A native English speaker has no problem distinguishing /θ/ as in "this" from /s/ as in "sis", but not very many languages need you to make this distinction, so people who learn English later in life have a very hard time with it.
Likewise, English speakers can't tell the difference between long and short vowels, or long and short consonants. That's because there are no long and short vowels or consonants in English--the distinction doesn't matter. But you'd have a hard time learning Finnish or Japanese without it.
And then there are the weird cases, like how in English we have rules for aspirating and voicing /t/ and /k/. If you speak Mandarin then you might pick out /t/ as if it were /d/, but only in certain positions. So "stop" might sound like "sdop", but "top" sounds like "top".
English has the distinction for vowels and it does matter. “can’t” and “cunt” have the same vowel sound in some accents, but “can’t” needs a long vowel sound while “cunt” needs a short vowel sound. Native English speakers speak those those two words quite distinctly.
Lose/loose is another pair (confusingly “lose“ has a long vowel sound and “loose” has a short vowel sound.)
Moon needs a long vowel sound to sound right. I am sure you can think of other examples.
The theories I've heard are that we are born with absolute pitch and develop relative pitch later on, losing absolute pitch at around eight months old. We also develop the ability to associate octaves, so C and C' start sounding "alike" at some point, but this happens because we are exposed to music which treats them as equal.
I find it hard to believe that it would have "null survivability benefits"--it seems pretty useful for distinguishing the sounds of different animals.
I don't follow. They ARE strongly related because an octave is a power of two multiple.
Just because a mathematical relationship exists doesn't mean that we perceive it.
Not all music is built around 2:1 octaves. People who grew up listening to music with 2:1 octaves can identify pitch classes, people who grew up in isolated tribes without exposure to that kind of music--hear C and C' simply as different notes. People with absolute pitch sometimes have the opposite problem--they can accurately recognize the pitch class of C or C', but are more likely to mistake C for C' or vice versa.
Real music often deviates from the 2:1 ratio anyway. Only certain instruments produce a near pure harmonic spectrum, most instruments have some inharmonicity, and these instruments are often played according to their spectrum, rather than the harmonic series.
They are made up of a series of overtones. By far the loudest of these overtones is the 2nd harmonic... which is double the base frequency aka one octave.
This is not some artificial construct but a fundamental part of how things vibrate.
Not true in general. There is no reason to expect the 2nd harmonic to be louder than the others. Some instruments produce mostly odd-numbered harmonics, such as the clarinet.
> This is not some artificial construct but a fundamental part of how things vibrate.
That's only true in a one-dimensional world. Instruments in the three-dimensional world are either mode-locked (not freely vibrating) or have some amount of inharmonicity. This is why the octaves on a piano are not tuned to 2:1 ratios, as I mentioned.
From the article you cited:
> This list of frequencies is for a theoretically ideal piano. On an actual piano the ratio between semitones is slightly larger...
For more details, see:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stretched_tuning
Or,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_...
It seems the same to us because we're building on hundreds of years of music that tells us it is. If you're comfortable with the tonic moving, the octave is no more "the same" than any other note.
Most of what we take for granted in music is learned through exposure.
and my point is “there need not be one at all, perhaps absolute pitch is a spandrel.”
From an evolutionary perspective, what could possibly be the reason for this?