I once spent a surprisingly enlightening five minutes at an office Christmas party trying to explain “the beat” to a work colleague. This mostly involved slapping the back of a chair in time to Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves and shouting “seriously, can you not hear that?” This was a completely alien concept to me. How can someone not hear the beat in a piece of music?
Since then I’ve taken up a number of musical and dance-related hobbies, and it’s become apparent to me that some people simply can’t hear the patterns in a piece of music. They don’t know what a key change is because they can’t distinguish between two different keys. They can’t tell when a break is coming up, even when the piece is issuing a screaming telegraph that it’s about to break. To them it’s just nice noise.
I’ve found maths to be a bit similar. When demonstrating something mathematically, there are some people who just can’t see how or why one thing is isomorphic to another, or why it’s self-evident that if this is the case, that must also be the case. Others without any maths training at all can spot the same thing right away, and call it a good intuitive example.
This does make me worry a bit, because I’m not aware of anything I “just can’t do” in this fashion. There are plenty of things I’m bad at, but I’m at least capable of recognising the criteria by which I’m bad at them. Is there anything out there my brain simply isn’t wired to perceive properly, and how can I even tell if I find it?
Perfect pitch? Probably not the best example of something you “just can’t do”, but the video makes the point extremely clearly and made me think “She’s right, is is weird that most people can easily identify different colours but not different tones”
The two phenomena are probably more analogous than you think.
Native speakers of languages in which tone conveys semantic content (Mandarin, for example) are more likely to have perfect pitch than speakers of tonally indifferent languages. Similarly, speakers of languages which make distinctions between two colours are more likely to be able to distinguish them than speakers of a language that doesn’t. Turkish and Russian split what we call “blue” into two different colours, and as a result their native speakers find it easier distinguishing different shades of blue.
I have actually recently started learning to play the piano, and I told my tutor I could recognise Middle C by ear. She asked me if I had perfect pitch, which was a bit of an awkward question to answer. I’m extremely confident I could train myself to recognise all the tones over seven octaves. I just can’t do it right now because I’m still trying to get the fingering right on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Actually, I’ve read somewhere that there’s a difference between genetic perfect pitch and trained perfect pitch. Those with the first find it physically painful to hear off-key music and to transpose known music into different keys (because it jars so much with their memory of what it’s supposed to sound like), while people with trained perfect pitch have more tolerance for those things because the association isn’t as ingrained. Kind of like the difference between synaesthesia and learned colour-letter combinations I guess.
I used to teach Sunday school, and some of it involved having students do a little singing. I was shocked at the number of ten-year-old kids who could not sing back a pattern of pitches by ear. I’m not talking about singing beautifully, or in tune; I’m talking about distinguishing flat, rising, or falling tones. The scary part? These were kids who had taken music lessons. I still don’t understand it; maybe it wasn’t inability at all, just passive resistance because they didn’t want to be there.
I’ve spent about eleven years of my life in various choirs, and I am still effectively music illiterate. I’m capable of singing perfectly well, but the terms “flat, rising and falling tones” mean nothing to me. I can’t read sheet music, remember the names of notes, I’m not even sure I remember what a scale is...
It’s not that I haven’t tried to learn these things, but for some reason I’ve found myself completely unable to retain any of it, despite having plenty of opportunity to make use of the information. I can only speculate on what the reasons for this might be.
I once spent a surprisingly enlightening five minutes at an office Christmas party trying to explain “the beat” to a work colleague. This mostly involved slapping the back of a chair in time to Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves and shouting “seriously, can you not hear that?” This was a completely alien concept to me. How can someone not hear the beat in a piece of music?
Since then I’ve taken up a number of musical and dance-related hobbies, and it’s become apparent to me that some people simply can’t hear the patterns in a piece of music. They don’t know what a key change is because they can’t distinguish between two different keys. They can’t tell when a break is coming up, even when the piece is issuing a screaming telegraph that it’s about to break. To them it’s just nice noise.
I’ve found maths to be a bit similar. When demonstrating something mathematically, there are some people who just can’t see how or why one thing is isomorphic to another, or why it’s self-evident that if this is the case, that must also be the case. Others without any maths training at all can spot the same thing right away, and call it a good intuitive example.
This does make me worry a bit, because I’m not aware of anything I “just can’t do” in this fashion. There are plenty of things I’m bad at, but I’m at least capable of recognising the criteria by which I’m bad at them. Is there anything out there my brain simply isn’t wired to perceive properly, and how can I even tell if I find it?
Perfect pitch? Probably not the best example of something you “just can’t do”, but the video makes the point extremely clearly and made me think “She’s right, is is weird that most people can easily identify different colours but not different tones”
The two phenomena are probably more analogous than you think.
Native speakers of languages in which tone conveys semantic content (Mandarin, for example) are more likely to have perfect pitch than speakers of tonally indifferent languages. Similarly, speakers of languages which make distinctions between two colours are more likely to be able to distinguish them than speakers of a language that doesn’t. Turkish and Russian split what we call “blue” into two different colours, and as a result their native speakers find it easier distinguishing different shades of blue.
I have actually recently started learning to play the piano, and I told my tutor I could recognise Middle C by ear. She asked me if I had perfect pitch, which was a bit of an awkward question to answer. I’m extremely confident I could train myself to recognise all the tones over seven octaves. I just can’t do it right now because I’m still trying to get the fingering right on Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
Actually, I’ve read somewhere that there’s a difference between genetic perfect pitch and trained perfect pitch. Those with the first find it physically painful to hear off-key music and to transpose known music into different keys (because it jars so much with their memory of what it’s supposed to sound like), while people with trained perfect pitch have more tolerance for those things because the association isn’t as ingrained. Kind of like the difference between synaesthesia and learned colour-letter combinations I guess.
I used to teach Sunday school, and some of it involved having students do a little singing. I was shocked at the number of ten-year-old kids who could not sing back a pattern of pitches by ear. I’m not talking about singing beautifully, or in tune; I’m talking about distinguishing flat, rising, or falling tones. The scary part? These were kids who had taken music lessons. I still don’t understand it; maybe it wasn’t inability at all, just passive resistance because they didn’t want to be there.
I’ve spent about eleven years of my life in various choirs, and I am still effectively music illiterate. I’m capable of singing perfectly well, but the terms “flat, rising and falling tones” mean nothing to me. I can’t read sheet music, remember the names of notes, I’m not even sure I remember what a scale is...
It’s not that I haven’t tried to learn these things, but for some reason I’ve found myself completely unable to retain any of it, despite having plenty of opportunity to make use of the information. I can only speculate on what the reasons for this might be.