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After eight moves, using his own limited chess ability, the unthinkable was occurring: Max was winning.

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Originally posted by jaaron11:

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After eight moves, using his own limited chess ability, the unthinkable was occurring: Max was winning.

It's an interesting story that I was reading about on Chessbase earlier today. However, the quoted line above is a bit of a dramatization. I played through the game, and at no point was Max "winning". The white player always has a small plus in the computer analysis to start a game simply because they get to play first. Max just hadn't made a mistake until move 9, but neither had Magnus. The entire game was a massacre, as you would expect. Max had as much chance of winning as I would in a foot race against Usain Bolt.

Still a good story, it just got my inner chess nerd worked up a bit.

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Originally posted by BamaJeepster:

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Originally posted by 46and2:
His (Wikipedia's) definition of Perfect Pitch is dumbed down, and his skill here is more parlor trickish / memorization tricks than any real sense of actually having Perfect Pitch.

I think he was pretty honest about that in his description of what he was trying to accomplish. I think his summary was very good (again, I know nothing about music, and the only pitch I am familiar with is either the kind you start fires with or perform on a baseball field):

Do I have perfect pitch?

Yesterday, I officially completed this month’s perfect pitch challenge: I successfully identified 20 consecutive, randomly-generated musical notes, without any reference, three times on video.
Even though I completed the challenge, as I defined it, I’m still not sure if I’m comfortable saying that I have perfect pitch.

Firstly, I’m still not “perfect”. I’ve become much more consistent, but I still make mistakes occasionally.

Also, I don’t recognize all notes immediately, especially if there aren’t any pauses between the notes. In other words, I still find that my interpretation of one note can be influenced by the note I hear before it.

Yet, there are also some indicators that suggest I’m actually closer to having genuine perfect pitch than I think…

Perhaps, most importantly, I always correctly identify the first note of every session. In other words, when there are no other musical sounds or reference points to confuse me, I identify notes with 100% accuracy and immediacy.

I definitely couldn’t do this if I didn’t have some form of perfect pitch.

The problem is that this “pitch identification in a vacuum” skill becomes less relevant and harder to maintain the deeper I work into a sequence of notes.

Over time, as I progress through a series of notes, my brain shifts from ‘perfect pitch’-style identification (of just plucking the note out of the air) to ‘relative pitch’-style identification (of comparing the note back to a mental reference tone).

In other words, I actually think I have perfect pitch, but the ability isn’t as dominant in my brain as my relative pitch abilities (which have been trained and synaptically hardened over the past 15 years of musical training). As a result, my relative pitch overpowers my perfect pitch abilities, confusing my brain and messing me up.

Occasionally, in the middle of a session, once my brain is already in relative pitch mode, a note will cut through and I will immediately hear it for what it is. The note bypasses my relative pitch default and finds it’s way to the perfect pitch part of my brain.

I suspect that if I continue to practice and strengthen my perfect pitch abilities, I could eventually overpower my brain’s relative pitch default and maintain genuine perfect pitch deep into a sequence of notes.

This month, because I had the 30-day deadline, I probably relied a little too heavily on my brain’s relative pitch skills to succeed. Thus, if I actually wanted to make my perfect pitch abilities dominant, I’d need to rethink my training and try to isolate just the perfect pitch components of the exercise.

Anyway, perhaps I do have perfect pitch, but it’s still only a quiet signal in my brain, getting suffocated by many stronger, more deeply engrained signals.

I’m not sure if this counts, but I’d like to think it does. And if not, at least my progress suggests that an adult could feasibly acquire genuine perfect pitch.

Semantics aside, I’ve clearly changed the way my brain perceives pitch, which is pretty cool.

The Insane outer limits of perfect pitch

This month, I acquired some lightweight form of perfect pitch, but have only scratched the surface in terms of what’s possible.

In fact, there’s a whole range of skills that fall under the perfect pitch umbrella that I didn’t touch at all: Identifying two notes at a time, three notes at a time, ten notes at a time, etc.; singing notes on command; instantly identifying the key of a song; and so on.

My favorite demonstrations of these kinds of perfect pitch skills are performed by 9-year-old Dylan Biato, who has been trained by musician dad Rick Biato since birth.

Here’s just one of his many perfect pitch videos…


Clearly, I have a long way to go to be at Dylan’s level, but I’m certainly motivated by his abilities. After all, like Dylan (and everyone else), I also have a human brain (which can’t be that different to Dylan’s).

In other words, when I see someone like Dylan who is masterful at his/her craft, it isn’t a reminder of my deficiencies, but a reminder of my potential.

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I also have a human brain (which can’t be that different to Dylan’s).