Do you lose your sense of pitch as you age?

[Bach5G]

One of my colleague’s sense of pitch seems to be getting worse. He’s past 80. His hearing otherwise seems fine.

Age-related loss of pitch - is that a thing?

[BGuttman]

Age related loss of hearing is a thing. Also, your hearing range high end goes away. Should be less of a problem on trombone; really bad on piccolo.

[Doug Elliott]

Yes it can happen.
I think that could be a great topic for somebody to study...
Loss of pitch recognition in aging and in people who have had strokes. What part of the brain is it in. If it can be improved. Obviously some never lose it despite dementia, etc. I think Carl Fontana was able to play normally despite whatever he lost otherwise; Tony Bennett I think could still sing.

[GabrielRice]

I had an incident several years back that affected my pitch perception. It's a long story, but essentially it was a rare form of meningitis that was putting pressure on something around my ears or nerves related to hearing. I'm fine now other than occasional tinnitus - it went away on its own - but doctors were pretty much totally flummoxed at the time.

There is a lot that the majority of the medical community does not understand about hearing.

[Mamaposaune]

Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia is not only a fascinating read, but he discusses the condition called Cochlear Amusia, a neurological condition that can develop and may be what your friend is experiencing. It only affects the perception of pitch and not the ability to hear sounds.

[Ozzlefinch]

I recommend the following reading on the topic:


Older Listeners' Perception of Speech With Strengthened and Weakened Dynamic Pitch Cues in Background Noise
by Shen, Jing
Journal of speech, language, and hearing research, 02/2021, Volume 64, Issue 2

[Bach5G]

Age related loss of hearing is a thing. Also, your hearing range high end goes away. Should be less of a problem on trombone; really bad on piccolo.

I adjudicated hearing loss claims in a workers compensation setting and am familiar with age-related vs noise induced hearing loss. In this gentleman’s case, based on conversations, he does not seem to be hard of hearing. But his pitch is off and seems to be getting worse.

I think I’ll add the Sacks book to my Xmas list. Thanks for that MP.

[Posaunus]

I think I’ll add the Sacks book to my Xmas list. Thanks for that MP.

Musicophilia is indeed a fascinating read, as are Oliver Sacks's other books. Highly recommended.

[robcat2075]

I have read of people with perfect pitch* who had that fail them in later years.

I recall a Metropolitan Opera harpist had to quickly retire because he had relied on it for so much of what he did, but suddenly... nothing made sense anymore.



*whatever that is


.

[Doug Elliott]

I have read of people with perfect pitch*
*whatever that is

I've had perfect pitch my whole life. I do know what it is.

But it has gotten a lot less reliable in the past few years.
For example, my car horn is a slightly flat Ab, but sometimes sounds like an A to me. My perception of pitch is frequently a half step off, but never more than that.

[TomRiker]

Doug do you have any memory of what that was like before you learned to play music? i.e. before you learned note names? Just curious.

[Mamaposaune]

Just this morning I responded to this question with a recommendation to read Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia, and here I am this afternoon at the Kimmel Center for a Philadelphia orchestra concert.
The connection? The composer of a piano concerto, Lopez Bellido, gave a pre-concert talk on his piece Ephemerae and talked extensively of synesthesia (an arousal of the other senses, i.e. seeing certain colors or sensing certain smells when hearing certain notes) and how it influenced his composition.
Oliver Sacks also described this phenomenon in his book.

[Doug Elliott]

Doug do you have any memory of what that was like before you learned to play music? i.e. before you learned note names? Just curious.

I was exposed to a lot of music as a child, records and live concerts. I always wanted to play trombone. My brother (3 years older) played trumpet for I guess a year or two before I started, when I was 8.
It seems to me like I just always knew what the sound would be before I played a note. I think I was about 10 when my teacher suspected, and tested me by playing notes on a piano and asking me what they were. I didn't learn piano and didn't have one until much later.

[timothy42b]

A tenor singer in our church choir recently passed away at an advanced age (late 80s).
He continued singing with us despite being quite deaf. He wore hearing aids but you still had to shout to have him understand you.

