Prolobe Online Absolute Pitch Ear Training

Hello everybody!

Here's what happened to me in the last couple of weeks.
It was Christmas time and I was relaxing and listening to a different kind of music from what I usually prefer. I am attracted to intellectual and complex music, polyphonic and with lots of harmonies. This time however the music had simple and clear melody lines.

And then it occurred to me that each tone of the melody sounded like a different vowel. As the melody unfolded, each instrument seemed to be talking. Sometimes different instruments would take turns in saying the same phrase - using the same vowels. Transposing the tune would change the vowels.

I still cannot name the tones, but I don't care. This completely new way of listening to music turns out to be a very delightful one.

No wonder at all, lately I've been going through my music collection, curious what I would hear. Here's what I found out:

I seem to hear the vowels at best when listening to bowed or wind instruments, because they have a smooth, voice-like sound. The cello sound is particularly good. Piano also works, although not as well.

I find it next to impossible to hear the vowels when listening to:
- vocals - the human voice has its own vowels and both get mixed up;
- special effects - when the timbre of the instrument is constantly changing, I can't make out the vowels;
- heavy metal - this seems self-explanatory to me.

On my keyboard, the vowels sound very faint. On the crappy MIDI sound of my computer - next to inaudible. Well, I don't care much about this. When doing the drills, I use my RP and don't strain myself to listen to the "chroma". I believe it's gonna come to me when the time is ripe ...

So has anybody here experienced anything similar ?

Yes, when I studied violin (my main instrument is piano) I used to have fun making vowel sounds by sliding up the string with different velocities - I had fun making different vowel sounds.

That's great! And yes, vowels are heard particularly clearly on bowed instruments.

Do you also hear them on the piano?

That's absolutely right!

Here's a possible explanation:
When you say a sound, you have three different frequencies going on at the same time. Your vocal chords vibrate at some frequency, and that's the main pitch of the voice. The other two frequencies that are sounding are the formants of your mouth. The interval between these two frequencies is what defines what vowel it is, and these frequencies are constant for each person. Try whispering different pitches - it's impossible. The best you can do is change the vowel you are whispering, which changes the two formant pitches to make a new interval. Since one of these is going to be louder than the other, each vowel does indeed have a dominant pitch.

Here's a recording a guy made where he took sound samples of himself whispering each vowel, arranged the resulting sounds chromatically, and he could make "whisper music."

http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/files/lightlyrow.MP3

I marvel at the crazy amount of research this guy has done.

The problem with those whispered vowels is, that they still sound very similarly when transposed. I recorded some myself and tried changing their pitches by various counts of semitones.

An 'a' still sounded like an 'a' when transposed. So did the 'o', so did the 'u', etc.

IMHO there is no fixed one-to-one relation between vowels and pitches. Rather, as sounds stimulate space-aware areas of the right hemisphere, they create a high/low experience; and as they stimulate language-aware areas in the left hemisphere, they create a vowel experience.

We have learned to pay attention to just one side of the experience, depending on whether we classify the sound as speech or music. For the other side we remain (at least consciously) oblivious - a kind of learned deafness.

You two are both blowing my mind with this informmation...
I'm still trying to understand what you mean when you say "vowels"
do you litterally meen like an A /(eh) sound?

please elaborate.

I'm very interested.

vowels are caused by filters on upper harmonic content. They are independent of the base frequency. Barry White and Mariah Carey have different base frequencies, but make vowels by filtering the exact same way.

This in no way affects your theory or experience though. I am just throwing it out there

Still don't really understand... but o...k

http://www.amazon.com/Mystery-Seven-Vowels-Theory-Practice/dp/0933999860/ref=pd_sim_b_2