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What you describe could be perfect relative or absolute pitch. While it is generally not possible to learn perfect absolute pitch, perfect relative pitch is completely learnable and if done with a high degree of skill, is almost completely indistinguishable from perfect absolute pitch. The reason it becomes indistinguishable is because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time and thus turn the relative pitches into absolute ones.

In a lot of ways, perfect relative pitch is better than absolute pitch because absolute pitch tends to go away as people get older and because it works better in ensembles since A is rarely exactly 440hz. In fact, historical Baroque performances deliberately tune to a different pitch standard. Another element is if you play an instrument like a wind instrument or a violin, it is common to adjust pitches on chords to get closer to pure chords (most commonly, major thirds are lowered though that is not the only adjustment). Absolute pitch can get in the way of these subtle adjustments since it feels wrong.

Fascinating remark. I don't have perfect (abs) pitch and never heard of the relative variety. But I grew up playing piano, mostly on my own time, which means I'm extremely comfortable playing anything I hear in C, and just slightly slower at repeating things in A#. My brain has to transpose. But now I play pedal steel slide, and I have a trick to picking up any song quickly. I find the root chord of a song and intentionally forget what it was... so I'm not playing in F or A. I remap my brain at the start of that song to remember that tone as C. And then I can find everything without thinking about it. If I think "where's the 7th of C#" I'd have to do a few steps in my head. But once I've got the hands synced with an artificial idea of "C" I know exactly where my options are. So in a way it really may be better than perfect pitch, because I can remap a song's scale to a keyboard in my head and then strum one or two times between songs and "remap" the "C". I realize that makes me uh... hahah not Mozart. But it works to let me forget what I'm playing and just play.

Same experience here with a pedal steel. That's why I am now pushing my bandmates to adopt the Nashville Notation System which only deals in relative position of chords in the scale[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Number_System

Hah! I love that there's another PSG player on HN who gets this right away... that's awesome. I never heard of this system specifically... I feel like a singer holding up 3, 4 or 5 fingers has been the way I've been cued lots of times to changes in a song I barely knew, without me even thinking that was a system. I bet they didn't either. Separately, I know zero music theory... but PSG really was what let my brain get comfortable with a 3rd of a 4th being a 6th that was two frets down from the 5th of the root... I think probably engaging your knees and ankles in reaching for the physical positions in time builds almost like a muscle memory of the musical relationships... like the kind of control you get driving a manual car... but only if you already have the tones you're looking for in your head, and you know where you're going. PSG is the most mindbending realtime puzzle to play... so it makes sense that players need tricks to know where to go from a certain position (especially if you find yourself stuck in one when you jump into a song)

I learned about that in the Paul Franklin online course (expensive, but worth the money if you are unable to find a personnal teacher, yay europe). I don't have absolute pitch (and a crappy relative one), but this "standardisation" based on the root note really helps build a knowledge of how chord changes "feel". I suspect this is what builds this ability to easily find the right notes when improvising. Weel anyway, always happy to find people keeping the steel alive !

I play guitar. I amaze people when I say I have no idea what notes I'm playing. I know the Nashville Number System (learned it before knowing it had a name) and use that. So going back to your example - I find the root and that's my 1. Next I look for does it have a 3 or b3, i.e. is it major or minor? That'll drive me to a major pentatonic or minor pentatonic. For a lot of songs you can stop there. There's a note that's outside of the pentatonic? That'll indicate your mode.

The nice thing about the Nashville Number System and guitar is once you have this information and know what your 1 is it's a set of patterns. You can put my 1 anywhere on the fretboard and I know what to play. Makes transposing super simple too.

Bottom line - I think in intervals, not notes. When playing a song by ear, which is how I mostly play, I could be off by a semitone or two but it doesn't matter: point our where the 1 really is and I'm still good to go.

This sounds very similar to how DAW (digital audio workstation) software has features to "transpose" pitch. You essentially just move one of the notes to where you want it to be and all other notes get transposed relative to it.

> because highly skilled musicians are able to remember a reference pitch for a very long period of time.

