Demystifying Perfect Pitch with Elizabeth West Marvin

What is perfect pitch and why do some people have it when others don't? How does it work and is it possible to learn it? In this episode, Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin (Eastman School of Music, and an author of the Musician's Guide series of textbooks) answers these questions and more.

Links:

Elizabeth West Marvin's Faculty Page at Eastman

Musician’s Guide to Theory and Analysis 

Marvin, Elizabeth West. Absolute Pitch Perception and the Pedagogy of Relative Pitch

Ross, Gore and Marks. Absolute pitch: music and beyond

Van Hedger, Heald and Nusbaum. Absolute Pitch May Not Be So Absolute

Show Notes:

00:20 Introductions

00:50 Guest introduction: Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin

03:20 What is perfect pitch?

04:28 Is absolute pitch (AP) the same thing as perfect pitch?

05:20 How did you become interested in studying absolute pitch?

06:55 Working with students with absolute pitch in an aural skills classes

08:40 How do people acquire absolute pitch?

10:25 Do animals have absolute pitch?

11:10 Can you train young children to acquire perfect pitch? (Eguchi Chord Identification Method)

13:04 Vowel colors/overtones and absolute pitch

14:40 What's the relationship between absolute pitch and timbre? Are there people who have absolute pitch for only a particular instrument?

16:18 Can I acquire absolute pitch as an adult?

19:28 How common is it to have a musician who has absolute pitch who did not begin study at a young age?

22:27 To what degree is AP valuable as a musician?

24:53 What is relative pitch (RP)?

26:33 Is there a relationship between AP/RP and choosing a solfege system (relative vs phenomenological systems)?

29:56 Why does absolute pitch change with age?

31:00 Ross, Gore & Marks's research on two kinds of AP: Heightened Tonal Memory (HTM) vs Ability to Perceptually Encode (APE)

33:27 How do people with AP and RP hear differently from each other?

36:50 What can people with AP and RP learn from each other?

40:08 Latent AP/AP without musical training

41:45 AP as a continuum and not a binary

43:50 What research is being done now on AP?

46:55 Van Hedger, et. al., research on flexibility of AP

48:57 Can you talk a bit about the Musician's Guide series of textbooks that you've authored?

55:35 Thank you and wrap-up

 

Transcript

0:00:21.9 David Newman: Welcome to Notes from the Staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory, where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

 

0:00:35.1 Gregory Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow, founder of uTheory and Associate Professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory.

 

0:00:41.5 DN: And I'm David Newman, and I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University, and I do programming and content creation for uTheory.

 

0:00:50.1 GR: Our topic for today is perfect pitch, and joining us to help demystify it, is special guest, Dr. Elizabeth West Marvin, professor of music theory at the Eastman School of Music. Dr. Marvin's research interests are broad and encompass especially the areas of Music Cognition and Music Theory Pedagogy. She's known to many of us as a leading author for the popular Musician's Guide series of theory and ear training textbooks, now in its fourth edition. Betsy, thanks for joining us.

 

0:01:18.1 Elizabeth West Marvin: You are absolutely welcome. It's a pleasure to be here.

 

0:01:21.4 GR: It's great to have you. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

 

0:01:25.6 EWM: Well, as you said, I'm a professor at the Eastman School of Music in the Department of Music Theory. I was also a student there, so I've been at Eastman for a very long time. I grew up as a choir kid, I played piano and organ and sang, but I do not have perfect pitch, so that's important to know going into this conversation. I always knew that I wanted to do music of some kind, but I flirted with all different majors until I got to Eastman and found Music Theory, and then I was really sort of hooked. And flash forward to today, I've been on the theory faculty at Eastman for over 30 years, and I have a textbook that's been out for 15 years in its fourth edition, as you said. But the Music Cognition part came right at the end of my graduate studies. I became very interested in how we perceive music, and I started taking courses over at the University of Rochester's River campus, and again, I was sort of hooked, I found the whole thing really fascinating, and it's developed into that whole area of music cognition that was sort of in its infancy when I was a student, but now is really a big part of music theory.

 

0:02:35.1 GR: And the University of Rochester, Eastman is part of the University of Rochester, which some of our listeners may not know. And you now have a connection there, you do research together with the Brain and Cognition department over there. Is that right?

 

0:02:48.6 EWM: Yes, Brain and Cognitive sciences, I have a secondary appointment over there. For many years, I taught a course called Music and the Mind, which was attractive both to Eastman students and to Brain and Cognitive Science students, and linguists and audio engineers, and it was a really, really diverse group of students. I'm not teaching it anymore, I've handed it over to a new hire that they have in their department, but that was a very interesting and fruitful teaching experience.

 

0:03:18.2 GR: Great. Well, shall we dive into our topic for the day?

 

0:03:21.4 EWM: Absolutely.

 

0:03:24.8 GR: So...

 

0:03:24.8 DN: Let's get into the nitty-gritty.

 

0:03:27.8 GR: Yeah.

 

0:03:28.8 DN: What is perfect pitch?

 

0:03:28.8 GR: I feel like this is... None of us really knows, because we either have it or we don't, and we can't know what it's like to be the opposite, so yeah, so Betsy... Yeah, sorry, what is it?

