=1001
======
daeken
This has been covered on HN a few times, and I should point out that the
sample size on this is in the low tens, so don't get too excited.

But every time I see it, I remember a really odd side effect that I had while
on a mood stabilizer (not sure which -- could well have been valproic acid,
the same drug referenced in the article). A few days into taking the drug, I
found that music that I knew well sounded different; specifically, it sounded
like it was being played back too fast, as if you were playing 44.1khz audio
at 48khz. I initially figured I screwed something up on my machine, but tested
myself with various other songs on other devices, and every one of them was
too sharp.

This continued for several days and was the primary reason I ended up
switching to a different medication; I don't have absolute pitch but I have
very finely tuned relative pitch and that's not something I would be happy
about giving up. Discontinuing the meds fixed it within a day, but I've always
wondered exactly why that happened. Very odd.

~~~
ismarc
I was on a medication that did something similar (I believe it may have been
depakote or gabapentin). Thing is, I have absurdly good relative pitch, and
combined with an 'internalized' sound of 60Hz (I've worked around a large
number of generators and high voltage equipment over the years), I have the
same net effect as perfect pitch (60Hz is roughly a quarter step above B-flat,
a quarter step below B).

What bugged me was the intervals were off. It's hard to describe, but, for
those not familiar with how the notes are laid out, 60Hz is quarter step below
B, 120 is quarter step below B, 240 is quarter step below B, and so on.
However, as you get higher, the frequency difference gets larger (B is
actually 61.75ish Hz and B flat is 58.25ish Hz, next higher is 123.5ish Hz and
116.5ish Hz, and so on). Things were translated ~1/4 octave higher, which
completely threw everything off because the 60Hz sound no longer fell evenly
between two notes or even directly on a note, it was an 1/8th step away. This
meant that as the notes got further away from 60Hz (higher or lower), the
distance to the note got larger. So while everything was still evenly in tune,
my guidepost began to really suck.

Long story short: I have no idea why it did what it did, but it was freaky.
However, it was probably the most amenable side-effect I had from the
medication.

~~~
enf
Did tempos sound faster too, or did just the pitches change?

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webwielder
If there's a pill that allows me to learn stuff as readily as a child, perfect
pitch is kinda low on my list of to-do's.

~~~
sjtgraham
I'm guessing you're not a musician.

~~~
acjohnson55
Perfect pitch is impressive and handy in some cases, but it's a lot more
useful as a musician to spend your time perfecting skills based on relative
pitch perception.

------
rosser
For reference, valproic acid (and/or its salt) is sold under the trade name
_Depakote_. This is not a drug you should consider taking lightly, whatever
neuroplasticity benefits it might confer.

~~~
MichaelGG
It's mainly prescribed a mood stabilizer. They'll commonly give it to you with
lithium or such things.

The list of side effects is rather long, just like most of these psych meds.
There's a reason bipolar folks tend to not want to take their meds or go off
them.

~~~
cosmic_shame
While it is often used as a mood stabilizer, it's actual pharmacological class
is an anticonvulsant (i.e. an antiepileptic).

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sjtgraham
I think perfect pitch can be acquired as an adult, I just think it becomes
exponentially harder. I started to learn guitar around 12 years old, and
became interested in perfect pitch after reading Steve Vai internalised
A=440Hz by having a tape start to play the tone as he slept. I definitely
don't have full perfect pitch, but after a while I could:

\- Tune a guitar, no matter how out of tune to concert pitch without a
reference pitch.

\- Recall the pitch of any song I heard once, not by name, but by singing it
in the key I heard it in, this includes different versions, e.g. covers,
transposed into different keys. I'm not sure how common that is, but a singer
I was dating could also do this too.