Remarkably, he sang mostly on pitch, I guess out of muscle memory. His tempo was often off because he couldn't hear the accompaniment changing speed, and he often sang loudly when it was marked soft. If he held a note for very long, pitch would sag. But mostly he sang the right notes and stayed in the key.

In a church setting you sing a lot of very familiar pieces, hymns and anthems, but directors also introduce new material, so it wasn't just memorization.

[Doug Elliott]

Sounds like most singers....

[pmeiden]

Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia is not only a fascinating read, but he discusses the condition called Cochlear Amusia, a neurological condition that can develop and may be what your friend is experiencing. It only affects the perception of pitch and not the ability to hear sounds.

Musicophilia is dedicated to Dr. Concetta Tomaino, a pioneer in the field of music therapy. Connie is a fine trumpet player who studied with Bill Vacchiano and just an outstanding person. Her husband is Walter Barrett (WaltTrombone) who is well-known to many on this forum.

[Mamaposaune]

Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia is not only a fascinating read, but he discusses the condition called Cochlear Amusia, a neurological condition that can develop and may be what your friend is experiencing. It only affects the perception of pitch and not the ability to hear sounds.

Musicophilia is dedicated to Dr. Concetta Tomaino, a pioneer in the field of music therapy. Connie is a fine trumpet player who studied with Bill Vacchiano and just an outstanding person. Her husband is Walter Barrett (WaltTrombone) who is well-known to many on this forum.

Wow! Thanks for sharing that.

[robcat2075]

It never fails. Mention "perfect pitch" and someone needs to express a contradictory opinion... even where no opinion had been given.


But I tracked down the harpist story. Richard Elster.

Some bios of him say he retired, at 72, due to arthritis but this article mentions the hearing complication.

Reinhardt Elster, the Met's oldest retiree, returns for a visit

...Elster hasn't put his hands on a harp in years, but he still uses them to communicate, punctuating his speech with a mix of choppy and graceful gestures reminiscent of an orchestral conductor. He studied conducting briefly, as a high school student at the Interlochen Arts Camp, and his fingers are so long that it looks as though from the podium, he could reach down and pluck the violinists' pizzicatos himself.

That is, if it weren't for the arthritis. It crept into his hands while he was still performing, creating difficulties that are easy to imagine. Then came the unimaginable: the erosion of Elster's lifelong absolute (or "perfect") pitch. Since as long as he could remember, when he saw a written note, he could automatically hear it in his head. As he grew older, the clear tones that he knew like family became so distorted that they sounded like different notes altogether.

This change occurs frequently in aging musicians with absolute pitch; the internal pitches that were once spot on can start to sound unfamiliar, resulting in dissonance between what a musician hears in his head and what sounds on his instrument. It makes performing a bit like pulling up to a stoplight and seeing orange, brown, and blue instead of red, yellow, and green, and having to remind yourself that what now looks like orange is actually what you used to see as red, and so on, and then mentally transposing every color you see while also navigating traffic and making the proper turns.

At the time, Elster didn't know that his problem was common. He was horrified. He decided to retire.

On this trip back, when he tells his former colleagues about how he'd struggled with changes in his absolute pitch, they are all surprised. They'd had no idea, they say later; his playing was always so beautiful, right up until the day he left....

[tbdana]

I'm interested in this thread because I'm noticing a change. I used to have excellent relative pitch. Then I took a few decades off playing, and now I no longer have good relative pitch. Is that a training issue and I just have to keep practicing it to get it back? Or is it age related and is just something I'll have to deal with?

Of course, if we're using the word "pitch" as simply the ability to play in tune, I've still got that and age hasn't affected it a bit. But if we're talking perfect pitch and relative pitch, meaning the ability to hear different notes without them being played, then this thread is for me.

How exactly are we using the word pitch here? Looks kind of nebulous from the posts so far.

[Bach5G]

I meant pitch as able to play in tune. My colleague will hit the tuning note A half or more a tone out.

[Doug Elliott]

A situation that I think has never been studied is how the perception of pitch (in the intonation sense) can differ between left and right ears. I really think that's the problem with people who have a "tin ear" or can't match pitches or can't hear intonation - it's just a continual state of confusion caused by hearing/perceiving two different pitches instead of one.

