Absolute Pitch Education

[Joe]

But remember that negative feedback doesn't do much, if anything. And I'm not really seeing where the comparison is really. If you look at the letters a and b, do you know a because it's not b or do you know a because a is a and you know b because b is b. Of course the latter. In fact, any sort of comparison would be counter-productive. You're not trying to recognize any relationship between the two notes. That's not absolute hearing. You're trying to absolutely learn the chroma, and of course the definition of absolute is being able to identitfy or produce without a reference, i.e. no comparison. If a comparison does exist it'd have to be an unconscious one comparing c with the identity built so far of C. So it might be an internal comparison, but g has nothing to do with c. Once you started presenting G in different contexts, C will also show up in these contexts and you'll recognize that you know it too. You may even want C present quite often while learning G, but I'm not sure. After the process of learning G, there should probably be contexts involving only c and g. At first this might be boring(but I'd rather have boring & effective than frustrating & ineffective!!), but after several pitches, more and more is becoming comprehensible. You might start putting in simple familier melodies involving only the pitches that you already know. You just need to make sure that you're really are moving from simple to complex the entire time, and of course with quite a lot of repetition. If i is your present level, you 'acquire' when you understand something at the level i+1. The current form of the launch pad is completely counterproductive because you only go there when you get confused, so often when I get there, I'm not sure if I hear the target in any of them. Thus the whole thing is incomprehensible and I gain nothing, in fact I often just get the 3 wrong so I can get back to the game, and I progressed further everytime I played it. (I stopped after getting past the first pitch due to the game being too frustrating and not comprehensible enough, but I listened with the strategy of comprehension and that's what allowed me to get past the first pitch)

[aruffo]

In your definition, you may have overlooked that any measurement, absolute or relative, must have a reference. "58 degrees" is a meaningless attribute if it cannot be compared to 60 or 20 or -30.

[Joe]

Is chroma a measurement? I know blue, red, yellow,etc. without a reference. In my mind those three colors don't have any relation to each other. They're distinct identities. If I'm learning Spanish I don't listen to Russion to make the comparison that it's not Spanish.That's one poorly understood aspect of language acquistion is how someone can learn something complex like a language with no negative feedback, but everyone does.

[aruffo]

The three colors have a relation to each other in that they are not each other. Blue is not red; yellow is not blue. Consider this challenge: how would you describe blue definitively except to say that it is not any of the other colors? You can't say it's "soft"-- so is a towel. You can't say it's "cool"-- so is a dog's nose. I could go on, but no matter what adjective you apply, the description is not definitive. The only way to unequivocally represent a color, the only way to comprehend its distinct identity, is as "not the others".

[Joe]

I'm not trying to put an adjective with the color blue, the only way to describe blue to someone is to show them blue. Just how you were talking about how the pitches would be their own label. If I want to learn a british accent, I don't need to compare any part of it to the corresponding American part, I just learn the british parts. I can learn just one phoneme, and I would do it in the same manner as I'm saying for pitches. I would 'comprehend' the phoneme in many different contexts, because consonants before and after vowels changes how the vowel sounds, so in order to know what the vowel really is, I'd listen to it in many different contexts. Directly equivilent to depening on what notes come before and after C it changes how C sounds to you. The french vowels y & u (tu & sous) and open o and closed o (ecole, chose) gave me lots of problems, I compared them to each other and really got no where, not until I did what I was saying. I tend to listen for a particular phoneme and I remark when I hear it in different words. This is producing results

[etaxier]

People without a learned ability to speak certain phonemes usually do have trouble reproducing new ones (though the method for learning these doesn't make a good analogy either, as it's an imitative ability involving a mechanical action of the mouth, tongue, throat, vocal chords, etc.).