Most excitingly I was recently listening to Spotify while out walking when
"Mr. Crowley" began to play. As Ozzy began to sing it instantly came into my
head that the root of the song is D. Obviously, I was hugely excited by this!.
I checked it against an instrument when I got home and sure enough I was
correct. I was delighted!

~~~
colmmacc
It took me about 2 years, starting at age 25, to acquire perfect pitch. I
didn't try the Vai trick, instead I ran an exercise at last once every few
days that challenged me to name the note associated with a tone (out of all 12
equal-temperament tones). At first I got right about 20% of the time, but I
was able to get to 100% over those two years.

But long before I could complete the exercise, I was able to tune my guitar
perfectly, and I can still tune it fine in a very loud environment, or on
stage without the full ability to hear it myself. After playing it for long
enough a good guitar made from good tone-woods will resonate like a bell
around the "home" frequencies you play a lot. For me, in DADGAD tuning that's
a "D" that makes the rosewood echo, but the "A"'s are plenty strong too. If
it's out by even a few cents, the guitar just plain doesn't feel right.

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treetrouble
There's a strange preoccupation with perfect pitch. It's not very useful today
since there are inexpensive electronic and mechanical tools to give you
absolute pitch. It wasn't even that useful previously.

I believe that people confuse it with relative pitch which usually translates
to the skill of transcribing and memorizing melodies. This is very useful as a
musician or even in daily life sometimes. There are people who have an innate
talent for that too, but it's unrelated to perfect pitch.

~~~
ek
You refer to perfect pitch and absolute pitch like they're different things --
do you realize that they're the same thing?

My brother and I are both musicians with perfect pitch, and we've found it
useful in a variety of circumstances. To name a couple, it really helps if
you're jamming and want to pick up a progression quickly, or if you're DJing
and want to key match. I will concede that Traktor recently got key detection,
which is nice, but especially when playing live I find that key segues will
pop into my head without having to search for the next song in the right key.

Even the best relative pitch cannot help you exactly memorize a melody -- if
you are unable to remember what note it actually starts on, you haven't
remembered it fully.

~~~
sjtgraham
I think they are different things. Knowing the sound of a perfect fifth is not
perfect pitch, but relative pitch. One could transcribe a piece of music from
memory with just very good relative pitch, with the caveat they probably will
transcribe it in the incorrect key.

~~~
ek
Are you saying that you think perfect pitch and absolute pitch are different
things? They are synonyms, cf. Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch)
.

If you're saying that perfect pitch and relative pitch are different things in
that it isn't as if perfect pitch is better than relative pitch, then yeah, I
absolutely agree. The hacks that I mentioned involve perfect pitch
specifically, but transcription ability like you mention is probably tied most
to one's sense of relative pitch, even if one has perfect pitch.

~~~
sjtgraham
Oops! I clearly need to read better. I thought I read relative pitch vs
absolute/perfect pitch. Sorry about that.

------
tzs
OK, so suppose you could re-enable child-like neuroplasticity and use it to
help learn something that is harder to learn as an adult than as a child. What
would you try to learn?

I would go for chess. The age when you start playing chess seriously seems to
have a big effect on how strong you can get. If you want to reach world class
strength, it seems you have to start when you are 8 or under. Wait until you
are 10 or so, and your potential seems limited to strong GM. Wait until mid
teens, and strong IM seems all you can shoot for. Later than that, and maybe
you will be able to make national master with a hell of a lot of work. (I may
have the ages wrong here...I'm going for weak memory)

This doesn't appear to be just one of those 10000 hours types of thing. If it
were just that, the early starts would not reach higher peaks--they would just
reach the peaks while younger. It seems that age of starting sets your upper
limit, and THEN it is a 10000 hours type of thing to reach that limit.

A foreign language would be tempting, but adults can already learn foreign
languages effectively. Yes, young enough children become bilingual
effortlessly, but that is if they are largely immersed in the second language
for years. Arranging to be immersed in a second language for years would be
hard.

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mh_yam
I have perfect pitch and I find it to be generally enjoyable.

It's useful, to some degree, in a musical setting; I find it very easy to hear
music and reproduce it immediately (including chord/key analysis, etc). It's
fun to take random songs I hear during my day and go about dissecting them.

However it has its pain points. I waste time analyzing useless things like the
hum of the refrigerator or the sound of water dripping because everything
sounds like a musical note. Also, I can't stand people / instruments that are
not in tune. This includes professional pop artists / singers -- a lot of them
sound awfully off key to me, even though in reality they probably are within a
tolerance level. Ditto going to karaoke with friends who cannot sing. It
destroys my ears and gives me headaches.

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dizzystar
I read a quote from Joseph Hoffman about perfect pitch. I can't recall the
exact quote, but it was a Q&A in his book on piano playing. It went a bit like
this:

Q: Is it necessary for a musician to have perfect pitch?

A: No. I don't think I have perfect pitch, but my father did. It appears to be
a double-edged sword. He couldn't recognize a Mozart tune if it was played in
a different key.

(I recall the part about how he "thought" he had perfect pitch in particular
because I found it odd that he didn't even know, despite his incredible talent

For those not aware, Rachmaninoff dedicated his 3rd concerto to Hoffman,
though Hoffman never played it.)

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microcolonel
Don't need to look far to find claims of some fairly serious side effects of
the drug in many contexts, but it's interesting to hear that it's possible to
tamper with neuroplasticity artificially.

------
wavesounds
I'd really love to have perfect pitch but I always thought it was genetic
until just a few months ago. Does anyone know any adults who were able to
teach themselves perfect pitch, without the aid of mind altering chemicals,
and if so how'd they do it?

