Ear Training Companion™ is a trademark of Acoustic Learning, Inc.
Ear Training Companion™ is a trademark of Acoustic Learning, Inc.
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Musicians:Forget the hype about absolute pitch.Get the facts.Introducing: the Ear Training Companion™ v6.1
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For Macintosh |
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For CD-ROM |
For CD-ROM |
Someone in the forum just asked how this Absolute Pitch Blaster thing is supposed to work, anyway. My immediate reaction was surprise-- hadn't he read the website?-- but then it occurred to me that, although the development of APB's principles are scattered all around the website, and although I planned from the start to use Phase 12 to explain the method, I hadn't yet written an article for the specific purpose of describing How It Works. So here it is.
Absolute listeners identify a pitch by its "chroma"; therefore, the key to absolute listening is pitch chroma. Chroma, vaguely described, is what a pitch sounds like. We've known since the 1900s that chroma is the absolute quality of a musical pitch, and every absolute-pitch training method since the 1960s has attempted to train students to hear pitch chroma. But to teach anything, you've got to be able to define it. Otherwise you can only give hints and suggestions, and hope that something clicks-- but then if something does click, there's no way to know what actually clicked!** Chroma is a subjective, psychological quality, and that's the main problem: nobody has ever been able to determine exactly what "chroma" is. Until now.
I have a definition of chroma. I see chroma as the psychological interpretation of a pitch frequency, and this knowledge is the core of the APB training method. Because of this definition, APB can ignore all the psychological touchy-feely sensory-awareness garbage, and solve the problem directly, by teaching you to recognize pitch frequency. (That's why APB is patent pending.) Nobody knows what "chroma" is, psychologically-- but we know exactly what a "spectral frequency" is, so APB can use established principles of perceptual learning to make you hear it. Equally important, we know what a spectral frequency isn't, so it's possible to know what APB should not teach.
So that's what it does. Now how does it work?
Here's what I wrote on the new software page, in case you hadn't seen it yet:
Here are three shapes that all have one thing in common.
How long does it take you to see what it is?
You didn't even have to know what you were looking for-- your mind found it automatically.
It's so easy, you may have thought this was a trick question. But it's not. This is how your brain works.And once you see that absolute feature, then you can recognize it no matter where it appears.
This is the principle of perceptual differentiation, and it's how APB teaches your mind to hear spectral frequency.
Spectral frequency is only one characteristic of a sound. Even a seemingly simple sound like a single tone is composed of multiple characteristics like duration, volume, and intensity, and musical tones are additionally surrounded by timbres and overtones and harmonies, and all of these are bundled together into our mind's normal comprehension of "pitch". APB works by placing a pitch into increasingly complex situations so that, bit by bit, your mind strips away everything that isn't chroma.
Here's a more complete visual analogue to the APB process.
This picture contains the "target."
(Notice that, at this point, you have no idea what the "target" actually is.)
The "target" is in all of these pictures. Can you find it?
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By now you should have a pretty clear idea of what the
target is, so that when you see this image
you can spot the target easily.
Also, when you were trying to figure out what the "target" was, you probably compared the new images to each other, yes? If you didn't just limit yourself to the original image, you would've found the process even easier. This is a natural learning impulse, and it is the purpose of the blue buttons in APB.
I can use the same pictures to illustrate traditional note-naming methods. By "traditional methods" I mean any method which requires you to identify pitches by name.
Here's how it works:
This is a "C". Memorize this image.
Here are more images. Please identify the "C" whenever you see it.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
If you successfully memorized the "C", you could easily recognize and identify #2 and #6. But all these images are "C"!
You'd never learn to identify the other ones as "C", because they obviously don't look like the original image. You might hesitantly select #5 because it's sort of like the memorized image, but the better you memorized "C" the less likely you'd be to pick #5.
This is why someone can learn identify and recall musical tones extremely well, using traditional "perfect pitch" training, but then find that ability to be musically useless. When you memorize tones you are not learning to hear pitch; in fact, from that training you never learn which of a tone's many characteristics is the actual pitch. (I wrote a bit more about this in the forum.) This is why Absolute Pitch Blaster never asks you to identify tones, and never asks you to name pitches. Trying to name pitches only encourages tone memorization, and tone memorization is counterproductive to learning absolute pitch.
Were you wondering why, in this example, I didn't just show the actual target as the "C" to be memorized? That's because a pitch frequency only exists inside of a musical sound. A pitch never appears by itself; it always appears together with other tonal characteristics. You can't separate it; even a sine wave has duration and amplitude (at the very least).
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