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hey, welcome to 12tone! let's try an experiment.
if you know it, I want you to sing the first line of the 1999 hit single All-Star, by Smashmouth.
take a second to hear it in your head first, then, when you're ready, try singing it out
loud if you're somewhere where that's appropriate.
ready?
go! (pause) alright, now I want you to do it again, but this time, just focus on the
first note, the one you're singing on the syllable "some".
(pause) got that pitch?
alright, hold onto it, 'cause here's the correct note: (bang) and here it is up an octave,
for those of you with higher vocal ranges.
so how'd you do? did you get it? were you at least close?
don't worry if you weren't, not everyone will be, especially 'cause I had to pick just one
song and assume you all knew it, but if you're familiar enough with All-Star there's a decent
chance you did sing the right note, 'cause despite what you've been told, you might actually
have perfect pitch.
sort of.
when musicians talk about perfect pitch, we're usually describing the ability to hear and
identify notes without needing context.
like, if I played this, folks with perfect pitch could immediately tell me it was a G.
just kidding, it's an F#, but messing with the perfect pitch folks is always funny.
this ability, also called absolute pitch in more scientific circles, is usually contrasted
with what's called relative pitch, which is the ability to hear and identify notes within
context, so given that this is an F#, if I played this, someone with good relative pitch
could tell me it was a perfect 5th higher and, thus, a C#. they don't have the name
for it immediately in their brain, but by combining their ability to identify intervals
with their knowledge of how note names work, they can find the answer anyway as long as
they have a decent reference.
and that's good, because absolute pitch is really rare: most estimates I've seen say
that only one in ten thousand people has it, although as you might imagine that number
goes up significantly among professional musicians.
part of the reason it's so rare is that it can't really be developed as an adult: if
you don't learn to do it as a child, you're never gonna get it.
sorry, that's just the way the human brain works.
but if that's true, and most of you don't have absolute pitch, why were some of you
able to pluck the starting note of All-Star out of thin air at the beginning?
well, that's because of something called the Levitin Effect, named after music psychologist
Daniel Levitin.
basically, Levitin believed it was possible that what we call absolute pitch is actually
made up of two distinct abilities: pitch labeling, which is the ability to associate names with
frequencies, and pitch memory, which is the ability to remember those frequencies across
time.
pitch labeling's the thing we described earlier, but if Levitin's right, then pitch memory
could theoretically exist all on its own, which means there could be lots of people
out there who have this form of absolute pitch but don't know because no one's ever thought
to check.
until Levitin, anyway, who thought to check in 1994, which is why he got to have the effect
named after him.
basically, the experiment worked like this: he brought in a bunch of test subjects and
asked them to pick songs they were intimately familiar with, then had them sing any line
they wanted from that song.
it could be the first line, like we did, or it could be the chorus if they knew it better.
whatever they wanted.
they didn't get to hear the song first, or receive any other musical information about
it, although he did bring in CDs for them to hold 'cause it was the 90s so people still
used CDs, and Levitin figured that maybe having a physical object that reminded them of the
music might make it easier to access their pitch memory.
anyway, he had each participant do this twice, with two different songs of their choice from
the provided CD collection, then he took the recordings, analyzed the pitch, and compared
them to the original pieces.
now, it's important to mention here that he specifically used a library of pop and rock
music.
this matters because, in those genres, there's usually one definitive version of each song.
if you were to try this with, say, jazz standards, you'd run into the problem that so many people
have recorded the same piece in so many different keys that it'd be impossible to define a single
"correct" note that your subjects were trying to access.
like, what note does Fly Me To The Moon start on? it depends who's singing it.
on the other hand, while the internet has provided us with plenty of All-Star covers,
it's still pretty clear that, if I were to try to sing it normally, I'd be attempting
to replicate the Smashmouth version, and thus, my correct starting note would be F#.
so what did Levitin find?
well, in each trial, roughly 25% of participants got the right note, and around 60% were within
a whole step.
even more excitingly, about 12% of participants got both trials right.
now, 12% may not seem like a lot, but for context, if you were picking notes at random,
you'd expect one double-success for every 144 test subjects, or roughly .7% of the time,
so 12% is phenomenal.
but I do have to put an asterisk on Levitin's numbers: he was working with a fairly small
sample size.
he only had 43 subjects complete both trials, so that 12% only actually represents 5 people.
that's not to say his results aren't valid, of course: scientists have ways of checking
whether things are actually significant or just the result of small samples and statistical
noise, and Levitin's results were definitely significant.
but would 12% of the general population actually consistently perform well on this task?
that's a little less clear.
and this is where we turn to the concept of replication studies.
now, this is a music theory channel so I don't get many chances to talk about good scientific
practice, but generally, when someone has an exciting result, it's a good idea to have
other people try the same experiment to see if they find the same thing.