~~~
triplesec
TL;DR: Anecdotes of how my perfect pitch does and doesn't work

I discovered I had perfect pitch as a 7-year-old on the way back from church.
I was newly a cathedral chorister annd had had a lot of classical music
lessons (piano, singing, even recorder) and exposure since I was 4. I just
remembered what C was, assuming other people could do that.

However, it's variable, and I had to work on tuning over the next few years to
calibrate my sense of pitch, because choirs go out of tune when unaccompanied,
as we sometimes were. It was good practice, but I did become somewhat obsessed
with knowing "correct" pitch. There are others with much more finely-tuned
perfect pitch, including some who claim to hear 1/8 semitone very easily. I
was never that precise, and even having not played or sung much music for a
few years recently (never really bought into the magic, but loved the music,
so not much church really) found my pitch calibration had dropped a semitone,
although this could be general memory confusion because of all the Baroque
music I did at one point in time.

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aroman
At first I read this as "want _a_ perfect pitch?" and I thought the article
would be about This One Crazy Drug That VCs Hate™. I was pleasantly surprised.

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lsv1
I never figured I'd need to hack my vocal cords... or that I'd see a post like
this on HN...

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jabgrabdthrow
This is very interesting to me. A while back I was fascinated with the concept
of absolute pitch (some people have a _qualitatively different_ ,
_categorical_ perception of pitch) and did quite a bit of research on the
topic. One resource that I invite anyone that is interested to read is the
research done by this guy:

[http://aruffo.com/eartraining/](http://aruffo.com/eartraining/)

Ignore the fact that he has a "learn AP here!" link - usually that is a signal
that it's a scam of some kind, but in this case he has quite a bit of
interesting material to back his theories if you go to "AP Research".

~~~
losvedir
Wow, now that's a blast from the past! Never really thought I'd see this on
HN.

I heartily recommend Chris Aruffo's work, as well. All the stuff in Research
Phases 1-17 in "AP Research" is really quite fascinating and well cited. I
hung on every new post as they came and was convinced that by the end of it
he'd have acquired perfect pitch, but alas 10 years later it seems it was not
to be. Still an interesting read, though.

------
Dewie
> In the world of music, there is no more remarkable gift than having perfect
> pitch. As the story goes, Ella Fitzgerald's band would use her perfect pitch
> to tune their instruments.

Pff. Playing drums like Buddy Rich or showing off while the band tunes their
instruments - not really a tough choice (might have been really useful back
then but today it seems kind of parlor trickery).

I'm much more interested in (perfect) relative pitch. Thankfully one can get
better at that skill.

------
bloometal
The comments really confused me _. I thought the article was about delivering
a pitch for your startup.

_ I have a habit of reading the comments on HN before reading the article.
Helps me confer some context to it usually, and also see if it's worth
spending my time. (Yes I know I should be making my own decision.)

