I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch.
I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice.
Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.
I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component.
The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command. But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist) could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds.
It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent.
I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch.
I had an ear training teacher who would play a bunch of random atonal notes on the piano between exercises to "reset" our ears. Only works for relative ears.
Similarly I (relative pitch) retain the key of a piece I practice. But if someone plays a random sequence of pitches it pretty easily makes me lose my anchor or at least make it lose focus by a semitone or three.
Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty, for example when they need to transpose or work with a different A4 than their "internal" learned one. Where us relative normies would just shrug and accept the new A4.
> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them
Actually they're not immune to being thrown off, there was an experiment where people with perfect pitch were played a long orchestral piece that very slowly detuned, e.g. over the course of half an hour dropped one semitone. The study found this also detuned their sense of absolute pitch, not just immediately after but also months later.
A good friend of mine in high school had perfect pitch. We played music together and he would complain about his 'anchor' of pitch getting thrown off if/when we wouldn't tune to A 440Hz but instead something else slightly up or down from A440.
My choir director finds it easier to transpose organ pieces on the fly than "set the organ to a different key" and just play the keys as written for that reason: There's too much dissonance between what his fingers know they're playing and what his ears are hearing.
He was one of those little kids who had absolute pitch from the start, though, and he definitely views it as a two-edged sword!
I’m a former pro musician. I’m a drummer so lol I don’t have perfect pitch, but I met a few folks who did. Having true perfect pitch sounds awful honestly. The world is constantly out of tune and it takes effort to ignore it.
I knew many more people with very good relative pitch. In school those people would get a middle C at the start of ear training class and ace every note after that because they knew where that C was.
I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.)
I don't have perfect pitch, but I actually seem to have anchored on A=443Hz. When my violin teacher insisted on 440Hz it would cause me discomfort the same way you describe, just feeling wrong. And I've found that when I try to tune an instrument from memory, I'm consistently sharp. (Assuming I'm not off by a whole-tone, because I don't have perfect pitch.)
When I played in a youth orchestra our music director told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many recordings with such tuning.
>the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them. Which is also a source of discomfort and difficulty
Not least because the argument about "what note is this" and "what note do you think you're singing" starts basically day one of singing lessons. Trying to learn any practical music when you can hear the difference between close frequencies mean you're effectively learning colours from a group who insist that blue and green are the same colour.
One of my party tricks used to be saying the song and artist from the first 5 seconds of a track. These days with samplers and synthesisers that's almost impossible. I still get tripped when I hear some samples, like "that's the bass guitar from {song x} WTF" in the middle of some otherwise pleasant song.
> It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent.
This is a function of time, not age.
Adults can (though seldom) learn languages to perfect fluency with zero accent. It's all a matter of how much time and immersion you put into it.
Adults are mostly too busy and have too many responsibilities. Children have all the time in the world.
> ...could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold.
> had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it.
This is really interesting! Did either of you ever try a spaced-repetition-style approach? It seems like you've basically described the shapes of your respective forgetting curves — I wonder what would happen if you tried to train with the specific goal of extending that window, rather than just noting what your window is during other training. Maybe it's possible to work your way up to long-term perfect pitch in this way?
Especially in your case, since you already have data that your window of 5-10 minutes could extend to 1.5 hours, it seems quite doable. I wonder what would happen if you'd spent an extra 30 minutes/day for a few weeks just on this — e.g., focus on remembering 10 minutes out the first week, then 12-15 minutes the next week, etc...
We didn't - the ear training portion was all devoted to developing better relative pitch and being able to name intervals and chords. It was more just the TA noting "Oh hey, you can remember that pitch I played earlier in the session, do you have perfect pitch?" and then a quick aside. As other comments mentioned, it's usually not worth it as a musician to develop really good absolute pitch, because you'll almost always have a reference note available.
It would've been a neat psych or neuroscience study, if the psych and music departments got together though. If I were still in college I'd suggest it. :-)
I've never heard of pitch memory before, but this makes total sense. When things make noise around me, I sometimes remember songs that have that note. My favourite one was my motorised stand-up desk which when going up would sound the same as Beyonce's Crazy in Love - and when I think about it right now, I hear the pitch, the song, and that motor in my head.
(Neuro-)Physiologically, it's not clear to me why the sense of pitch should decohere. It's not like the cochlea is physically unstable, and the hartley-ish-transformed data the brain is pulling out of the cochlea should be quite repeatable. I wonder if the brain converts the cochlear data into some other representation that is not (inherently) stable, and those with perfect pitch have or develop a more stable version than most other people.
Absolute data points rarely make sense, they are rigid and inflexible, which is not good against an always changing environment.
You should be able to recognize the same scene both with a clear sky and a partly cloudy one, and it’s hardly important that this tiger had a deeper voice, the important part to recognize is the fact that there is a tiger. But even something as trivial as movement coordination is constantly updated by feedback mechanisms, like training with weights and dropping them in the end will temporarily make the movements “weird”.
That’s not what perfect pitch is. Perfect pitch is “color hearing”- recognizing the unique sound properties of each not along the scale, much in the same way colors of the rainbow can be distinguished. It can also be trained for.
It was Tonal Harmony and Counterpoint. Unless you're at the specific college I went to, it wouldn't do you any good, but an equivalent course is offered at most universities and liberal arts colleges.
FWIW I found it well worth it. My mom had been encouraging me to take something far outside my major (physics at the time, then I switched to CS), and was suggesting Art History. I couldn't make Art History work with my schedule, but I took this music theory class and it was great.
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately.
For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do.
Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.
Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility.
It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.
There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano.
As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.
My experience with pitch memory is nearly identical to yours (but only 34 years playing cello, not 35).
Absolute (perfect) pitch really does seem to be a whole different thing neurally, akin to (and perhaps actually related to) the difference between learning a language before a critical age and learning one afterwards.
I'm gonna try to teach it to my kid, because, why not. Even if it's not that useful most of the time, there are definitely times when it would come in handy for me, e.g., being faster at transcribing notation from recordings. If he doesn't end up using it, that's fine.