Not just highly skilled ones. I just checked, and I still have my A-flat 2 reference note that I've been carrying around since 2013, having not used it for at least 5 years and barely doing any singing/piano these days.

How do you know? I don't mean this in a challenging way. Just that I'm completely ignorant to how one would even test these things.

To test whether your memory of a pitch is correct, you can just sing a note then listen to a reference sound in close succession. Absolute pitch ability is not required to tell whether pitches match.

Can't you just listen to a song you know well in your head, and be aware what the notes are?

the reference note needs to be listened in your ear to check wether the note you are imagining matches the reality, if it does then you can confidently (if you have trained it) find the intervals.

It was the first note in a vocal concert, no accompaniment, no cueing, and I remember that it's A flat. I just googled A flat 2 and sang what I was thinking of. When the recording started, it matched my pitch.

So if I hear the opening bar of either The Simpsons or Futurama, I can absolutely tell if it's been pitch shifted, even slightly. Some episodes of Futurama have a slightly sped up opening theme to make up for the episode being a bit too long.

This clearly requires the ability to distinguish absolute pitch, but isn't this something most people could do?

This supports the article's assessment that "it may be better thought of as a continuous spectrum." Long term memory for the key or opening note of a particular song seems to be a more widespread skill than naming the pitch class of a pitch without such context. From wikipedia: "People who are not skilled singers will often sing popular songs in the correct key, and can usually recognize when TV themes have been shifted into the wrong key." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch#Pitch_memory_re...

See also: "The Levitin Effect" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1CBPV1_uTI

Time-stretching algorithms like Elastique/ZTX make up for the change in time by compensating and keeping a neutral pitch

AFAIK, in most audio/visual software tools used by professionals, this is baked in and so you'd have to purposefully pitch-shift it up and make it noticeable for this to happen.

IE, when I mess around in REAPER, and my song is set to 110BPM, listening to/dragging in a 170BPM loop keeps the exact same pitch (nearly, it's quite amazing) as the original it's just stretch/compressed to fit into 110BPM.

While true, it is somewhat tangential to what I'm talking about.

The Futurama theme was not pitch compensated when it was stretched, perhaps as it's from 1999.

Huh, I just tested out tThe Simpsons and yeah, I got the key dead on.

Wow!! I just tried it too and nailed it--I certainly wasn’t expecting that!

I've been told I have fantastic relative pitch (but not perfect pitch) and it's exactly as you describe. For me, it's the theme to Super Mario Bros. I know what that sounds like in my head, and I know also that it's in C major. Taking the root of that will get me within epsilon of middle C, just from my head (I can also take the E or G from the first six notes), and then I can reckon whatever note I'm listening to on the C scale. I suspect most instances of "perfect" pitch are this skill, honed to a much greater degree.

Oh wow. This is an amazing life hack. I can hear the SMB song perfectly in my head, and now other sounds in my environment are clearly falling on one side or the other of that C. This is going to help a lot with my writing!

Nice one. Somehow I've never chosen a C reference. That's a good one.

I use the two intro notes to "Don't You Forget About Me" for D, E.

> I know what that sounds like in my head

as in you can replay the tune as a, well, tune?

For me, the "music" in my head is just my voice approximating it.

Really? That's fascinating to me because the music in my head is the actual music as if I were playing it off a CD. In fact I've learned many songs "by ear" just using the music in my head.

I must've overlooked your reply before, so apologies for answering so late.

The only thing "in my head" is my voice. So no images, smell, touch, music, and such.

For context, I think I have aphantasia [1], altough not tested in a clinical setting (MRI or something like that)

Of course I am willing to answer any questions you have, hopefully in a timely manner this time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

> perfect relative pitch is completely learnable

Can I ask how you recommend that a person do that?