 

0:03:41.1 EWM: Yeah, so I'll try to demystify some of that. Some of my recent research actually involves interviewing people with absolute pitch. I've interviewed about 50 kids between Eastman and some work I've done in Hong Kong, so I can tell you a little bit about their stories, but the official definition of absolute pitch is that it's the ability to recognize and name a pitch that's heard, or to produce a pitch when it's named, without any reference to an external standard like an instrument. And I would say, Greg, you were saying either you have it or you don't, but I actually believe that AP is on a continuum, and that people can have degrees of absolute pitch, so that's one of the more recent findings in research.

 

0:04:29.7 GR: You talked a little bit about the music cognition side, how did you get interested specifically in absolute pitch? And also maybe... You've been saying absolute pitch. What's absolute pitch versus perfect pitch? Is there a difference?

 

0:04:40.6 EWM: Oh yeah, I use absolute pitch partly because of my experience with students. If I ask them, "Do you have perfect pitch?" They'll hesitate and they'll say, "Well, it's not always perfect," they'll have good days or bad days, or it's not perfect enough for them, they can't tell the difference between A442 and A440, so it's not perfect. But absolute pitch is the term used in Music Psychology, so I tend to use that more. But my interest came out of teaching, so when I was first hired at Eastman, I was hired to run the RR Skills program, and I did a big re-write of the whole curriculum. I got in there and started teaching, and realized that in the same classroom, I would have two kids with absolute pitch, and all the rest with relative pitch. And from my own experience of having been a student myself, I remembered that teachers would do things like have the absolute pitch kids take all the melodic dictation in alto clef or tenor clef, or they would hear it in F-major and have to write it in C-sharp Major, things like that.

 

0:05:57.4 EWM: So as a new teacher, I started doing the same stuff, and I realized that the kids were feeling persecuted or punished for having absolute pitch, and I also realized that there were some things that they actually could not do very well, not as well as the relative pitch kids, like naming intervals. You play a perfect fourth, and they would write F, B-flat, and then they would sit and figure out, "Oh, that's a perfect fourth." It wasn't an immediate relational thing. And similar with dictation. So I started spending time thinking about ways to teach function instead of just absolute identification, and I can get more into that later if you want.

 

0:06:47.2 DN: I do, I want. [laughter] I have made it a... I don't think that my perfect pitch students feel persecuted, although some of them may, but I never play any melodic or harmonic example in the key that it says.

 

0:07:07.0 EWM: Well, do you wanna talk about that now? I could tell you what I do.

 

0:07:09.9 DN: Sure.

 

0:07:11.7 EWM: What I do, I try to not single out the AP kids, and so what I do is I try to avoid announcing a key or writing on the staff at all. So I do a little bit like what Gary Karpinski does with protonotation. So say for a melodic dictation, they would write out... They would take dictation of the rhythm, and then they hang on to that rhythm, so scale degree numbers. Everybody, not just the AP kids, so that you're forced to think in a relational way. And I'll wander around the classroom, if I see those AP kids writing down letter names or notes or anything, I stop them, and I say, "I want scale degree numbers." And then at the end, you can have them transcribe it onto the staff, which helps the relative pitch kids gain facility with dictation, but it also forces the AP kids to think in a relational way. And I do that with harmonic dictation too, soprano, scale degrees, base scale degrees, Roman numerals.

 

0:08:13.4 DN: I love that. Yeah.

 

0:08:14.9 EWM: I think it works really well, and it's good... As I say, it's good for the RP kids too, relative pitch kids.

 

0:08:21.0 GR: And for any of our listeners who don't know, Gary Karpinski is the author of Acquiring Aural... Or Aural Skills Acquisition, I guess is the easy title?

 

0:08:26.5 EWM: Yeah.

 

0:08:28.3 GR: And also has a sight-singing text manual for sight-singing and ear training. So absolute pitch, I don't have absolute pitch. I maybe have the ever slightest shade of it, where I can usually tell if I'm hearing a white note or a black note. How is... How do people...

 

0:08:47.7 EWM: That's a thing.

 

0:08:49.3 GR: Yeah, how do people get absolute pitch?

 

0:08:54.9 EWM: There are many theories of how people acquire absolute pitch, and I think that... I can run through various theories, but one has to do with heredity, so maybe you are born with it. Another theory is that you're taught music at a very young age, say you began at age four to six, and somehow you have what's called a critical period, similar thing for language acquisition, where your brain is perfectly tuned to learn this association of letter names with pitches. So if you begin your music lessons at that early age, you're more likely to have absolute pitch. There's even a theory that all babies are born with absolute pitch, and that as we learn relational processing, we discard that strategy and take on the relative pitch processing. And then the question is, why do some people keep the AP whereas others discard it? And in cognitive science, it's kind of interesting that development of relational processing is true in many domains, not just pitch, so little babies recognize faces by recognizing a mouth, or the hairline, or the eye, and it's not till they get older that they put all that together in a relationship to make a face. [chuckle] So, it's an interesting thing.

 

0:10:25.7 GR: I was re-reading your, I guess, your 2007 article in Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy this morning, Absolute Pitch Perception and the Pedagogy of Relative Pitch. Was it there that, I think, actually it was mentioned that maybe some animals have forms of absolute pitch?