I suggest not to do it. It is really painful in the orchestra when the orchestra has gotten sharper than what you are comfortable with and you have to play a minor third. I remember playing Mahler 2. The hall was hot as hell and the orchestra had risen from A441 to what must have been A445. I had to play a major sixth and it was borderline revolting.
I stopped practicing it after some experiences like that. Knowing what note to play by some absolute measure is only useful if you are playing alone. What you play in an ensemble is relative to a lot of other people.
Having perfect pitch can be useful for a lot of musicians, or educators, or composers in various ways, including:
Improving accuracy in performance: Perfect pitch can identify and reproduce musical notes more accurately and quickly, which can help perform music with greater precision.
Improving music education: Perfect pitch can help people teach music theory and composition more effectively, as students with perfect pitch can better understand and apply the concepts.
Enhancing creativity in music composition: Composers with pitch can more easily hear and reproduce musical ideas in their heads, which can help them create more complex and interesting compositions.
Facilitating communication among musicians: Musicians with absolute pitch can communicate more effectively with each other by using a common standard for identifying notes.
Improving the ability to transcribe music: Musicians with perfect pitch can more easily transcribe music by ear, which can be useful for analyzing and studying music.... the list goes on
I am an orchestra musician. Having perfect pitch was only trouble, despite playing in good orchestras at the time.
In the end of Ein Heldenleben the orchestra will not be the same pitch it started and, and for you to be in tune you will have to play notes that will be more than a quarter tone too high compared to what you think is correct.
I found it awful. The only orchestras I have played in that stayed in tune was the Swedish radio orchestra and the Munich Phil. But a major third is 13 cent low there as well.
And regarding most other things: I would have loved to have it during solfege exams. That is about it. The trouble it gave me when doing the work I studied to do it got in the way.
Most colleges I went to had special classes for students with perfect pitch as they were taught different strategies. In my final exam in "Gehörbildung" the two top scoring students did not have perfect pitch.
from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be aggravated if I don't have to?"
On the bassoon this was (and is) the case for me. It even translates to instruments very close to the bassoon such as dulcian and the French basson. If I hear a baroque bassoon I know what note it is in 415.
There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others out there.
That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.
I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.
That's simple pitch memory. I started playing guitar at 12 and at that time used a tuning fork - and I noticed that after a while I could hear the "right" note of the A string in my head and I didn't really need the fork anymore. That ability is just pitch memory (which can be thrown off) combined with learning the timbre of the instrument you play (in my case a guitar string).
And yes, that's not the same as perfect pitch, which typically includes much more than the above. I certainly don't have it, even if I can pick any string first time in the morning and hear if it's "off". Because that's all I can do. But then again I don't get annoyed by "out of tune" sounds in the world around me, unlike what people with perfect pitch sometimes tell about.
I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that strategy makes sense
There is some good evidence that children whose first language is tonal (e.g. chinese) develop perfect pitch at much higher rates than those whose is not (e.g. english). This strongly suggests that at least if you catch it at the right developmental stage, it is learnable.
I haven't seen anything equivalent for learning later in life though, although ear-training exercises clearly make your estimation better if you are disciplined about it, but that is relative, not absolute.
I began by listening to a C. After a week I could find it reliably every time. Then I did it for all the other notes.
On bassoon I recognize all notes by their timbre. When I did this it started being something else. After a while I didnt recognize the notes. I just knew. I sometimes still have this. My harp colleague plays a note and I just know what it was.
I told this to a friend of mine who teaches solfege at college level (royal Danish conservatory) and she said that in her line of work perfect pitch isn't a gift it is a work-related injury.
Not quite that extreme. I could use it for harmonies if it wasn't too many dissonant notes because I couldn't tell the notes apart.
However, that is something I trained before doing the perfect pitch thing. Being able to pick apart harmonies is extremely useful. Having perfect pitch just made it a little easier.
I always found it hard on the piano. I wonder if it is related to the fact that everything sounds good on the piano, even things that are badly composed. Parallel fifths in a chorale on the piano? Sounds wonky but ok. In a chorus? Awful.
What you describe sounds like pitch memory, which doesn't have the same qualities (and problems) as actual absolute ("perfect") pitch. I also remember pitch. I can grab my guitar after a week away from it, touch a string and know if it's out of tune. I can tune it without a tuner.
But what I'm actually doing is remembering the pitch with the help of the timbre of the guitar string (or harp string, for my wife's harp - I hear if a string is "off" even if it's the first single note I hear in the morning). I believe I would quickly be bewildered if I heard pure sine tones. And that's it. There's nothing more which is even close to what people with absolute pitch can do. I haven't run into that many of them, but it's like they see all the music in color, it's a different world (and they are often constantly bothered by out-of-tune sounds from life). Hit some random notes in parallel and they can tell you the notes instantly. And so on and so forth.
The other thing is what happens if they lose the perfect pitch.. which does happen, with age, for many, or at least it de-tunes a bit (drops a semitone, for example). Then, when it's gone, they don't even have relative pitch to rely on. Rick Beato interviewed a couple of people this happened to. I don't want to be there. My little ability to tune without a tuner is enough for me, and what it is is trained pitch memory - not absolute pitch. And it's relatively common, unlike absolute pitch.
I have tone memory on a bassoon. I described this in another post. It even translates to baroque bassoon, tuned half a not lower.
When I practiced pitch instrument did not matter. I could tell what note a sine wave was.
I never made any differenriation between what I had and absolute pitch. Functionally they wäwrre the same and I believe that if I would have kept it up for a couple of months it would have been permanent. Some of it still lingers. I can still tell whether a tuning A is 440 or 442. Sometimes i just know what note is being played, regardless of instrument. When that feeling comes I am never wrong.
Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a certain age (at least that's layman my understanding).
Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a new language?).
The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago’s study is most famous but results have been replicated at many other schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine.
The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as artists they’re better off spending their time elsewhere.
This isn't quite right; the University of Chicago study replicates what has already been known for a long time - that musicians can develop their pitch memory around the timbral context clues of a particular instrument. However, this learned pitch does not generalize to other instruments and/or common everyday sounds (train horns, washing machine vibrations) in the way that people with absolute pitch can instantly identify.
