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Comment by sureaboutthis | Hacker News Reader

I had a friend, Jim, who was blind. He went to school to become a piano tuner. Once, we were at another friend's house who had a piano. The friend played a short piece on the piano and Jim mentioned that it could use some tuning and went on to claim he had perfect pitch hearing. Well, of course, we had to test him.

We hit one key. "That's D!", he said.

We hit another. "That's G!"

With a smirk, my friend pressed three keys at once.

"Uh, Uh, B, D and F#!"

We were amazed.

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I have a somewhat similar funny story. I was ill a lot as a child, and spent a lot of time at home as a consequence. My mom would go to work, my sister to school and I would be in an empty house with not much to do but play with toys or read which you can only do so much of before getting bored. So I would play the records, especially the piano ones because I loved the sound of the piano. And then I'd try to imitate the music on the piano, which was hard enough to keep me busy for a while. And so, over the course of a week or so I taught myself to play Fur Elise (the easy part...). Then, one evening with my mom at home I played her the piece to ask what she thought of it and she burst out laughing wondering what music sheets I had used because it was all wrong: transposed downwards. It turned out the record player was a bit slow...

I'm really happy I picked computers over music because I think that it was more in line with my skills and it is super hard to make a living in music if you are not absolutely top grade, and even then it is hard. But I've always enjoyed music very much.

Super impressive what your blind friend did there, especially to be able to name them like that, I could pick out the chord after a number of tries but to be able to decompose a chord like that without being able to try whether you have it right or not is quite a skill. I'd love to be able to do that but I am not sure how you would train that particular ability.

The number of blind piano tuners is probably much larger than what you'd expect from statistics, I know of two myself, one in Toronto at Lowrey's and another in Amsterdam who used to work for Cristofiori. That's one profession where lack of sight is not an obstacle, and where a better developed sense of hearing is an asset.

Of course, once he'd got the first note right, he didn't need perfect pitch to get the second one. Is there a reset procedure for testing perfect pitch? Some confusing sequence of slidey trombone sounds? Just listen to Shepard tones for a while?

One of my kids has perfect pitch and it's very weird. I used to randomly test her with things and she was never wrong. I'd ask what note the microwave beeps or her toothbrush buzzes and she could easily say answer the question (or at least say what two notes the noise falls between).

In real psychophysics experiments, you never tell the subjects if they were right or wrong (in fact, double blindness means not even the experimenter knows). So in that case you could try using relative estimates, but it won't increase the expectation of the accuracy.

In our church choir, if the conductor wants us to "forget" the key we've been singing in, he just has the accompanist lean both arms onto the piano keyboard all at once.

Many good musicians can do that, especially if they have a reference pitch (I have A-440 pretty much memorized from years playing in orchestra). The chord would take more time to reason out, but a standard chord (like the B-minor one you mention) would be quite quick.

I sing with someone that has perfect pitch (not just good relative pitch like I have). He can immediately identify a note at random, but has a very hard time when we want to transpose a piece—he's never really had to learn how to figure out intervals.

We had a deaf tuner. He “heard” through his hands.

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