 

0:10:42.2 EWM: Yeah, birds. There are certain birds... Well, there are certain animals that have what's called vocal learning, which means they learn their... Like a bird learns its song from its parents, and vocal learning is necessary for things like rhythmic entrainment and so on. But some of these animals, or birds in particular, I'm thinking, sing their songs at an absolute pitch, rather than a relative pitch, so sort of always in the same key. I wanted to say something else about the early learning hypothesis. You would think that if starting music lessons at age four is all it takes to get AP, why not just take a bunch of little kids and train them up, and then you would have shown that. And in fact, there is a researcher who did that. Her name is Sakakibara, she's a Japanese researcher, published in The Psychology of Music. She took 24 little kids, ages 2 to 6, so these are toddlers, and trained their parents in something called the Eguchi chord identification method, and it's sort of a game for little children in which they'll hear a chord... This chord is, you raise the red flag. And when you hear this chord, you raise the green flag, and when you hear this chord, you raise the blue flag.

 

0:12:01.2 EWM: And then after they're good at the chords, you narrow it down to single pitches, raise the flags, and then after you're good at the single pitches, you take away the flags and add note names. So these parents trained their two-year-olds, two, three, four-year-olds, every day, multiple times a day for about two years. Okay. So this is like maybe bordering on child abuse, but maybe it was also... Maybe it was gamified and fun. But these kids, two kids dropped out of the 24. At the end of the experiment, all 22 of them had absolute pitch.

 

0:12:37.0 DN: Wow.

 

0:12:37.6 GR: Wow.

 

0:12:37.7 EWM: So that's kind of interesting. Yeah.

 

0:12:42.8 DN: I'm curious...

 

0:12:44.4 EWM: But is it worth doing that?

 

0:12:45.8 DN: Yeah, I wonder why she started with chords before notes.

 

0:12:52.4 EWM: It's apparently easier, because maybe there's more overtone information or something like that, but the chords for little children are easier to discriminate between.

 

0:13:03.6 DN: I have... I don't know if you've seen the work that Ian Howell has been doing around vowel... Picking out vowel colors. And as he has refined his ability to identify specific vowel colors, he has also developed a kind of absolute pitch where he can recognize it by the vowel color that it inspires in his...

 

0:13:28.6 EWM: Well, that's interesting. No, I haven't followed that, but it's similar to synesthesia maybe, where there's a pretty high incidence of synesthesia in people with absolute pitch, that being an association between most commonly color and pitch. So I could see vowel sound in pitch. But the color and pitch is interesting because it's not just a color, but it's often a color and a texture, like brown corduroy or red velvet, or something that you see. So I would believe what you're telling me about the vowel sounds.

 

0:14:09.5 GR: From a physics perspective, it makes sense, because the overtones that give the vowels their color tend to be at a relatively fixed pitch level across different voices, regardless of what note you're singing. So it could just be that Ian started to actually hear the kind of interval between the fundamental and the fixed vowel formants above it. For those who don't know, Ian Howell's a Professor at the New England Conservatory, who leads their voice pedagogy, voice sciences area there.

 

0:14:43.3 DN: But it kinda led me, what you were saying, to wonder about the relationship between absolute pitch and... There are some students who seem to have absolute pitch related only to one instrument color. Is that something that you've seen, or is that... Am I making that up?

 

[laughter]

 

0:15:01.8 EWM: Nope. That's very common, actually. And it has to do with that early learning hypothesis that I was talking about, so if a student acquires AP through lessons on a piano, or lessons on a violin, say, they're better and faster at identifying pitches on that piano or on that violin, and in the range of their instrument. So, like a violinist has trouble in the low registers because their instrument doesn't go down that far. So that is in fact very common, and it's continent with this early learning hypothesis. And also what Greg said before about white keys and black keys, that is also consistent with the early learning hypothesis, because if you think about your piano lessons when you're a little kid, you're mostly playing those little five-finger patterns, C-major, G-major, white keys, and that's when your critical period is maximally available to you. But as you get older and the black keys come into play, then that window is closed and you're doing quick half-step displacements from the more familiar white keys into the less familiar black keys, and so it's slower and more prone to errors.

 

0:16:17.5 GR: So you've been talking about this early learning critical period hypothesis theory. I sort of, I think as many of us, have often thought, wouldn't it be great to have absolute pitch? Wouldn't it just be super handy to know, "Oh yeah, I'm hearing this and this and this and this," without having reference to anything else? YouTube, I think, targets me on this, 'cause I can't tell you how often I see promoted courses to teach me perfect pitch. Can I at this point learn perfect pitch? Or is it too late?

 

0:16:53.9 EWM: This is an active area of research. There was a time when I would have said, "No, it's too late, time has passed you by." But there are some researchers now who are developing training regimens, probably different from the ones that are on the internet for you, but we'll see, in which the AP drills are gamified so that it's fun and you're trying to beat levels and... Just like some kind of video game. And it inspires people to spend many, many hours at it, and I think it does take many, many hours to acquire any new skill. That said, this is new research, and I'm still a little bit skeptical about it. I wonder whether that kind of adult acquisition is really as fast and immediate and effortless as the true absolute pitch of people who've had it since childhood. For them, some of them, they can't turn it off, it's just completely immediate and always accessible, whereas, I suspect that the adult-trained people have more cogitation that goes into it. Have you ever clicked on those things? Do you know what the courses are like?