Similarly, learning basic things like colors is a far more complicated process than simply showing the color to someone, or any other 1:1 direct procedure. You need to latch on to certain dimensions of objects (such as "color") usually because of their task relevance; you need the physiological ability to differentiate colors (i.e., tell the difference between them by relating), etc. A good article on the subject: http://cognitrn.psych.indiana.edu/rgoldsto/pdfs/perlearn.pdf

But if your results last, then I suppose none of this discussion would really matter

[Joe]

Yes, it is a imitative action involving the speech organs, but the perception must come first. Otherwise you still wouldn't know if you're pronouncing it correctly. You hear it in your head first and then produce it, same with a good musician, they hear the music first and then produce. and not so good musicians (like me, well I wouldn't call myself a musician yet because of this) muscularly know what to do and the sound is produced after. People with AP process pitches the same way other people process phonemes. So I think it can be a valuable analogy. After I started to perceive the vowel better then it takes practice to properly produce what you already properly perceive. But that's on the production end, whereas with AP the production end is the instrument, so it'd take less practice with a fretted instrument or a piano and considerably more with a violin, with the violin being a better analogy to the mouth producing phonemes, ie no frets, just continuous mouth positions producing slighty different results. Chris has said that music and language are closer than we ever thought. Music is a language, you literally learn to understand and 'speak' music, or a certain style of the music. The same principle guiding language acquisition, I believe, guides music 'aquisition'. Read about the comprehension hypothesis at www.sdkrashen.com. He's the leading researcher in the area. Naturally there's controversy, but I'm absolutely convinced that comprehension works for language (studying grammar DOES NOT work). The Rosetta Stone dynamic immersion method follows this extremely well. http://www2.rosettastone.com/pdfs/research-basis-dynamic-immersion.pdf is the research basis for it. But I propose using the same principles with phonology too.

[etaxier]

I'm glad you mentioned Rosetta Stone! I've used it; it's based on perceptual learning principles and relies very heavily on the use of both multiple contexts and comparisons. It poses a series of trials that progress from ridiculously easy (almost exclusively "positive feedback") to a point where it's constantly challenging, where the potential for making a mistake -- for getting negative feedback -- is always there, just like when you're learning to speak or walk or do just about anything. Mistakes are noted and translated into statistics.

That's a great analogy, and it heartens me because that's exactly how the blue buttons in APB work, which Chris plans to make the primary learning tool in the next version. The only fundamental improvement would be to eventually combine several methods into one big mean relative+absolute+"writing/singing" learning system (rather than a set of disconnected games), like Rosetta Stone does with language.

[Joe]

First I must say that I like this forum, it creates good discussion and promotes new ideas! Negative feedback is not needed for language acquisition. This is the reason why Chomsky proposed Universal Grammar, because he believed natural language grammars were too complex to acquire without negative feedback unless some innate system was involved. The Rosetta Stone isn't always super clear, but ideally each new sentence's meaning would be so clear that there wouldn't be any chance for negative feedback, you would always understand. It's the comprehension hypothesis, when humans are exposed to language that's comprehensible acquisition automatically happens. The launch pad right now violates the comprehension principle because usually it just confuses me further, because I'm already confused when I go there, and since the target isn't in each one, I can't tell which one is the target, and the melody word is minimally helpful at best. The research basis for the Rosetta Stone never mentions perceptual learning at all. The Comprehension hypothesis works (and RS does references Krashen's work), so maybe what needs to be done is somehow linking it to perceptual learning? as for the comparison, I guess I don't know, I still don't think it's absolutely necessary. Maybe I'm just misunderstandng what a comparison is, I tend to think of comparison as recognizing what's different between two things, not what's the same. Couldn't Rosetta still teach the tenses the same way but not put "the boy is going to jump" "The boy is jumping" "the boy jumped" on the same slide, thus preventing comparison? because I learned the present tense before I even had the opportunity to compare it to the future and past tenses. So I guess you could say that by understanding C in two different contexts you're comparing what's the same, but this isn't comparing it to G. RS starts with whole words instead of the sounds that make up the words, so I think you could apply comprehension and break it down further, thus avoiding a foreign accent completely. Babies do afterall acquire the phonemes first and babble. Oh well, just some more thoughts ....

