The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers

Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by jtheory on Monday December 01, 2014 @09:03PM (#8685286)

Reply to sibling comment -- perfect pitch can probably be developed with a lot of training (though I imagine it's harder if you're not a kid anymore... for kids, sure -- there are tonal languages, after all!).

But it's honestly not that valuable a skill, even for professional musicians. Having really keen relative pitch (and avoiding slipping pitch if you're singing, for example) would be a much better focus to take.

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Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by hibbelig on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @09:03AM (#8687088)

What is the relationship between perfect pitch and tonal languages? I've dabbled in Mandarin and there relative pitch seems to be good enough. But I realize that there are tonal languages other than Mandarin, and I know nothing about them...

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Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by Synaesthesia on Wednesday December 03, 2014 @02:30AM (#8692357)

I once saw a study that said perfect pitch is far more prevalent in mandarin speakers due to it being an penal language.

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Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by aninhumer on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @09:06AM (#8687100)

>there are tonal languages, after all!

I believe most (if not all) natural tonal languages use relative pitch, not absolute, so you wouldn't need perfect pitch to understand them.

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Re:The Saddest Thing I Know about the Integers by jtheory on Tuesday December 02, 2014 @08:24PM (#8691301)

Huh; quite right. I've had it in my head for several years that Thai, at least, was tonal based on absolute pitch; but it looks like that's wrong.

I did turn up that a much larger percentage of people have perfect pitch in populations that speak tonal languages.

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