An analogy to this might be that a colorblind person if shown enough fabric and told what the colors were can eventually associate the texture of the fabric with a given color and can learn to do this translating in their head, but they will not be able to train their eyes to see color no matter how much practice takes place.
If it were the case that such a substantial number of amateur test subjects could develop absolute pitch from doing a few exercises, we would expect to see commensurate numbers of musicians who spend thousands of hours playing music to also develop this skill, but this is not and has never been the case.
Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is relatively the same. Things would be different if every key had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought about different keys having different moods.
That statement is not true of Western music in general, only of most (not all) classical and poular music since roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became popular.[1]
Much Western music, such as that written during the the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. use a variety of other systems such as some form of just intonation[2], where different keys sound very different as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same interval.
Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American music.[1]
I hadn't actually heard of the Chicago work before, but this is interesting:
"These results suggest that the acquisition of intermediate absolute pitch ability (significantly above chance but below ‘‘true’’ AP performance) depends on an individual’s general auditory working memory ability" [1]
Apparently learned absolute pitch wasn't as accurate as "true" perfect pitch.
May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means?
(I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'
Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command.
If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch for a short time after they stop playing and others (apparently) always have it. In that aspect, it’s a little like memory.
Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald are two famous people you’ve likely heard who had absolute pitch though I have never read or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly useful. Of the musicians I know who have worked to develop it, it’s mostly kind of a party trick.
If you’re interested in perfect pitch, you should likely learn about relative pitch as well. Whereas perfect pitch refers to the ability to correctly distinguish a note cold, relative pitch refers to the ability to distinguish notes in relation to each other.
But how accurate does it have to be to be considered perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to the frequency?
Within less than half a semitone seems more likely. The frequencies of the notes don't matter as the relationship between the pitch classes are unchanged.
Perfect pitch means that you can identify (give the name of) different pitches without the help of instruments. This is a rare ability even for trained musicians.
Interesting, I didn’t know perfect pitch was something you could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His teachers always told us it was something you’re born with.
I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good speller was something you were born with (she was not the best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good, to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's cube.
I would imagine relative pitch is more useful/practiced? I was a musician in a rock band for many years (you never heard of) and I have relative pitch. I started in orchestra on the cello at age 7. Banged on drums during middle school. Picked up guitar in high school and formed a band. I can identify chords and I can tell you what note if I have another note as a reference (like you do with your voice).
Rick Beato made a video or two about that. His son Dylan has perfect pitch. What he did when the boy was very little was to let him listen to various types of jazz music - he can't be certain, but his theory is that if the music is "interesting" in the sense that it's not always predictable then the brain automatically zooms in on that and gets interested - and that's what gave the boy perfect pitch (I believe this theory relies on an underlying theory - a quite common one - which is that babies are actually born with perfect pitch but lose it relatively early, just as all babies are born with the ability to hear every sound in every language, and that also gets filtered off as they get older. This last one is pretty certain, the other one is still debated).
I would have found it useful in school. At work it got in the way.
Unless your kid is going to.play one of those perpetually out of tune instruments like the piano I wouldn't recommend it. I had a horn colleague that had the crazy kind of perfect pitch (he still has, but he is retired) and perfect metronome tempo and all that. He called it a curse.
Interesting perspective. I'm an amateur musician and always thought that absolute pitch would have made me a better musician. I wanted to make sure that my kid gets the opportunity to acquire perfect pitch, even if he doesn't decide to take up music in the future
I find that being able to hear the note you are about to play before you play it is great, but having that note absolutely anchored into something that might not be in tune with what is around you is really just a hindrance.
There are certainly people that like their perfect pitch, but I did not. There is a reason they teach in in many asian countries between the ages 2 and 5. A girl I studied with told me they never told you the note they started on when they did melody dictation. You were just supposed to know.
Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy.
For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. Also, conductors frequently have perfect pitch, probably because a strong musical memory and being able to sight sing on pitch from a score are valuable and depend to a certain extent on perfect pitch. See here for a lot more.
Perfect pitch is by no means a requirement for musicians, although it is more common than in the general population, even more so for conductors.
But intonation is equally easy/hard for absolute and relative ears. Some tasks, like transposition, can require more practice for people with perfect pitch.
Source: lived experience from my doctorate in music from Sibelius Academy, Helsinki.
There are some downsides of perfect pitch. For one, choral singers with perfect pitch sometimes have a hard time re-tuning if the rest of the choir shifts pitch. (This can happen naturally over a long piece that has no accompaniment.)
Another downside is that almost all people with perfect pitch lose it when they hit a certain age. Imagine being an accomplished painter. One day, you wake up and see leaves as blue-ish green instead of green. It might be difficult to adjust to no longer being able to see the world in color.
Absolute pitch is a curse for musicians. It's not even an asset unless you are a piano tuner or a transcription professional of some sort. Not many conductors have it. Only a handful of the great musicians in history, from classical to jazz to pop happened to have AP. It's a parlor trick. And many musicians thought to have perfect pitch actually were just great recognizing pitches - pitch memory - which is different from perfect pitch. I can recognize pitches with a ~50% accuracy just because I can either recall the note, or bend my vocal chords as if I would start singing the note and, from pure muscle memory, say "this is probably an E".
Absolute pitch basically spoils the musician's ability to deal with varying pitch and musical temperament[1] situations and instruments. It can drive them nuts, ie if given a C to sing but actually have to detune or transpose it on the fly. It's also detrimental for anyone's ability to purely enjoy music. _Relative pitch_ on the other hand is so much more important. Absolute pitch in fact can mess with your relative pitch, as C and Ab are just that C and Ab, not a minor 6th.
Also, a good sense of being in tune when playing with others is, obviously, fundamental but also a relative, not absolute, in essence. Knowing you are playing in tune, not perfectly pitched, is the asset needed by bowed string players. Relative pitch, not AP, is an asset for someone who needs to sight sing on pitch - just listen to your tuning fork and find that C or Ab.
Music is not a perfect craft, it's not about being digitally precise. Making music is not about frequencies, or hitting absolute hertz. Even pitch itself is not "perfect", it's a flawed system that people, in part for the sake of standardization, settled upon. Pitch is a size that does not fit all. So why would anyone be proud of have frequencies memorized?