 

0:18:14.5 GR: They tend to be like, "F-sharp is red. Listen to this and imagine that F-sharp is red."

 

0:18:21.4 EWM: Exactly, I... Before there was clicking on the internet, I sent off for the David Burge method, David L. Burge method, and it was... It started with F-sharp and E-flat, and it said... And you only had to tell those two apart, and E-flat was mellow and full and rich, and F-sharp is brittle and biting, and so it was teaching affective qualities of each note, and then once you got those two under control, then you'd add a third note and then a fourth note, and each one had a little affective character to it. So it's interesting, but I'm skeptical. And I think, again, for true AP people, it is just instantaneous, like you would see the color red and say red, or the color green and say green, it's instantaneous, and no effort for AP people. And I imagine that there's effort to it, if you've had adult training.

 

0:19:25.0 GR: Some of your research has looked at the correlation between the age that someone begins study and whether they have absolute pitch or not. What is that correlation?

 

0:19:38.0 EWM: I don't know the answer to that, Greg. [laughter]

 

0:19:39.0 GR: Sorry, that was a really specific question. Or I guess I should say, how common is it to have a musician with absolute pitch who didn't begin study at a young age? Say before age six.

 

0:19:53.0 EWM: Yes. Let me back up and just say that I think that there is... AP exists on a continuum, as I said at the beginning, and I think there is something like good pitch memory that people have, that's not AP or not fully AP because they don't have the labeling function there. So this is a roundabout way of answering your question, I realize. But somebody with really good pitch memory might be able to acquire AP later in life because they already had that good pitch memory, and there are ways of testing that that don't involve naming. So they might, for example, play you a pitch and then do all kinds of interference noise, music, words, etcetera, and then you have to remember that pitch.

 

0:20:44.2 EWM: Some people are very good at that, so perhaps they could learn AP later in life, whereas other people might not be able to. And there are also people who can sing pop tunes in the right key without prompting, it's a different kind of AP 'cause it doesn't have the labeling, but I'll just say, going back to the choir kid thing, when I am in church and open a hymnal, I will look at the hymn and I'll often imagine it in the right key. The organist comes in and there I am right with them. So I think I have some kind of long-term pitch memory associated with familiar repertoire, and that's been shown in experimental settings too. There's an experiment in which pianists are played movements of the Well-Tempered Clavier, which are in every key possible, each prelude and fugue.

 

0:21:42.8 EWM: And if they're played the C-major prelude in C-sharp major, they don't see notation, but they can tell the difference, so they have some kind of long-term memory for these pieces without actually having AP. So in terms of your question about age, I think there's so many factors involved, like do they have this kind of inherent enhanced pitch memory? If so, maybe they can acquire AP later in life. Or were they born with some kind of genetic predisposition for AP? In which case maybe they have it right from the get-go. So it's a difficult question to answer.

 

0:22:26.5 DN: I have a couple of questions related to the value of acquiring, or the value of having AP. Because I think my thinking changed on this at that first Music Theory Pedagogy conference when... I can't remember who gave the talk on meditation as a way of helping AP students get through oral skills, and I thought, "Why would AP students need help getting through oral skills?" But of course, it's a different kind of challenge, it's a different way of interpreting sounds coming at you. I guess my question is, to what degree is AP valuable as a musician? Does it make you a better musician? Should we... Is it something worth acquiring?

 

0:23:14.5 EWM: I don't think that AP makes you a better musician. I think a kind of mythology has arisen around absolute pitch, because there are famous musicians who are said to have had AP, like Mozart, like you can go hear a piece, and because you've got absolute pitch, you can go home and write it down, and then this is a great mark of musicianship, or you can go home and play it. But in fact, there are many fabulous musicians who don't have AP, but we just don't talk about that, so I don't think that it is a mark of the child prodigy or the great, great musician. It's just that there are certain things that they can do, they can give the pitch for the choir or they can play really well in tune, or they can take dictation easily unless their teacher is punishing them. [chuckle]

 

0:24:13.3 EWM: But I do think that there's a kind of mythology, and that's why we have this persistent idea that the person with AP is a better musician, but as I said earlier on, there are some tasks that AP musicians are not very good at, and those have to do with relational hearing. And I think that if they are able to acquire both the absolute hearing and the relational hearing, then they've really got a good toolbox as a musician.

 

0:24:48.1 GR: Maybe we should just take a moment. You use the term RP, relative pitch person. Can you just talk about relational hearing and relative pitch a little bit?

 

0:24:57.8 EWM: Yeah. It's interesting, I'm actually on a team of researchers right now who are doing a study on relative pitch, 'cause there's so much research out there about absolute pitch and people just automatically say, "Oh, relative pitch is the other thing." [chuckle] It's not very well-defined. So, some people... And so I guess I'll say that there are different definitions floating around out there. For me, relative pitch is relational hearing, so that you hear dominant to tonic function, you hear leading-tone to tonic, you hear intervals as opposed to pitches, so it's all about relationships of notes. Every key sort of sounds the same. So it doesn't matter. For people who have difficulty with white keys and black keys, AP listeners, it might be harder for them to process music in F-sharp major than C major, but for a relative pitch person, it's all relationships, so it doesn't really matter which is which.