And I would imagine that could come on or change with age.

[GabrielRice]

A situation that I think has never been studied is how the perception of pitch (in the intonation sense) can differ between left and right ears. I really think that's the problem with people who have a "tin ear" or can't match pitches or can't hear intonation - it's just a continual state of confusion caused by hearing/perceiving two different pitches instead of one.

And I would imagine that could come on or change with age.

This was part of my problem. Sometimes it sounded like half the orchestra was playing a half step away from the other half.

[tbdana]

This was part of my problem. Sometimes it sounded like half the orchestra was playing a half step away from the other half.

Narrator: "They were."

[W1XO]

A situation that I think has never been studied is how the perception of pitch (in the intonation sense) can differ between left and right ears. I really think that's the problem with people who have a "tin ear" or can't match pitches or can't hear intonation - it's just a continual state of confusion caused by hearing/perceiving two different pitches instead of one.

And I would imagine that could come on or change with age.

I experienced this back in 1985 (I was 29 at the time, so not age-related). The condition is called diplacusis. I had just finished a two-day car trip in a car with a bad muffler, so my ears had been buffeted by noise for that length of time. I was shocked when I turned on the radio when I got home. (Ironically, one reason for the trip was to buy a new bass trombone.)

I immediately did experiments with a couple of audio generators and headphones. One ear heard everything about a half step higher than the other.

Weirdly, my two ears gradually came to agree on pitch after about three weeks. My hunch is that my brain learned to reinterpret the signals from the two ears, something like the classic experiment where people were given glasses that turned everything upside-down, and found that their brains re-normalized their vision after a while.

While I never had perfect pitch, my relative pitch sense was good before the diplacusis came on, and it's been good ever since.

[Doug Elliott]

I didn't know there was a name for it.

[Mamaposaune]

The chapter titled Coclear Amusia in Oliver Sacks book Musicophilia details a case of diplacusis in a musician/composer who develops it, but is able to overcome it. In his case, it was found that his left ear sharpened the pitch by as much as a major third compared to his right, and it worsened in the higher frequencies. There was also some variation from day to day, and he found ways to compensate and control it to some extent. (Haven't read it for several years, but needed to review it again. And I am not worthy of trying to paraphrase Dr. Sacks, but highly recommend reading ihis book.)
These are his footnotes at the end of the chapter.
As Doug Elliott's post stated, it would be interesting to read of a study of those who are tone-deaf. Do they experience hearing different pitches from birth, with no resolution? Aside from hearing or making music, I would think that it would have very little effect on the other aspects of their life.

[Burgerbob]

As Doug Elliott's post stated, it would be interesting to read of a study of those who are tone-deaf. Do they experience hearing different pitches from birth, with no resolution? Aside from hearing or making music, I would think that it would have very little effect on the other aspects of their life.

If they speak non-tonal languages, of course.

[ithinknot]

I used to have excellent relative pitch. Then I took a few decades off playing, and now I no longer have good relative pitch. Is that a training issue and I just have to keep practicing it to get it back?

Probably "mostly yes"...

Or is it age related and is just something I'll have to deal with?

...but realistically, some physical and neurological things must inevitably have shifted over the years, and at the very least age might slow down the reacquisition of that skillset...

I too have excellent relative pitch, though never the childhood/party trick/absolute/Perfect Pitch.

When I was working full time in the choral world, spending hours a day training singers and singing myself, I ended up pretty close to the true perfect pitch types, able to pull X out of the air at A440.

When I moved into the early music world and was spending most of my ensemble time at 415, still with a decent amount of 440 work and various excursions above, below, and between those pitches, the nearly perfect pitch went out of the window. These days I know what I'm hearing within a semitone, but the reference flips between 415 and 440. Sometimes I can slightly cheat, e.g. knowing that the key for something C17th is almost certainly C maj at 415 rather than B maj at 440, but in general it's probably 50/50 which pitch my brain is at on a given day. Trombone resets it to 440 for a few hours, but not necessarily more than that.

[ithinknot]

As Doug Elliott's post stated, it would be interesting to read of a study of those who are tone-deaf. Do they experience hearing different pitches from birth, with no resolution? Aside from hearing or making music, I would think that it would have very little effect on the other aspects of their life.