I wouldn't go that far — it was occasionally advantageous for me as a singer, when sight-reading music with a ton of weird intervals (e.g. Poulenc's Quatre Motets).
> For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch.
The benefit is rather small if you look at ear training for professional musicians and what properly trained relative pitch looks like. It basically doesn't matter anymore as soon as a professional musician holds his/her instrument. In short: There is basically no difference anymore as soon as the trained musician without perfect pitch gets provided 1 reference tone (which is why perfect pitch gets commonly attributed to people that do not have it).
It is more like a "shortcut" when it comes to ear training, but ultimately a professional musician with perfect pitch and a professional musician without pefect pitch arrive at basically the same destination in practice, making the advantage minimal when it comes to the things a musician actually does.
Rick Beato has a certain kind of obsession with the topic that makes it seem so much more important than it actually is in the real world.
Also noteworthy that there are disadvantages to perfect pitch (transposing instruments, losing it with age, etc.), and interesting video on that topic by Adam Neely [1] was already linked.
His hypothesis, based on some studies, is that children in ealy age have ability for perfect pitch but later loose it, if it's not utilized. The same way as young children are able to percieve any phoneme of any language, but later loose this ability and only recognise phonemes of the language spoken in the family (that's a known scientific fact).
It's something you commonly see in videos with YouTubers showing off their kids. The adult is trying to make an engaging video and the kid just looks bored or shy around the camera.
My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening to an exhaust pipe.
I also had a classmate who could identify any pitch to the exact frequency, so A443 versus A440, for example. Of course we tested him.
In the old days of PCs (maybe even now) there was a way to click the speaker at a specific frequency- I wrote a simple x86 code to click, delay, click, delay and proudly told my office mate that I could make my computer play A440.
He listened for a bit and said, nope that's 441 or so. I checked, and my program had a tiny bug where it wasn't delaying long enough. Fixed that, he verified it was now A440. He said he had perfect pitch and it was really annoying because almost everything was out of tune.
Did you ever test his ability to recognize pure sine waves?
Ofc, each note is actually composed of ~40 frequencies at different levels (timbre). That’s why different instruments playing the same “frequency” sound different
Heard somewhere that absolute pitch folks sometimes struggle with sine waves (no timbre)
There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch".
After the first note is known, the two are mostly indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can, once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch don't even need to be told what that first note is.
(This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance, whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the same.)
I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern?
When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand.
It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in identifying pitch, because the distortion would just sound differently depending on pitch - I associated it with a few notes and could roughly identify them - especially the lower ones (E, D and C# specifically).
The effect faded over time and now I can't do it any more.
In any case, non-newtonian fluids exhibit such distortion and the body is full of them(most notably blood). I wonder if they play any role in this?
Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other things. People learn to identify the pitches because they sound different and learn the names for them.
Nerd note: the name "Perfect pitch" is something of a misnomer because the frequencies the note names refer to is a social construct which has changed over time[1]. A=440 is the predominant concert pitch now but since "pitch taste" generally gets brighter/sharper over time A=443 is used now by the Berlin Philharmonic for example instead as a concert pitch. In the Baroque period we know (from looking at surviving fixed-pitch instruments like historical organs) that their reference A was generally a bit flatter than that but it's not consistent. Nowadays musicians playing historically-informed performances have settled on A=415 as a common baroque pitch standard because it's helpful for everyone to agree so they can have instruments made that play that pitch standard.
I don't think "pitch taste" is a good way of describing it. It's not about the pitch itself. It's about the timbre. Musicians wanted a brighter sound, which they could accomplish, for example, by tightening their strings a little more. I personally really like a darker mellow sound and very much enjoy the 415 A and historically informed performances. I also think pushing to a 443 modern A is stupid and tune all my ensembles to 440. There is a little practical bonus to starting higher, though, which is that it helps mitigate the tendency of pitch to drop over the course of the piece.
> Absolute pitch is just a learned skill like a lot of other things.
Is that true though? I had a friend in college who had perfect pitch. I asked him all the time how he learned it, and he said he didn't know. It just started happening. He never explicitly trained for it.
It also wasn't just about notes. He could nearly instantaneously tell chords and keys from the radio or going to the symphony. I would test him using my guitar as well, an instrument he didn't play.
It's quite rare to obtain skills by never practicing them.
I've had it in my right ear ever since being exposed to a loud engine for 9+ hours in 2021. It gets noticeable for loud sounds, especially in the 3700-5200hz range; in my right ear, I'll hear a high-pitched ringing overtone on top of whatever external I'm hearing. It's quite frustrating, but seems to come and go. Nice to hear that it faded over time for you - gives me hope!
I think it was three years before it stopped being unpleasant and another three that made it largely go away.
I remember designing an amplifier circuit for a college project, listening to the output sine wave while looking at the frequency domain and thinking "that unpleasant feeling is just the THD being over 0,5%".
I can't sing or carry a tune to save my life and have a speech impediment, but I can tune a guitar or a piano by ear, confirmed by tuning fork.
From ages roughly 10-25, I could tell the type of (US civilian or military) aircraft or helicopter flying above and the number of engines it had without looking.
My hearing now is fairly shot and I have SCDS. I can hear my left eyeball move, eating chips is a noisy affair, and it sounds like water is perpetually in my left ear.
That is a very interesting constellation of symptoms. Thank you for sharing, and I feel for you. I have much acute sensitive hearing response than the rest of my family and friends and it’s a hard thing to explain with no one else notices.
For me however it’s a largely positive experience. I am hugely grateful for things like the sounds of frogs, birds, voices I like, movie soundtracks, and for cleanly processed digital music.
On the other hand, musicians playing or singing out of tune, gives me a visceral response, and I have been down to leave clubs when a musician is having a slightly off night.
do you also suffer from ( sometimes socially compromising) misophonia as well? I also have what I consider to be above average hearing sensitivity, although not to the point where artifacts from music compression bother me that much. I don't have an official testing result to prove or define this in quantifiable terms, only that I seem to notice things in the ambient sound environment that most others either don't notice or tune out, and this has at least as many downsides as benefits.