 

0:26:00.2 EWM: But there are some people who have very different definitions of relative pitch. For example, some people think that relative pitch is having good pitch memory for one note, like A or C, those are the two most common ones, and then everything else is a relationship from that, and I would say that's sort of on that AP continuum. If you can always remember A or always remember C, then you've got one level, one degree of absolute pitch and then you're using relative pitch skills to figure everything else out.

 

0:26:32.2 GR: This brings back to mind a previous episode we did on Solfège systems, and it makes me think a little bit about movable "Do" versus fixed "Do" and functional systems versus phenomenological systems. Maybe can you talk a little bit about that and how AP, RP influence one's choice of a Solfège system, and... Yeah.

 

0:26:53.6 EWM: Yup. So, in the broadest possible terms, fixed "Do" is a... Advantages people with perfect pitch, and in some ways it sort of helps to develop perfect pitch. Relative pitch is more facilitated by movable "Do", where the tonic of the key is always "Do". Fixed "Do" means the C is always "Do". So if C is always "Do", and every time you hear or sing an A, it's "La", and every time you hear or sing an E, it's "Me", then that reinforces a kind of absolute pitch way of hearing. As you said, a phenomenological system which focuses on associating a name for a note. If you have a relative pitch system, it's bringing to the fore that relationship T to "Do" is always a half step ascent functionally resolving to "Do" no matter what key, so it could be F-sharp to G and G-major, D to E-flat, and E-flat major so you're thinking functionally.

 

0:28:08.4 EWM: So the message I want to convey is, that I think it's not a good idea if you end up with a student in your class who has perfect pitch and has had fixed "Do". I think it's not a good idea to try to convert them to movable "Do", because it's very hard for them to have one system in their head, where Do is C and another system in their head where Do is all kinds of things depending on the key. So in that case, I would try to get that student to think, to keep the fixed "Do" for the note names, and to learn movable numbers of scale degree one, scale degree five. So Karpinski, whom we've just mentioned, says that it's a good idea for all students to have two systems, one that is note identification and one that is functional, so some people prefer fixed "Do" plus numbers, that gives you the note naming and the function. Other people prefer movable "Do" and note names, so the note names give you the naming function and the movable "Do" gives you the relational function.

 

0:29:21.0 DN: Yeah. That provides a challenge when we get students from countries where Solfège is the note names. [chuckle]

 

0:29:31.7 EWM: Exactly, and that's why I think they really have to go to numbers at that point because it's really confusing for them. And again, they feel punished in another way, "Here I have to learn something completely nonsensical to me," it's very, very hard. And their perfect pitch is kind of turned against them.

 

0:29:48.3 DN: And they're already trying to learn a new language maybe... [chuckle]

 

0:29:51.9 EWM: Yeah, yeah, it's hard.

 

0:29:55.2 GR: So I've also heard that absolute pitch can change with age, that the pitches can seem to sag. Is that true? And do we know why that happens?

 

0:30:05.6 EWM: It has to do with your basilar membrane, which curls around in the cochlea in your inner ear. As you age, it becomes less flexible, so it's interesting, sometimes you hear that the pitch creeps sharp, and sometimes you hear that it falls flat, but at any rate, is no longer true, and it has to do with your basilar membrane, which is where the pitches are sort of located in the inner ear, and then that sends a signal to the brain to identify the pitch. So it could be that that has to do with the kind of test that's being given, whether it's a produce the pitch or an identify the pitch, but at any rate, it's very common with aging. I'm sorry to say, for our listeners with absolute pitch, it's probably coming. And it drives some people crazy.

 

0:30:58.3 EWM: Now that we're talking a little bit about physiology, I'll say something else about theories of absolute pitch, which is that there are these researchers named Ross, Gore and Marks, who have the theory that there are actually two kinds of absolute pitch, one they call HTM and one they call APE. An HTM is heightened tonal memory. An APE is ability to perceptually encode. So HTM, heightened tonal memory, is what I was talking about this enhanced pitch memory with a template from early childhood, so people with HTM, they have AP, but it's associated with a template that's clarinet timbre in a particular range. So they have trouble with high and low, they have trouble changing timbre, they have trouble with none A-440 tunings, like people who learned on piano, if you get into Baroque tuning or some other kind of tuning system, it can throw them for a real loop.

 

0:32:06.0 EWM: People with APE, ability to perceptually encode, the theory is that they actually are encoding pitch in a different way in their brains, and that they have the ability to encode all frequencies, not just the A-440 template that they learned in childhood, and so they're more flexible, they can do all kinds of timbres, they can do really high, really low, they can do different, they can quickly adjust to other temperaments and tunings, because they're processing it in a little bit different way.

 

0:32:36.4 DN: That explains so much about several people that I know. [laughter]

 

0:32:42.0 EWM: It does, and it explains why there are conflicting findings in the literature too. You read something in one article and something different in another article, and you say, "Well, how can that be?" Well, it could be that they just have two different flavors of absolute pitch. They're processing it slightly differently and they learned it in a different way. One of them, the APE is the hereditary inborn one, those kids can't ever remember learning AP. They just kind of always had it. In fact, they think that everybody has it, sometimes it's not till they get to college and they're in some ear training class and the teacher says, "Oh, you must have perfect pitch." And they say, "What's that?" They just thought, everybody heard music that way. It's interesting.