If they speak non-tonal languages, of course.

Of course, even in non-tonal languages pitch still plays a huge role in nuance, performative aspects etc. You can imagine that significant pitch-deafness might affect the reading of social cues or gauging tone in ways that would probably overlap with various other neurodivergent traits. Seems very studiable, but I don't know what's out there.

[sungfw]

As Doug Elliott's post stated, it would be interesting to read of a study of those who are tone-deaf. Do they experience hearing different pitches from birth, with no resolution? Aside from hearing or making music, I would think that it would have very little effect on the other aspects of their life.

If they speak non-tonal languages, of course.

I dispute the validity of that assumption.

My father, whose first language was Chinese, and who didn't learn English until he emigrated to the US to pursue graduate studies, was musically tone deaf, but had no difficulty in understanding or making himself understood in Mandarin Chinese: witness the fact that, from 1952-1955, when he emigrated, he was a newsreader for Broadcasting Corporation of China; as well as in Cantonese and Japanese.

[Burgerbob]

If they speak non-tonal languages, of course.

I dispute the validity of that assumption.

My father, whose first language was Chinese, and who didn't learn English until he emigrated to the US to pursue graduate studies, was musically tone deaf, but had no difficulty in understanding or making himself understood in Mandarin Chinese: witness the fact that, from 1952-1955, when he emigrated, he was a newsreader for Broadcasting Corporation of China; as well as in Cantonese and Japanese.

That's actually very interesting, and I wonder how that works.

[Doug Elliott]

Tone-deafness may be from the confusion of hearing different pitches, but maybe it's something else entirely. I was just thinking of it as a possibility.

I know that in certain periods of my music life I have had a tendency to play slightly under the pitch, and other times slightly over the pitch. I still very much prefer higher notes to be somewhat sharp, and in some recording situations I've had to adjust my high range pitch downward, with some difficulty.

Right now I'm very comfortable with my own pitch, but that has varied over the decades.

[GabrielRice]

The Oliver Sacks excerpt above is very interesting to me, as it echoes my own experience pretty closely. I'll go into some more detail in the hopes that it can help someone else:

On a very cold day in January 2012 I attended a tuba recital (Mike Roylance of the Boston Symphony) in a reverberant stone church. Even with the clarity with which Mike plays, it was hard to hear much detail. Suddenly in the middle of the recital, I started to hear a very high, very loud pitch in my left ear. It didn't go away when I left and went home. Over the next few days it started to be accompanied by whooshing sounds, and I started to find that I was not hearing my own pitch accurately when I was practicing, like my bone conduction pitch was not matching what was coming out the bell.

I got an appointment with an ENT, who said I probably had a viral infection. Antibiotics would not help, he said, so he put me on a course of steroids to knock out whatever inflammation was causing the presumed pressure on the auditory nerves on my left side. The steroids helped while I was on them (though they made me sick in other ways), but as soon as I finished the course the ringing sound and pitch distortion came back worse than before.

Then the symptoms started to evolve and vary from day to day. Some instruments - clarinet, French horn, as well as children's voices - sounded very strange, like they were coming through a fan, especially from a distance. Some days it would sound like high pitched instruments were about a semitone sharp relative to low pitched instruments. Some days I couldn't tell if my students were playing in tune.

I was sent for an MRI of my head, and the images were described by the ENT and my PCP as strangely fuzzy or out of focus. They did not see anything else wrong. My PCP gave me a referral to a more specialized ENT (I am fortunate to live in Boston, one of the great medical treatment and research cities in the world, where we have an entire hospital devoted to Eye and Ear), who listened to my symptoms, looked at my MRI, and was able to give me a diagnosis!

What I had was called Pachymeningitis, a condition in which the meninges, the membrane between the brain and the skull, is wrinkly and folded on itself (pachy as in "elephant skin"). Neither the first ENT I went to nor my PCP had ever heard of it, and the doctor who diagnosed it did not know how to treat it, but she sent me next door to a neurologist at Mass General who specializes in infectious diseases of the nervous system and had worked with it before.