If someone is a loud chewer, or drink slurper, it's as if I can hear every single bit of muscle and conjunctiva flexing and saliva sloshing around inside their jaw, and the glorp glorp sound of their swallows, if we're both in an otherwise quiet room. Or if there is a car alarm going off or dog barking three blocks away, sounds other people appear to be completely unaware of or passively filter out can sometimes drive me into quiet boiling stress that is completely irrational yet impossible to reason myself out of, and i just have to leave.
Unrelated to SCDS, I have misophonia* and hyperacusis#.
* Certain external sounds (mostly by other people) raise a limbic rage or anger, such as chewing, raking silverware with teeth, crunching, or rustling food packets. People who don't chew with their mouths closed are painful.
# Painful to hear certain intensities of certain frequencies. I believe the SCDS is also causing vestibular problems. For example, deep subsonic bass cause my eyes to slew up and to the side with the beat involuntarily, with momentary nausea (almost vertigo). It's beyond simple nystagmus. (It's not vertigo, but I've had that and bought the silly vertigo bubble level hat.)
SCDS maybe caused and worsened by the gradual thinning of my already paper-thin superior canal plate with age.
Exactly as you describe. Agonizing but it sounds insane to people so you can’t say anything. I excuse myself from social situations more than once a week.
Oh, this is a fun (deep-fried sarcasm here) thing to have, ask me how I know.
It's not well researched, but apparently what you (or actually we) are feeling is a fight-or-flight response.
I started using it to gauge whether I'm upset with a particular person over something, because it would intensify in such cases, and reflect on that.
Also helped my friend manually remove breath and lip sounds from a recording he was doing for an indie mod for a game because, well, with enough compression it was painful to listen to for me.
The only known condition for hearing one's eyeball move is a 3rd window somewhere in the inner ear, so there's no meaningful differential diagnosis. I received a formal diagnosis by an otolaryngologist (via high-resolution CT of the superior canal) and audiology but I already knew the conclusion.
I could get brain surgery and I'm "a good candidate" for it, but do I really want a surgeon cutting a large hole in the side of my head, jacking up my brain, and then packing my superior canal with my spare tissue*?
* I flatly refuse to have tissue implanted that isn't my own.
I used to recognize cars by their engine-noises, and hear bats when I was walking home through various parks late at night up until I was early twenties.
These days too much loud metal, and age, have taken their toll, and I have no ability to do either of these things any more.
Is absolute pitch something you would actually want? From what I’ve read as people with absolute pitch get into late middle age in many their reference drifts and they start to perceive music that is in tune as being out of tune. For some this makes it hard to continue to enjoy music.
People with relative pitch can learn specific notes well enough to be able to recognize them given the constraint that the note is being played roughly in tune on an instrument tuned to the common tunings of the music they are familiar with, and they can learn to recognize intervals.
This allows them with practice to identify notes almost as fast as someone with absolute pitch, and allows them to do all the practical musical things people with absolute pitch can do.
Yea, absolute pitch is not very valuable for musicians. Interval training is much more common, where you train on the differences between notes (maj 3rd, minor 6th etc.). Good interval skills make improvisation and composition much easier. If you know the key you're in having absolute pitch doesn't really add anything, and if you're lacking in understanding intervals it won't make up for it.
Interval-training is a lot more useful. Regardless of what key you're in, particularly if you're not playing (or don't know how to play) from sheet music. E.g. given two notes, what is the distance between them in semitones.
Once you can recognize any interval then, given a pitch, you can identify the other notes in any chord (major, minor, etc.) it's a part of. Useful for tuning instruments (e.g. guitar). Useful for understanding chord notation (charts), and what chords are being used (progressions). Useful for quickly figuring out all the notes in a melody. (Especially one you want to remember.) Useful for deciding what -scale- is being used (dorian, phrygian, pentatonic, etc.)
While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
I have good relative pitch but my friends with a more "restricted" sense of pitch shall we say seem to be less open minded, have a tougher time appreciating some of the music I love despite its disorder or imperfections. I don't have any problem appreciating what they like.
Heh, I'm that friend in my circle. I certainly don't bash anyone's music preferences but everyone has to know why a song/artist "just isn't my thing," and I get the "snob" label. Ah well.
But I get where your friend is coming from. When I hear something off pitch, for whatever reason, it's just distracting and pure cacophony.
My impression from talking to musicians with absolute pitch is that it’s more an annoyance than anything. They’re always hearing how things in the real world are slightly off pitch.
A person with perfect pitch can no more turn off knowing the pitch of a sound than a person with relative pitch can turn off knowing if one sound is a higher pitch than another.
How much "resolution" do their ears have? Like can someone with absolute pitch tell whether an instrument is in 12-ET or just intonation without a reference?
I have very good relative pitch and used to moonlight as a harpsichord tuner. I can tell you if an instrument is in equal temperament - an equal-tempered fifth and an equal-tempered third have very distinctive sounds. With enough time, I can also identify most of the common baroque temperaments: Just Intonation and quarter-comma meantone stick out like a sore thumb, but tunings like Werckmeister and the others that attempt to be close to equally tempered are harder to pick out by ear since you really need to hear a lot of the circle of fifths to identify which one is used.
However, this skill isn't due to hearing a precise gap between the two notes, but listening to the beating of the overtones of the notes. It's a very different skill than what you learn in school to identify intervals.
Also, professional string players can often tune equal tempered fifths (~2 cents flat of a pure fifth) precisely on their instruments.
Perfect pitch is a simplification, it's not really binary like you either have it or don't. People have varying ability, practice, and speed at identifying a note relative to a reference, and "perfect" is how we describe being past some threshold.
When we talk about perfect pitch we're usually assuming 12-tet tuned to A440 but you correctly homed in on the "problem" with perfect pitch. Is that C a little sharp, or did they just tune to A446 for some reason? Just intonation, microtonal scales, there are a lot of notes out there. How do you know they're "wrong" and not just trying to play the note that sounds out of tune to your ear. "Perfect" has to be established against some intention, we just usually assume 12-tet A440.