 

0:33:25.0 GR: So I guess that actually leads to a question of... We've talked about a bit how people with AP and RP hear music differently. What can we learn from each other?

 

0:33:36.5 EWM: Let me go back to the hear differently first, because there are a couple of things I'll just throw in that I haven't said yet. One of them, I mentioned that I had been doing some research in Hong Kong with a Eastman alumna who teaches there now, Su Yin Mak, and we interviewed a lot of AP listeners there who specifically spoke to listening to Western music and listening to traditional Chinese music. And they have a real hard time with the traditional Chinese music, because it's not in the same temperament and tuning as Western music, and so some of them are able to adjust, so one or two of them even play a traditional Chinese instrument, but some of them are really turned off by it and cannot listen to it, or really cope with that music at all, they just find it really aversive. And the same, as I mentioned, Baroque tuning, instead of A-440, it's often A-415.

 

0:34:38.4 EWM: Now, some kids can adjust to that, it's almost like being bilingual, they have one way of being in the world of A-440 and one way of being in the world of A-415, but others cannot abide it, and we heard story after story of people having to take melodic dictation from a Baroque recording and just freaking out, going into sweats and crying and just... It's like their AP has been taken away from them, and it's part of their identity and suddenly it fails them, it's really difficult. It's kind of funny, but it's really difficult and challenging for them. So that's one way in which AP listeners are different from RP listeners. Another way is that some of them told us that they have a constant string of Solfège syllables going through their head as they listen to music or note names. So one of them sort of illustrated a melody singing it on this really fast Solfège, and he says he can't turn it off, it's just constantly these little syllables going in his head, and again, I think that's probably an early learning thing, just like we attach a timbre or...

 

0:35:47.9 EWM: Well, in your case, that sound, but he's attached Solfège syllables, and so he was talking really eloquently about having problems with phrasing and musicality and large-scale gestures, because everything is very note-y to him, because all these little words are going through his head, so that's another way of hearing differently. And then the synesthesia, the people who are hearing colors as music goes by, that's almost hard to conceptualize for somebody with relative pitch. And some of them, in addition to colors, will have emotions associated, the E-flat heroic and the different emotions that might be associated with keys. We read about that in history of theory, but key color and affect and so on, but for people with absolute pitch, for some of them, it's a very real thing, these different affects associated with keys.

 

0:36:50.0 EWM: So what can we learn from each other? I think that, as I said before, the relative pitch skills can really add to the absolute pitch student's experience of music, if they get both the affect and the key and the precise tuning and all the things that AP gives them, but then if they also learn to hear the function and the harmonic progression and so on, I think that just gives them a 360 degrees or something of how to perceive music. It's more challenging the other direction to think about what can AP listeners teach RP listeners. I was thinking about that a little bit, and it's a hard one because for relative pitch listeners, absolute pitch seems so unattainable and it's kind of mysterious about whether you want it or not and does it make you a better musician and so on. So, I don't know whether... I don't know exactly what we, relative pitch listeners learn from AP listeners. I don't know. Do you guys have thoughts about that?

 

0:38:07.3 DN: Well, I just did a gig in December where I really wished that I could have a tuning fork, an A tuning fork just implanted [chuckle] in my skull, just above my ear so that I could stay on pitch through long, long acapella sections.

 

0:38:28.9 EWM: Yeah, absolutely, and singing atonal music too, for another thing. That's a different thing, that's a relative pitch person just wishing they had AP, but in terms of...

 

[laughter]

 

0:38:39.9 EWM: In terms of what can RP listeners learn from AP. Maybe precision of tuning is one of them, but I think relative pitch listeners tune via relative pitch, they're tuning in relation to the piano, or in relation to the choir around them, rather than to some absolute sense of where A is or C-sharp is.

 

0:39:07.5 GR: I was gonna say, I've done some gigs with people with very, shall we say, precise absolute pitch. Singing gigs where they could be inflexible about, "No, no, no, A is here." But if that A is the third of the chord, maybe it needs to be a little bit somewhere else, so yeah, I can see...

 

0:39:28.4 EWM: Yes, I agree, there's some AP listeners have inflexibility about pitch, and so they sometimes have trouble with ensemble music, chamber music, because they have a sense that I'm right and you're wrong with regard to tuning and intonation. But then again...

 

0:39:48.9 GR: Definitely not, definitely not all AP listeners, right? It's...

 

0:39:52.0 EWM: Correct, and maybe that's part APE versus HTM, part just personality, part socialization and how they were brought up, and all kinds of factors probably play into that.

 

0:40:07.6 DN: So I have a student, this is a tangent, but it's totally relevant. I have a student who does not have, at least typical AP. But if he learns a song in one key and then I say, "Hey, you know, I think this is a little high, let's transpose it down a step," he has to completely relearn the song, he can't name the pitches out of the blue, but once he's learned a song, it's in that key, has to be in that key, and learning it in a new key is a totally new thing. Do we have a name for that?