I used to have a music teacher who taught me to practice by associating the openings of common songs with each interval

I've forgotten most of them now but the Jaws theme "duh-duh-duh-duh" is a minor 2nd, Twinkle Twinkle little star is a perfect 5th, and "my bon-" of My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean" is a major 6th

If a beginners point of view is useful, let me tell you I'm using Ear Trainer on iOS and was using Complete Ear Training on Android, I've only been doing it for like six or eight months with a break in-between. I went from nothing to being able to recognize m2, M2, m3, M3, P4 and P5 upwards and I'm working on m3/M3 downwards and harmonically now, usually with 85%/90% accuracy. I can also tell major from minor 7th chords apart with like 70% accuracy and tell the major and minor scale and their pentatonics apart upwards and downwards with above 80%. All this with different root notes, same root note is way easier.

If you are interested in transcribing I would recommend a teacher. My girlfriend can arrange live on piano and has insanely good absolute pitch and she helped me on moments of extreme confusion and frustration that I wouldn't have gotten out of on my own. Also I have a tuner app on iOS that plays a reference pitch and also tells you what interval you sang, it's called TonalEnergy Tuner. I didn't need to sing until I got into learning downwards intervals, and I think I would never would be able to learn those without being able to sing do re mi in tune. Singing for some reason really helps you "imagine" and remember tunes.

On the same amount of time I am now very seldom but sometimes able to transcribe very simple synth lead melodies to my synthesizer, as I was also learning basic sound design in parallel to this.

One year ago I didn't even know you could learn absolute pitch as an adult, I'm 37. I'm completely mind blown by the fact I learnt what I learnt so far and sometimes I just don't believe it happened and am scared it will just like completely go away or something because it's like a very alien thing for me to be able to do. I don't even know what my objective is but it's probably being able to musicalize things in my mind and being able to jam with friends.

Practice transcribing music. There are also simple ear training applications you can get for your phone. Relative pitch is a fairly simple concept, so there's a proliferation of apps that teach it, at least to a basic level.

It's also common to have a library of songs in your head that start off with each interval. Everything from "Für Elise" for the minor second, to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for an octave.

The same way it's taught if you go to music school. Practice. Have music played to you, and write it down. Start with very short pitch sequences; this will require you, of course, to learn to recognize intervals accurately. Then move on to longer and more complex sequences. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Look at Rick Beato's ear training course (https://rickbeato.com). It's $119 but you get 100 modules. Private lessons are commonly $20-$25 per half hour so this is a pretty good deal.

Thanks, I may do that.

I've put some links in a comment below to help with pitch and interval training.

I know a vocalist who has perfect relative pitch who can pretend she has perfect absolute pitch because she knows the lowest note she can (quietly) sing, giving her a solid reference point.

i don't think its possible at all to learn absolute pitch after the age of 3.

Do you have a source for that or any reason for picking 3 other than an arbitrary anecdotal choice?

There is also the valproic acid study where the window of the critical period appeared to be reopened in a two week study of 24 adult individuals.

Valproic acid is used as an anticonvulsant and mood stabilizer, thought to enhance brain plasticity, and (unfortunately) can cause big problems in livers.

When there is greater understanding of the pathways affected there could be safer options for re-entering the critical period after the window has closed.

(edit: age of critical window discussed in the study here - https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...)

It is possible, but it requires some native talent and a painful amount of practice.

https://news.uchicago.edu/story/acquiring-perfect-pitch-may-...

https://medium.com/@maxdeutsch/how-i-developed-perfect-pitch...

Rick Beato disagrees, although he puts the limit at 6 yo, not 3... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM

Probably Rick Beato.

Heh. You'll enjoy this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4fuXCBJLKc

There's not a lot of things psychopharmacology can't do https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2013.0010...

That's super interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up in a very musical household and absorbed a lot from being around that all the time. One thing I noticed is that it was always people who didn't really put any time into music that would talk about perfect pitch as if it was some kind of genetic gift, and it never really squared with the reality that I perceived. Think tiger parents who want to brag about how their kids have perfect pitch or something. On the other hand, people who played very well really don't even mention it, because it's just something you pick up over time. Maybe it's not 100% accurate but yeah you get pretty close when you do music stuff all the time.

Basically two camps of people. The "perfect pitch" people who were obsessed with the prestige of it, and then the people who just do a lot of music, who don't really make a fuss over it.