Anyway the ability is at least somewhat a matter of practice and training, so you can develop it against any consistent reference, regardless of the tuning or intonation system.
That’s a question about relative pitches, not absolute - you can definitely hear if e.g. the third is a little sharp or flat even if you don’t have perfect absolute pitch.
More generally, I think the answer is “pretty high-resolution”. Lots of people can definitely hear the difference between equal and just temperament.
IIRC most people’s hearing is accurate to around 10 cents (a tenth of a semitone). Wikipedia suggests musicians generally tune to within 12 cents, and the “just noticeable difference” is 5-6.
You’d only need absolute accuracy better than 50 cents to be able to correctly name a note on the piano. I’d guess most people with perfect pitch are more accurate than that, likely around the same ~10 cents mark.
Anecdotally, I have a musician friend with perfect pitch who finds it annoying sometime, as they find it unsettling when music is tuned slightly sharp or flat; so I think their sensitivity is much finer than a semitone.
Intonation is a matter of relative pitch. I have good relative pitch, and can distinguish intonation to a degree.
People with absolute pitch can nonetheless distinguish pitch with better than semitone accuracy. This is why it's often a hindrance, because if an ensemble is tuned to a slightly different reference, it is quite noticeable to them.
I've wondered if it's possible to train exact, frequency-based pitch, instead of this relative tuning-based absolute pitch. I wonder if that would be as discordant to the trained ear when switching to another tuning.
It can be useful, but it's not necessary to have perfect pitch to be a musician. Relative pitch (the ability to identify notes relative to each other) can be learned and is good enough.
Here in Brazil we have churches that allows members to sing songs from a book that we call it Christian Harp[1] as part of the worship, the result is a lot of people who can't sing to save their own life end up singing and musicians from the church try to find the song key and chords in real time, it ends up being a great practice to develop a good ear.
Thanks for the video link! Very cool. The poor singing combined with the on-the-fly guitar tuning gave the piece a grungy punk-like feel, at least to my ears. I rather enjoyed it.
A cute (translated) comment from the video: “To sing with this guitarist is easy! Just praise the Lord and he does the rest!”
Yeah my mom is a piano teacher and described the same difficulty. In university (USSR) they would play the same song twice. The first time she got all the notes and the second time she’d fill in the melody. Other students without perfect pitch would be able to transcribe the entire thing the first time and just use the second time to correct any mistakes they made.
Ah, this answers my question above about “switching modes” to relative. Sounds like that’s not a thing. But can you hear chord qualities independently of pitch? I hope you’re not just getting a bunch of individual notes and doing interval math all the time!
I can tell chord qualities fine. But I'd never be as good as someone with good relative pitch. For example, music majors have classes in sight singing: this is where the professor plays a note, say, a C, and tells everyone it's a C, then proceeds to play a sequence of chords and people learn to write down the chords based on relative position. But I and another student with perfect pitch would ace the class by just writing down the chords based on what they actually were. This went on until he started playing, say, a C and then telling everyone it's an F#. Then he'd play a sequence of chords relative to C and everybody would write them down relative to F#. Everyone except for us two, who were totally hosed.
When I went to my parent's church, the organist would spot me and then immediately transpose the organ down a half step. Nobody noticed in the entire room except for me -- I couldn't sing any hymns because the notes didn't match what was on the sheet. It was his private prank just between us two, and he knew that I was the only other person in the room who knew what he had done to me.
It also makes it really difficult to play out-of-tune instruments. The piano in our local pub is a whole tone flat and it confuses the hell out of me... there's a mismatch between what my brain thinks I'm playing and the sound that's coming out.
Interesting, I also play jazz with perfect pitch, but I always just think in absolute pitch even when there's a lot of modulation (and also learned my instrument in concert pitch).
With good enough sense of relative pitch it's almost a non-issue as one is usually only a half step away from in-key and that can be played off as deliberate.
Nah you're right, intervals ear training will always give you more bang for your buck than absolute pitch, and even though absolute pitch is trainable, I don't know any serious musicians who have put effort into it. This is why I think folks think absolute pitch is innate (it isn't): some folks just have a knack for it, and those who don't quickly learn that the effort to build the skill isn't worth the payoff.
As an amateur musician and composer who doesn’t have it, seems like it would be handy for transcription and tuning, but I don’t know what else. You must still be able to “switch modes” to relative, right? Otherwise you couldn’t even hear musical structures the same way, because aside from timbre they’re all relative.
My mom says it’s helpful for her as a music teacher. It was annoying when she tried to teach me piano and she’d be cooking in the kitchen and I’d be playing in the other room and she’d call out when I made a mistake. But that’s probably just because I was an ornery student. Objectively my mom is a fantastic teacher. Her students all do really well in competitions and my nieces love playing with her. I’m sure perfect pitch is only a small part of it but it helps.
It seems like hearing someone make a mistake, especially on a piano (vs a trombone or violin), isn't related at all to perfect pitch... unless the mistake is playing the whole piece in the wrong key
I used to moonlight as a harpsichord tuner, and I didn't know anyone in the field or any piano tuners with perfect pitch. As I understand it, it doesn't help at all because perfect pitch is not precise enough to tell 440 Hz from 440.1 Hz for example, while you can do that easily with a tuning fork (once you learn how to listen for the beats). On the flipside, unequal temperaments - which are frequently used if you are a harpsichord tuner - are hell for people with perfect pitch who listen to only equally-tempered music. When you "merely" have relative pitch, unequal temperaments can actually be nice.
Not that useful if you have very good relative pitch. One advantage is you can walk in a jam and start playing from bar 1, instead of having to figure out which key they're in. However if you have good relative pitch you can also figure it out within 10 seconds.
Even in music it is not that helpful to be honest. Eg. most live shows you tune the instruments to the piano. If the piano is slightly out of tune, someone with perfect pitch will be annoyed the entire time trying to deal with that while everyone else hears a perfectly good concert.
having good relative pitch is way more useful.
Many musicians with perfect pitch have also been really obsessed with tuning in their recordings and it sets off a lot of anxiety for them cause they can hear themselves the smallest amount off, when no one else can and the performance makes it a perfect take to use in the song.