 

0:40:48.8 EWM: I think that's part of AP on a continuum thing, so I think he has probably some kind of AP without labeling, that idea that you're singing the hymn in the right key, or singing the pop tune and the right key, you've learned it in a particular place in your mind and your voice, and for these, especially kids without a lot of musical training, he does... He's in your program, but it may be that he has not learned to... The relational bit though, and so he's learning in an absolute way, so that a new key is a new thing, that's really interesting. But I think it's probably that AP without labeling kind of thing.

 

0:41:33.4 DN: If you want another subject to study, I can connect you.

 

[laughter]

 

0:41:39.3 EWM: There are so many incarnations.

 

0:41:44.3 GR: It's just fascinating for me to hear about these varieties of absolute pitch and these sort of different kinds and the different ways that, something for so long I thought of as just being like a binary, you have it or you don't. It's one thing and it's not. It sounds like there's really a lot of variety there. It's very individual.

 

0:42:00.9 EWM: Yes, and I thought the same thing, Greg. I don't know if I was taught it, but I really thought it was an on or off switch. Either you have this or you don't, but just even from my own personal experience, I know I don't have absolute pitch, I can't pull any pitch out of the air with a letter name or whatever, but I do have this good long-term memory for keys of pieces I've sung or played. If I sit down to sing something that I've sung a million times, it just comes out in the right key, or music notation is sometimes that way too. I remember once when I was running the sight-singing Program and I was singing a lot... Lots of Otman tunes. I would audition people to be a teaching assistant, and if I would start a tune like I was asking them to coach me or something, I would just start it in some random key that was comfortable for me, and I had people say to me, "Well, don't you know that's the right key? You're singing in the key in the book." But I had not given myself a pitch or planned on it, it's just... I don't know, I think I had some kind of long-term memory for it, or a long-term memory for queer notation, and the stuff sits in my voice or something like that. But I don't have the out of the blue, acontextual labeling, a note kind of AP at all.

 

0:43:21.0 GR: Yeah, I had to experience... Re-reading your 2007 article this morning. There was a harmonic dictation example in there written in A-major, and I just started listening to it in my head, and I was like, "No, that's the wrong key, and I just stopped, and then I was like, "Oh there," and then I listened to it in my head, and I was like... And I just know that's the right key, and I went over to the piano, I was like... And sure enough it was, and it's just, it's so weird and fleeting and bizarre, and yeah. So, you mentioned a little bit when talking about, can I acquire absolute pitch at this age? Some current research, what research is being done now on absolute pitch, what might we know more about in the future?

 

0:44:03.0 EWM: Yeah, one thing I haven't talked about very much, but there are people doing it, is not the cognitive side, but the physiological side, so there are people who do that genetics. Is there a gene for absolute pitch? And in fact, I worked for a little while with a genetics researcher and he was very excited because they were finding some similarities between synesthesia genes and AP genes, but that is such a huge field and genetics is so complex, that there has not yet been found an AP gene though AP runs in families. So there probably is some kind of genetic component, there are people who do brain imaging with absolute pitch, so pretty robust findings. A number of people have reported that people with absolute pitch have asymmetry between the two hemispheres of their brain, so we don't know whether people born with asymmetrical brains are more likely to acquire AP or whether the process of acquiring absolute pitch somehow creates an asymmetry as your brain is growing, but that's there. So those sort of physiological and brain imaging kinds of studies, I think there's also more connectivity in certain parts of the brain for AP listeners, maybe different things are connected up.

 

0:45:31.2 EWM: One area that hasn't been studied very much at all is cross-cultural aspects of AP, so we are so attuned to Western classical music or western pop music too, which has that A-440 standard, but what of other cultures in which there is no standard in which maybe every ensemble has its own tuning, or every village has its own tuning, or something like that. Can AP exist in that environment? And if you have the genetic part of AP, like you have this predisposition to acquire AP, can you without a consistent [chuckle] tuning system? So that's interesting. And then the work that I've been doing recently is this qualitative research where we collect the personal stories of people with AP. Do you remember when you first discovered it? Do you remember being taught AP? When is AP difficult for you? Those kinds of things that we've been talking about today, those personal stories, they are interesting, really interesting and entertaining, but they also tell us some clues about AP, and then we might develop more experiments to follow up on those, like the intonation and tuning part.

 

0:46:56.7 EWM: Oh, incidentally, I meant to tell you about this interesting study by a researcher named Van Hedger et al. He has shown that AP can be kind of flexible, so that he played a bunch of listeners who have absolute pitch a Brahms Symphony, but unbeknownst to them, the Symphony was being slowly, slowly, slowly lowered, so slowly that you could not tell the difference that it was being lowered, it was over the whole course of a movement, and at the end of it... So they tested AP, sorry at the beginning for truly tuned pitches, A-440, and then quarter tone sharp, quarter tone flat. Then they lowered this whole Brahms Symphony and once it reached the new standard, you heard the other movements, and then they re-tested them for AP and they discovered that people had adjusted where A was, now it was a quarter step flat.

 

0:47:57.0 EWM: So maybe absolute pitch isn't so absolute, maybe we are constantly having that AP reinforced by using pianos and A-440 tuning, so every day you hear that A-440 over and over and over again, it's reinforcing and re-learning and so on. But if everything in the world were slowly detuned, I think they would adjust to that. [laughter] It's kind of an interesting experiment. So there's lots still being done. I think it's an endlessly fascinating topic for teachers and for musicians and for lay audiences, there's a whole new area of public musicology where people go out and speak to non-musicians about music, and I've done this several times with absolute pitch talks, and they find it absolutely fascinating. So there's still lots to be done, I think.