[Joe]

Here's another idea about the comparison. Instead of difference it's commonality you're after. For example. If all you know is "the boy" and you see rosetta's pics of a boy drinking and a boy eating. So you have "the boy is drinking" & "the boy is eating". You already understand boy, and you see 'is' in both, so what's the same in the two pics is the tense of the actions. So you know 'is' is controlling the tense, and you can see they're in the process of eating and drinkng. But I didn't have to compare it to the future tense or the past tense. So maybe we're looking at comparision from opposite directions, I was thinking commonality, and I thought you meant difference. But it's still just comparing it with itself.

[etaxier]

The problem is, if you don't already have perfect pitch, you are a "pitch dyslexic" of sorts, which puts you at a severe disadvantage with non-relative perceptual tasks. Language acquisition can, theoretically, follow this "comprehension hypothesis" into adulthood because we compare new meaningful structures with our current understanding. Pitch, however, does not follow this analogy at all. We can't tell "blue" from "red," and merely pointing it out doesn't work (otherwise you could learn perfect pitch in a matter of days or even hours; it's only twelve notes!).

So that means you need to find inherent meaning in the pitches in order to categorize and remember them, i.e., you need to have some use for perfect pitch. By forcing the player to decide whether or not the target pitch is present, thereby providing the player with a task that uses perfect pitch, APB guarantees a meaningful use for perfect pitch. Otherwise it's entirely a passive memorization routine -- which might work for 3-5 year olds (for whatever developmental reason), but has been proven to not work for adults.

You do have reason for not liking the C level: it is the most annoying level, because it trains you to quickly recognize and temporarily memorize a pitch after just a few trials instead of actually learning perfect pitch or even "perfect C"; the real learning task of comparing known pitches comes later on (at least that's how it seems to me).

Beyond all of this theoretical discussion, it just seems impossible to invent a game with 100% positive feedback and no wrong answers.

[Joe]

This isn't exactly what I said. I said the comprehension comes from recognizing what's the same about the target in the different examples "just knowing that you hear it". and then I said that after learning C and G, you'd have examples with only C & G where you have to know that you heard both, and then at 3 pitches you'd start having simples songs that you absolutely identify the pitches involved. For initially learning each pitch the differenct and increasingly complex contexts are needed to guide your mind to the chroma because at the start you have no idea what the chroma is. Krashen is suggesting that child language acquisition and adult language acquisition have no real fundamental difference, so is the Rosetta Stone's theory. Dr. Fuller is attempting to show that dyslexia doesn't exist when the proper method is used. Her Bird-Bat-Ball reading system is highly comprehensible. She takes the idea all the way down to the letter level, even introducing the alphabet in a non-standard order. Whole Language = Comprehension (Krashen researches reading as well) It's detrimental to compare the foreign language to your native language as they don't really relate. It's definitely best to completely build anew the new language in your head by lots of exposure to comprehensible input. Good acquierers do this. Otherwise you get not-quite-right sounding phrases eg a french person in english saying "we were three" instead of "there were three of us".

[KosciaK]

Yeah! Today something very nice happened. I was skipping through TV channels looking for something interesting and on one channel I've found a music quiz show. It's about guessing the song title after hearing the beginning of the song. In one of the phases of this quiz participants get the author (or some description like "song from movie" "song about love" etc, etc) and a small hint and they decided after how many notes of the song's melody they will manage to guess the title. So when I turned on the show the host asked "how many notes", a guy asked for one, piano player played the first note and I just knew it was C! It was like seeing red and being 110% sure that it's red.

So there's a chance to develop AP! It might all work after all! :)

[KosciaK]

Unfortunately I don't have much time for ETC. So Chordhopper became my favourite game right now. It's short enough so I can have two sessions a day - each one around 5 minutes. It seems to me that it's the best to play to games in a row. In a first one the first chord is the hardest to guess. Then it's getting easier and easier and in the end of the first game your brain switches to more absolute listening mode. So in the second game I'm listening to notes, not shapes or tonic-dominant-subdominant. If I would play third game in a row it's getting much harder again mostly because I tend to make more and more absolute errors (I know it's blue sound but it's getting harder and harder to guess which one).

[aruffo]

Is that the same thing that happens to me--? Sometimes I hear the one pitch sound so clearly and strongly that I can barely even perceive the other notes, much less the entire chord and its structure.