I learned that pachymeningitis can cause much worse symptoms, including vision distortion and blindness, and it can be caused by all sorts of diseases: HIV, tuberculosis, fungal infections, some cancers, etc., etc. I was tested for all of those things and had none of them. I had more MRIs. My symptoms kept coming and going and changing. One day I was dizzy and had trouble walking in a straight line. Some days were perfectly clear; others were incredibly frustrating.

I skipped the bass trombone audition for the Boston Symphony, but somehow I didn't cancel any performing work. Once I was playing in the context of a large orchestra my hearing would sort itself out, but sometimes sitting and listening in tacet movements was excruciating. I did consider what I might do if I had to stop performing and teaching professionally.

I sought out various therapies. Massage was great if only to help relax my body and alleviate the emotional stress. Acupuncture helped temporarily. Craniosacral therapy was AMAZING and helped even more, sometimes for several days afterwards. But it would always come back.

I kept going back to the neurologist for more tests, and it seemed my case had happened idiopathically - for no apparent reason. And then one day in May my hearing was clear and stayed clear. I went in for another MRI, and he confirmed that the pachymeningitis appeared to have resolved itself just as mysteriously as it appeared.

About a year later the pitch distortion came back, though milder than before, and I went in for another MRI. It was confirmed that it was back, but then it resolved again quickly. I still have frequent tinnitus (particularly when I think about it...it's very strong right now as I write this), but it usually doesn't really bother me.

So...doctors do not know everything, especially about hearing. If you have a problem and the answers you get don't make sense, keep asking.

[ghmerrill]

The Oliver Sacks excerpt above is very interesting to me, as it echoes my own experience pretty closely. I'll go into some more detail in the hopes that it can help someone else: ...

So...doctors do not know everything, especially about hearing. If you have a problem and the answers you get don't make sense, keep asking.

Very interesting. I've had tinnitus for some years now (left ear), but am quite sure it was consequent to bacterial ear infection. Like you, I just ignore it and it really doesn't bother me; and my ENT isn't excited by it. It doesn't appear to affect my pitch perception.

My wife, on the other hand, has gone through a similar medical history as you have in terms of diagnosis and treatment, but with her left eye rather than elsewhere. Luckily, the people at Duke (another spot of medical excellence) determined the condition rather directly, but it's the sort of thing that requires constant maintenance/medication and has been relieved surgically at one point. Specialists are involved.

One thing she/we learned during that experience is that viral infections can be extremely difficult to detect -- and that you may never have clear empirical evidence for them, but basically end up postulating them as the only reasonable remaining cause. The nasty little viruses have a habit of "hiding" (often with periods of dormancy) in various tissues (think also of shingles) -- sometimes favoring nerve tissue -- and so can't be found with the tests available. And sometimes palliative treatment is the only recourse.

[hyperbolica]

To answer the original question, no, generally losing your sense of pitch isn't a 1:1 effect of aging. Some people do develop conditions that lead to a loss of pitch or partial loss of pitch, but it's not universal. I've had ringing in my ears since playing in Navy stage bands 40 years ago. I can hear pitches and play in tune. The exceptions for me are when playing tuba, I can't seem to do much with the pitch I hear on tuba. That might be because of the range, might be because the bell is over my head in stead of in front of it, might be just because I'm less accustomed to it. My wife would tell you I'm hard of hearing, but I can hear instruments and pitch just fine, I just can't distinguish speech.

[AtomicClock]

A situation that I think has never been studied is how the perception of pitch (in the intonation sense) can differ between left and right ears. I really think that's the problem with people who have a "tin ear" or can't match pitches or can't hear intonation - it's just a continual state of confusion caused by hearing/perceiving two different pitches instead of one.

This is interesting. I currently have a stuffed up right ear. And am hearing intonation subtleties (much?) more than normal. I know from tuners and teachers that 5th partial needs to be raised. But I finally heard it myself!

[GabrielRice]

This is interesting. I currently have a stuffed up right ear. And am hearing intonation subtleties (much?) more than normal. I know from tuners and teachers that 5th partial needs to be raised. But I finally heard it myself!

Yes! You're hearing the bone conduction sound more. You can recreate that by using an ear plug occasionally when you practice.