 

0:48:56.4 GR: Yeah, so turning the page a little bit, as many of our listeners know, you're also an author for the Musician's Guide series of textbooks. I wonder, could you just talk a little bit about that side of your life, maybe tell us about the series, who it's target audience is, and what's unique about its approach?

 

0:49:15.9 EWM: Target audience is everybody. [laughter] When I teach my theory pedagogy class, I often talk about a sort of dichotomy in theory teaching between horizontal approaches and vertical approaches. So a vertical approach is one that sort of salami slices music into verticalities, then you can slap a Roman numeral on each verticality. And a horizontal one is one that deals more with counterpoint between lines and prolongations of harmonic areas and so on, so sort of Shankar influenced, and we tried to position our book in the middle. So that we use a phrase model approach where harmonic progression is taught tonic, predominant, dominant tonic, and that each of those areas can be expanded, so the expansion idea is the linear approach, but we also do things like complement that with teaching about progression by root motion, ascending fifths, descending fifths, descending thirds and ascending seconds and so on, which is a more vertical approach. Then the idea is that if a teacher on either side of that divide is dissatisfied with how things are going with their textbook, it's kind of an easy journey to us in the middle, and we try to help teachers through that adjustment with lots of online materials and like our textbook workbook has a complete answer key.

 

0:50:52.0 EWM: Every single exercise has been part written for you, every single interval spelled, every bar line put in a rhythm, so that teachers who are making an adjustment have an answer key, there they have kind of authoritative response, and so that it can help the situation in many schools where the choir director or the flute teacher or someone else's teaching theory, and it may not be that these are professional theorists, but there are other musicians who are teaching theory. So we try to help supply materials, also recording, so now we have the internet, thank goodness, but once upon a time we had to run to the library in the morning and find recordings of everything you were gonna use in class, we have a really robust... Every single thing in the book is recorded, we have an anthology that goes with it, all recorded mostly by Eastman musicians. The entire book is also an electronic book, so during that quick switch to remote teaching that happened in 2020, it was pretty seamless for users of our book because the whole thing, when you buy the text, you also get access to the electronic book, which is all click and play every example, you can hear it, and it's exactly formatted like the textbook. It has a note slide-enabled workbook, so they could do all their homework online and turned it in online.

 

0:52:23.1 EWM: So all of that I think is really helpful for teachers. The other thing we've tried do since the very beginning is to have diverse repertoire. Since the beginning, we've had black composers and women composers in there, we also tried to diversify to have band music in there, choir music in there, and solo flute and solo cello, and so that every student can see himself or herself in the book in the instrumentation and so on. But we've really ramped that up in the fourth edition, so now every single chapter has at least one piece by a woman featured, that's 40 chapters of pieces by women, and we've increased the number of black and Hispanic composers in the book and the anthology. We have art songs in Spanish as well as French and German.

 

0:53:13.7 EWM: So we're really trying to be more inclusive, I guess, is the way we say that. And not to forget, it's all coordinated with aural skills books, so our colleague, Joel Phillips and Paul Murphy are the primary authors on that, but chapter by chapter, each concept in the textbook is reinforced with a sight-singing and dictation book that I think is just wonderful, and it uses a lot of these techniques we've been talking about like writing out scale degrees or Solfège instead of going straight to the staff. And those books too have lots and lots of music by underrepresented composers and women. So we're very excited about the fourth edition, you would think that after going through revising a textbook multiple times, it would get old. It is a lot of work, but it's exciting each time, because we solicit input from teachers across the country, we have things in our own minds that we want to change, like in this edition, we have two full chapters on popular music analysis, that's different for most books. So a lot of books sprinkle popular music throughout, and we do that too, but we have two focus chapters on popular music. So again, it's exciting to be able to keep tinkering with a product and make it better and better each time, so that's exciting for us. Thanks for asking.

 

[laughter]

 

0:54:43.6 GR: As in yeah.

 

0:54:44.6 DN: Well, I used your fundamentals book right into the pandemic, so... [laughter]

 

0:54:50.0 EWM: Oh, good. Yeah, and the fundamentals book has self-grading homework too, so you can assign these things that the computer will grade for you, which is nice.

 

0:55:01.7 DN: It's vital.

 

0:55:02.9 EWM: Yeah. We're about to do, not a new revision of the fundamentals book, but a re-working that pulls out some controversial repertoire. There's been a lot of talk in the Music Theory discipline about using music by Stephen Foster who started out in the minstrelsy tradition, so we're doing a new reprint edition now that pulls all the Stephen Foster out and replaces it with music mostly by women and minority composers. So look for that. [chuckle] Next year I hope.

 

0:55:34.4 GR: Great. Look, Betsy, this has been just an absolute delight. I've learned so much from this. Thank you for joining us.

 

0:55:42.8 EWM: Oh, you're welcome. You've asked great and probing questions, it was fun for me to think about answers, and to think about applications to teaching and to future research. So thanks for inviting me.

 

[music]

 

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