It can be helpful I guess for composing, but as someone who does composing, it's not hard to just tinker with a piano to get the notes I want, no need to be able to perfectly hum them when I think of them.
Relative pitch is quite helpful to have. However, I have absolute pitch and I find it quite helpful as well.
- I can hear things in my head and play them directly on the instrument more or less on the first try
- I can improvise with others and catch what key/etc they are in quickly
- As we practice, we get a sort of kinetic/physical memory for remembering music, but also this can feedback into that "hear things in head, play them on the instrument" – so I feel like memorizing things can be assisted by absolute pitch
- I can remember music I heard and play it back easier
There's a lot of people saying it's not helpful, but I have to wonder if they have experienced having it or not? If they have it and find it unhelpful that's fine… but I've experienced it as nothing _but_ helpful to me.
We have the visual equivalent by default. You can look at something and make a confident determination that it's "red" or "blue", not just that it's "redder than the color next to it".
We can tell if something is red or blue, but red and blue are huge spectra. That's like telling the first third of a piano keyboard from the second. Even I can do it. Absolute pitch is more like telling exactly what wavelength it is (to a certain degree of course). Most people can't do that.
There was once a meme called "the dress" that shows that color perception is very relative. Some people see it black and blue, others see it white and gold.
It makes composition easier. By that I mean, I can mentally simulate music and pick out the sequence of tones to write it down in sheet music or a DAW piano roll, and I don't need to 'calibrate' my pitch beforehand.
One of my high school teachers ( at a special public arts high school ), heard the lawnmower going outside. He darted to the piano and immediatley conjugated the chord then exclaimed the cadence. I was kind of dumb founded at the time.
Not that helpful. It's a bit akin to being able to tell which individual letters are in a word spoken.
It might make some genres of music less enjoyable as they sound too predictable.
It does help to play improvisation with other musicians.
As far as I know there is a similar but probably not exactly the same, "super sellers" - perfume companies hire those with the skill to be their perfumers or "noses".
Lately I have a theory about perfect pitch training as an 18+ year old human, I think we will achieve it (my friend and I) via the following: Using Tuesdays to practice E chord songs, using Thursdays to practice C# minor chord songs. One day play only E songs, one day play only C#m songs, do this several weeks, pick 2 new chords for 2 fresh days, repeat.
I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.)
If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. They practice by associating a different colored flag with each chord.
Had to look up the technique, Eguchi method, and it uses color rather than complicated musical notation to associate with each key. Interesting how those who have synesthesia naturally have this same color, key association.
I have a step in my fashion work where I pause and consider what the colors I’m selecting will look and feel like to a normal person. Converting back and forth between [optimistic-seaglass-springtime] and “teal” isn’t very accurate, but I’m certainly accustomed to it. I’m going to try this technique soon now that I know about it; as I’m already color sensitive to pitch, I suspect the value will be in training that sensitivity rather than memorizing their hues.
Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which I'm hearing all the fucking time.
My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect pitch.
If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, not just what's on the top 40 radio.
Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes if we had a language codified that way.
This is more like learning phonemes. It significantly helps language acquisition to expose your children to a lot of different word sounds. Similarly, if you only play top 40 pop music or baroque music, your child likely won't be able to acquire perfect pitch.
They do, most kids learn to say words perfectly imitating what they hear, including regional accents. Of course some people have speech impediments but it's a minority.
Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are).
Many people have absolute pitch for certain well known sounds.
Who can't tell if a sine wave sound is higher or lower than the emergency broadcast tone. That tone is 1000 hz.
So, that is absolute pitch, just low resolution. I'm assuming if you can add in a lot of reference points that you know well, you could get better resolution.
You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ in our church is a quarter-tone sharp.
The goal should be very very very good relative pitch.
I've heard that some people with absolute pitch lose it as they age (50's and 60's), but they tend to lose it in a weird way. Apparently, they still have absolute pitch in a sense, but it just kind of shifts over time so it's a little offset. It'd be like if you could still see color, but all the sudden your blues started to look purple or something like that. Curious if anyone with absolute pitch can confirm.
What's with nerddom's fascination with absolute pitch? I've already made several lifetimes' worth of ruckus in my few and am continually only barely learning to listen. Is it because for so many of us music lessons have proved a more affordable form of childcare than the presence of a compassionate, listening human being?
If you ask me, it's pretty fucking neat if you're someone who from some early years is already fluent in the universal language of 440Hz. But chief, what do we do with the 438Hz ninjas from the other village then? And there surely must be a solution to many of existentialism's pointless crises to be found in elucidating a universal theory of how brains pick up language, music, (hello tonal languages), maths, and all other myriad traditional symbol systems using the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.
But every day this spring, hearing the birds outside teaches me new unique facets of the sense of hearing. (It's a mad racket out there - there are the birds that I could possibly learn to name, and then there is this one that sounds totally out there - nuff said). Funny testament of how we seek to cultivate in others what we fail to cultivate in ourselves.
The committee for meta-ethics is mildly piffed at un(ac)countable replications of the natural phenomenon that, yes, young children can be taught symbol systems of arbitrary complexity up to maximum sensory perception (and, if they're anything like us, they'll even manage to pick up a bunch of metaphysical spooks on the way to the oceanic moment of unlearning it all and interfacing more directly with "real reality" beyond their nervous system lol)
Thankfully, if they're anything like us, by middle age they will have reverted back to monkeys.
I'm in my 30s and have had almost 0 experience in music before. I bought my toddler a xylophone a few months ago and I started playing random keys (just trying to improvise a melody on the spot) every day or so for less than an hour each time... Then after about a month, I found that I could teach myself to play pretty much any piece of music from memory in only a few minutes (national anthem level complexity). My improvised melodies have been getting better as well.
The xylophone helps a lot because each note has a different color and so I now associate each color with a particular sound. I tend to think of notes as (left to right) going from sad to happy. There are 2 notes I use as a reference which are 'emotionally stable'; one on the left (sad) side and one on the right (happy) side. On the left side, there is a blue note which I consider to be the last one in the 'sad' spectrum just before it gets happy... And on the right side, there is a yellow note which is at the end of the 'happy' spectrum just before the mood goes into a kind of mania.
