Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from April, 2016

Perfect Pitch: is it possible?

We're going to explore how good someone's perfect pitch could be. How well can a human discern the frequency of a sound? Then we'll show how this pertains to the ability to throw and hit the perfect pitch. How accurately can you hear pitch? The measurements that show how many frequencies a person can distinguish show that humans can discern about 1500 different pitches.  How do they do this?  It's done by a vibrations picked up at the ear drum then transmitted to the cochlea via three tiny bones (that server to amplify the vibrations due to leverage.) The cochlea is a small tube that's about one inch long (rolled up) and gets smaller the further away from the entrance point the smaller the tube gets.  This causes sounds of different frequencies to have peak intensities at different points along the cochlea.  The intensity causes the hairs that line the tube to fire in proportion - hence which hairs fire tells you the frequency (pitch) and how many fire (and th