Absolute Pitch Recognition

"Absolute pitch recognition" (AP) is the magical ability, possessed of musicians with highly-atuned ears, that enables them to identify tones out of thin air, without benefit of a reference tone.  A person with a very acute sense of pitch can sing pitches accurately without reference.

Test yourself.  Sing a middle C, then play middle C on a piano.  Does it sound the same?  Bingo.

It's a hyper-awareness of tone that only certain gifted people have.  Scientists have studied it.  To many people it's kind of mystical, and there are stories and legends around it.  For instance, it's widely thought that if you, sitting there right now don't have it, you will never get it.  I happen to disagree with this notion. 

Many people, even some people who have AP, say that it's not needed to be a good musician, and even gets in the way at times.  The idea is that they can't stand to listen to sub-standard music, like a kids' orchestra.  I think that's just being snobby, nothing to do with AP.  What about microtonal music?  Does Arabic music sound offensive to them?  How would they survive in Indonesia?  Thailand?

Relative Pitch Recognition, which is the ability to discern intervals accurately, is more useful in general, but very similar in execution.  I see them as parts of the same elephant.  

It's been shown that it's much easier for a person to learn a language before the age of seven, partly because of the formation of speech center musculature that takes place around this age.  The same has been said of absolute pitch.  Is there a relationship?  I say yes.

But I digress...  The rest of what I have to say comes from my own direct experience.

I was lucky enough to have an ear training teacher at an early age.  By the time I was seven, I'd been through several unremarkable piano teachers with unremarkable results.  My mother, whom I credit with my having a musical life and career, kept trying to find the right teacher for me.  I was a bit unusual.  I didn't want to learn the music my teachers gave me to play.  I loved to improvise at the piano, and write little tunes. 

My mom was working as a librarian at a high school, where a certain Mr. Bing Vassar came to teach instrumental music.  He wasn't a piano teacher per se, but a music teacher with a Masters degree.  As it turned out, the year I spent studying with him was one of the main experiences of my childhood.

He tested me and found that I had AP.  I suppose at first it was nothing spectacular but he recognized there was something there and wanted to work with me.  We spent most of our time together developing this ability in me, and by the time he left our town to go back to school he could play clusters of notes on the piano and I could name them all almost without fail.  I'm eternally grateful for his guidance.  The thing is, I knew what he wanted me to do.  He played chords and melodies on the piano and I identified them.  As I recall he never told me anything about how to do it. 

Actually now, 45 years later I have to say that I don't have absolutely infallible AP.  I can sing a tone and be confident that it's the tone that I say it is, and that a tuner will back me up.  I know better than to show off, because it's in such brash moments that my gift tends to fail me.  I can tune my bass by ear but I don't usually do so because I can't afford to be wrong.  And I've noticed that if I'm upset or someone's upset at me my acuity suffers.  It seems to be preponderant upon good feelings. 

AP is very useful, though.  I use it all the time.  Furthermore, the more aware you can be, the richer life is.  I think it makes deeper appreciation of music possible.  It's like second sight, but for the ears. 

The fact is that a high level of pitch recognition actually is a magical ability.  And music is magic.  And musicians really are different from other people.  The practice of making music enhances a person in subtle and profound ways, and enables them to do magical things.  AP is a good example of this, or the same concept as applied to time--as in an amazing sense of rhythm.  But think of the effects of music on society.  Music is able to move millions of people to action.  It is the one bridge that can span gaps left between groups of people by differences in language and culture

Fun fact: among all things human beings do, making music is the one activity that engages the most gray matter in a person's brain. 

Don't be discouraged by myths.  It is possible to learn to perform magic, and anyone can improve their musical ear.  To begin with, everybody has the basic tools--some kind of pitch recognition ability; everyone has at least entry level skills.  Anyone can tell a high sound from a low one. You can tell a man's voice from a woman's. 

Ears improve naturally over time in the course of a lifetime of making music, singing and playing instruments, or even through passive listening. It's primarily a matter of where you put your attention.

The best news if you're a musician is that there are techniques you can practice that specifically help to develop pitch recognition ability.  There are things you can do outside of your normal practice of playing or singing that teach you how to focus your ear in a deeper way.

Mr. Vassar's method was the same as I see teachers using now, in schools and through computer programs: trial and error.  They play something and ask you to identify it, and you as a student might be guessing at the answers at first.  Gradually you start to get it.  Or not.  But if you succeed, how do you to it?

As an 8-year-old I developed several tricks for divining the tones, but I couldn't explain when he asked me what I was doing.  Only as an adult, when I got interested in teaching did I go back to try to figure it out.  It's been a long process, and I've struggled to understand.  In the course of my research I've played thousands of gigs, spent thousands of hours practicing, searched my soul, meditated, toned in subterranean caverns, and found some great reference books related to the subject.

For instance, Alfred Tomatis, the famous neurologist, summing up his work towards the end of his autobiography, said that "The ear is the original sense organ, the builder of the human nervous system.  Furthermore, the entire body is made up of differentiated ear tissue!"  (Those are his italics.)  I don't do him justice with just this one little quote.

What this means to us in practical terms is that there's more to listening than just using your ears.  Your whole body can listen, using proprioception.   

Proprioception (proprio=self, cept=sense) is a neurologist's word for the body's general sense of itself.  It is the basic sense of being that's possessed of every living thing, including plants, and including very simple organisms.  I heard proprioception described by the famous classical bass violin soloist Gary Karr, speaking in a master class, as having two basic aspects:

1.  Position in space, including relative positions of body parts. 

2.  Changes in vibration: Any change in vibration, including a sound starting or stopping, increasing or decreasing in volume, changes in pitch or timbre...

The body is filled with proprioceptors.  The main ones are in the inner ear (the equilibrium apparatus that allows us to find our balance), the lips and tongue (speech center), and the thumbs.  Close your eyes and move your arm around.  What your mind's eye perceives is the location of a proprioceptor located at the base of your thumb.  Gary taught us to listen through our thumbs.  It's fundamental to his teaching, and he's very eloquent in his descriptions of how this is. 

Ever hear really loud bass, like in a reggae band?  How about one of those cars with the really tricked-out sound system that has huge wattage, mostly dedicated to bass, with bazooka speakers that rattle the whole block as they go by?  You can feel the sound, almost more than hear it.  That's a gross example of proprioception in music. 

Here's how to start using proprioception in listening:  The next time you feel that kind of bass sound in your body try to notice how the sensation goes up and down in your body with the pitch of the notes. 

Then try the same thing with your voice.  As your voice goes up or down in pitch, so does the sensation of resonance in your body.  This is the basic sense upon which AP is predicated. 

The other main component of my teaching is the concept of active listening.  The completion of the act of proprioceptive listening is to shape one's body around tone.  And this in a nutshell is what I learned to do as a kid in order to succeed in my ear training lessons. 

The details of how this works is for me to know and you to to find out.  From me. 

To learn more, contact me at andigi8@gmail.com, call (206) 748-0153, or visit www.andyzmusic.com