However, I played a rehearsal and two concerts this week. I know that my pitch dissipates after a period of time. As a kid, I could tune my cello by ear, but I noticed after coming back from a long family vacation, I had lost that ability. It came back quickly, but still, it means that I don't really have perfect pitch.
I was forced to learn piano when I was 6, really hated it and ended in 2 years. When I really got into music in high school and started playing guitar it's an amazing feeling to discover I actually have perfect pitch. However the perfect pitch I have is an inferior one, I sometimes even miss a note by a half step, curious if someone is the same.
People can have absolute/exception memory for other things too. I dated a woman who could look at a bit of cloth and say "that's the same colour as..." and be right every time. Even when she hadn't seen the other item of clothing for months. It made shopping with her somewhat less painful because she wasn't constantly swapping things just to look at the colours.
Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.
I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names and sound.
But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear I'll nearly always start on the right note.
What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect it could be developed it were a priority.
A member of my family is an interesting case, in that he technically doesn't have perfect pitch, but does for all practical purposes. He has a clear memory of a particular note that he heard as a child and can recount that memory. Years later he is able to identify the pitch of anything by comparing it with that memory. He might think about it for a second or hum a note to himself, but invariably can identify the pitch without have to hear a reference (apart from the one in his head).
He's got the best of both worlds, in that he doesn't get driven crazy by something being out of tune, but can accurately name a pitch without a reference. He's also been able to transpose on the fly from an early age.
The opening F# upward octave in Paganini's La Campanella is that pitch memory for me. It's fairly well seared in my brain from violin practice. It's very similar for me where I remember the F# pitch and then work out the relationship to the heard tone. However, I am worse with non-orchestral instruments. I think I "cheat" by remembering The timbre of the instrument in certain ranges. I'm most accurate with my own instrument (violin). The less I practice though, the harder it is getting to remember the pitch. I always figured I was somewhere between relative and perfect pitch. I'm curious what this training could do for adult musicians.
Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up during a critical period in early life. However, there was a fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill!
Wow, thanks for the link. Hopefully this doesn't leak too much medical information, but I used to take valproate for epilepsy and the time when I was on it almost directly corresponds to an unexpected and sharp rise in my musical ability/accomplishment. How much of this is attributable to the drug, I don't know — high schoolers discover they're good at something and throw themselves into it all the time — but I had piddled around the typical childhood music lessons a bunch as a child without demonstrating any remarkable talent. Certainly my trajectory was unexpected, this is very interesting.
For funny historical reasons, the english tone B is called H in some countries, especially northern and central europe. (English B-flat is called B there)
Wherever that figure is from.
One time in physics lab we had an experiment with tuning forks. I rung the fork, put it to my ear, did the “do re mi” song in my head and I unmistakably recognized that one of the notes matched. I told my lab partner, we looked it up and determined that I was correct.
I don’t have much musical training, I’ve tried to learn an instrument a few times but never motived myself to practice.
Really slow (impossible) to train, if some understanding/training for realtive pitch is already present. Try with one single note, training session is over, because at that moment the brain switches to relative mode, and refuses to process absoltute information. A couple (max) of individual stimulations per day isn't sufficient to learn.
About this time I always "begin" to wonder how helpful would it really be for someone born with perfect pitch today at A=440 if they would have instead been born during a previous century when the recognized standard pitch was seldom A=440?
I would have to imagine it would drive some of them nuts.
I don’t think that’s how perfect pitch works, it might be more accurately described as tone memory. For example I’ve “memorized” the sound of standard C=262Hz and can work to other notes from there. But I imagine if C=259Hz instead it would have made no difference to my ability to recall it.
I don't care if the acoustic piano is C=259 or the full 262. The guitar and bass (and electronic keyboard!) just need to tune to it either way, a good singer can then follow and everything will sound fine regardless.
But if people were truly born with perfect pitch you would expect them to be stuck at one particular reference frequency.
And conversely if they only gained outstanding pitch reference during certain formative years, you would expect that would have been relative to the prevailing external reference they were exposed to at the time.
So if some isolated child had great pitch but unfortunately was only exposed formatively to a non-standard reference they might be SOL if they could not adjust in later years to join a mainstream orchestra or something.
In addition the agreed-upon reference frequencies have been a moving target over the long run.
Perfect here may be more like perfect in a wide range of ways more so than really absolute.
Some people sure can tune an instrument in isolation using no external reference and it will be a perfect A=440 even without the ability to identify notes by name, that seems to be very helpful right there.
I do not have perfect pitch but the concept of pitch memory is something I’ve experienced. I’ll occasionally hear a chord or a pitch and then a song will also pop in my head. I started ear training in college and it was pretty rough but has come a long way
Perfect pitch can be acquired by anyone. It’s the ability to distinguish notes by their unique sound characteristic much like seeing colors of the rainbow. It’s akin to “color hearing”.
I've read that perfect pitch can be a burden later in life, because it wanders. So as an older person, you still have the notes in your head, but they're off by a little bit.
The Japanese method is based on chord identification, but I found that note identification worked directly. Play a note, point out a toy of that color. Kid brings a toy, play the note for the color. Kid plays a note, you bring a toy. Color association is the tool that lets you connect the music to everyday things and make up all kinds of natural games that interact with the kid’s interests.
If your kid can achieve absolute pitch in geometric space, like.. epsg:4978? That would be epic. Your kid could always tell you what coordinates you're at if you're standing at a known angle.
Sort of but not exactly. The way I'd explain it as someone who's had to deal with a lot but has not been formally trained in it is that WGS 84 is a system for reasoning about the earth spatially. EPSG:4978 and its more commonly used sister EPSG:4326 are standardized ways of writing down coordinates relative to the WGS84 model of the earth.
The "joke" in my comment is that EPSG:4978 coordinates are written down in distance in meters from the center of the earth, as a sort of absolute position that's nice to use in maths. In contrast to EPSG:4326 where coordinates are written down (usually in degrees) relative to the equator and a line through some place in England over an idealized representation of the surface of the earth.
I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice.
Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.