in the case of the Levitin effect, a lot of people cited his work, but as far as I can
find no one actually tried to reproduce it until 2013, 19 years after the initial test.
this paper, which I've linked in the description along with Levitin's, was a massive collaboration
between six different labs in Germany and the UK, doing basically the exact same experiment
with only a few minor, largely irrelevant changes, but with about 250 test subjects
total.
so what did they find?
well, first thing's first, they did confirm Levitin's results: people did significantly
better at singing the correct note than you'd expect by random chance.
but when it comes to the question of how much better they did, that's when things start
to differ: in Levitin's experiment, roughly 25% of participants were right on any given
trial, whereas in the replication study it was only about 15%, and while Levitin saw
a 12% chance of double-successes, the replication dropped down to around 4%.
now, again, this is still a big deal: guessing randomly gives you a double success less than
1% of the time, so quadrupling that is unlikely to be a coincidence, especially with such
a large test group.
basically, they confirmed that the Levitin effect is probably a real thing, but it's
most likely rarer than the initial test implied.
now, none of this is to say that Levitin screwed up, of course: it's just his sample was, for
whatever reason, unusually good at the task.
maybe it's because they got to hold the physical CDs, which the replication study abandoned
because, in 2013, CDs were no longer a relevant part of how most people consumed music.
the authors also speculated that the changing way we consume music may itself be responsible
for at least part of the drop, because greater accessibility to a broader range of music
through streaming services and the like might mean we're listening to more different songs,
but fewer times each, reducing our ability to build a consistent pitch memory for any
individual piece.
it also may expose us to more versions of the same song, which might be in different
keys, affecting our conception of the "correct" starting note.
but, whether or not any of that's true, one thing that's almost certainly a factor is
just that the initial study used a small group because, well, it was an initial study, which
is part of why replication is so important.
this is how this sort of thing is supposed to work.
anyway, one thing both studies agreed on is that there was a significant correlation between
the two trials.
like, in the replication study, around 15% of subjects succeeded on trial 2, but if we
only look at the ones who had already succeeded on trial 1, that number shoots up to almost
30%, and while Levitin's numbers are slightly different, they show the same trend.
this implies that not only is pitch memory a thing that exists, but that it's an actual
skill, which some people are better at than others.
how exactly you develop that skill isn't, as far as I can tell, shown here, though:
the replication study found some weak correlations, like how people with a university-level music
education tended to do better than those without, but in the end they concluded that none of
those correlations were strong enough to be significant, at least not with their sample
size.
but if you're sad that you don't have this power, there's one last result that may give
you some hope: when people missed, they didn't seem to miss randomly.
both studies observed a distinct tendency to sing flat, and as a former singer and trained
vocal instructor myself, let me tell you: that is not even remotely surprising.
the higher you sing, the more effort it requires, so most people without much vocal experience
tend to sing flat even when they're actually listening to the recording, so the fact that
a lot of people are singing a half-step below the target note may not mean they don't know
the right pitch, it may just be that they don't know how to sing it.
that is, it could be a lack of vocal technique, not a lack of pitch memory, that's making
them miss, which may mean that a lot of people actually do have this ability, they're just
not good enough singers to prove it. of course, this is just speculation, but it's a speculation
that the authors of both papers shared, so it seems worth mentioning.
so what does this all mean?
do you secretly have perfect pitch?
well… that depends how you define it.
pitch memory is a component of perfect pitch, but so's pitch labeling, and to have the full
package you do need both.
that's why it's so rare.
that said, a lot of the more profound effects of perfect pitch, like noticing when a song
is played in the wrong key or feeling uncomfortable when an instrument is tuned a quarter-tone
flat, are most likely the result of pitch memory, which may be a lot more common than
we thought, so while perfect pitch itself is still rare, the perfect pitch experience
might not be quite so alien.
so yeah, if All-Star didn't work for you, maybe try it out on a different song you know
better and see how you do.
you might just have what Levitin calls latent absolute pitch after all.
and if you're interested in perfect pitch, you might want to check out this video's sponsor,
CuriosityStream!
CuriosityStream is a streaming service with over 2400 documentaries covering a wide range
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check it out!
*snap* this is a series about people with extraordinary abilities, and their section
called Super Brains includes Elisabeth Sulser, a musician and painter with both perfect pitch
and synesthesia, which means the notes she hears appear to her as colors.
the documentary dives into how that works, and what her experience with synesthesia is
actually like, plus there's another really cool story about Derek Amato who, after a
head injury, suddenly found himself an expert piano player.
it's fascinating.
*snap* that's just one of the documentaries available on CuriosityStream, and you can
watch them all on basically any device, including many smartphones and tablets, so you can take
documentaries with you wherever you go.
they're even offering 12tone viewers a free 31-day membership to get you started, so just
click the link in the description, use the promo code "12tone" when signing up, and have
fun learning.
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