In general, I would say that people who don't really do music are always the ones who dramatically over emphasize innate musical talent, at a technical level, but they're almost always the least qualified people to make those assessments. The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice. Much more important are sort of qualitative things that are hard too develop, like good taste. If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please.

And yeah, the part in the article about the timbre of the piano is 100% spot on. I think that plays a huge role in like the character of the sound.

This is spot on, perfect pitch is something that parents like to brag about. My son Luca is pretty good with picking out polyphonic tunes by ear and more than one person has asked if he has 'perfect pitch' and they are always surprised when I say I don't really care all that much whether he does or not because either he does or he doesn't and what matters most is that he has fun making music (which he does).

There is a similar thing about music theory where people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it after you pass your exam. Musicians don't usually care all that much about a particular piece of theory until they need it and then it just gets added to the pile. Other than that they are mostly concerned with making music, not with the theory behind it.

> ...There is a similar thing about music theory where people from the IT side tend to approach music as though it is something you cram some theory for and then you can go and make it after you pass your exam...

Theory offers some shortcuts, like circle of fifth, chords, composition, rhythmic patterns etc. which one could of course discover personally, but if there's any focus on a particular style of music, then there's a respective theory package for learning that, just like with any craft.

In any way, practice and really doing it, while it's still fun, makes the real difference!

Btw, perfect pitch is a nifty shortcut too. I can imagine an excitement of being able to read store signs easily for the first time, it probably could be that liberating with the perfect pitch (guessing here).

...Just to eventually find oneself drowning in the sea of meaningless text around our lives, just as a miriad of music sources may turn into a meaningless yet pervasive cacophony.

> The truth is there is such thing as a knack for music, but it doesn't really make all that much of a difference in the end, after practice.

The people you are comparing, though, are mostly people with at least a moderate 'knack' for music; those without it are unlikely ever to make it into the 'after practice' category, because it will be too frustrating and unrewarding to continue for the long haul.

> If anything, the real "gift" is simply enjoying to make music. When you have that, improving isn't hard because it's fun, and you can do it in whatever aspect you please.

I don't think this is necessarily very distinct from talent. Skills that come relatively naturally to us are usually more fun to practice than skills we can only make slow, halting, unimpressive progress at.

What an amazing story, and what a terrible thing to be losing your hearing. I've heard some simulations of what the present day cochlear implants sound like and while they are lightyears ahead of what they used to be like (the original ones had only very few channels) it is still way too little for the enjoyment of music.

I have a cochlear implant and strongly disagree that it prevents me from enjoying music. So much so that I've taken up piano lessons again after a break of 20+ years.

Oh that's great to hear. I'm slowly losing my hearing and to know that there are solutions that work even with music now is super good. Do you happen to know how many channels your implant has and whether it has any particular tricks up its sleeve? Maybe make & model?

I have the Cochlear CI512 implant. Not sure how many channels it has (14?), but IIRC at this point increasing the number of channels doesn't have a significant difference in outcomes. Implants are designed to be simple and reliable so that they last for life. The real smarts are in the external processor, which is custom programmed or "mapped" for each recipient.

I recently upgraded to the Nucleus 7 processor, but it sounds identical to my previous Nucleus 6 processor. Main benefit is that the Nucleus 7 is smaller and lighter and the batteries last longer.

Keep in mind though that cochlear implants are generally a last resort since implanting them will usually remove any residual hearing you might have left. AFAIK your ear has to be "profoundly" or totally deaf before doctors will recommend implant surgery. Preferred treatment is to augment whatever hearing you still have with hearing aids before recommending implants. In my case my left ear is almost normal up to 1500Hz so it has a hearing aid that does some frequency transposition for higher frequencies. Implant is in my right ear which was almost totally deaf.

Hope that helps.

Thank you, yes, this helps very much. A friend has had one since birth many years ago now, I'm wondering if an 'upgrade' would be worth it for them, I will read up on this and your comment prompted me to update how far this tech has come in the last years. Thank you very much.

i wonder how long until they can match average default human hearing? and if it would in principle be possible to exceed it. i suppose that would depend on if the bottleneck is the sensitivity of the cochlear nerve of the sensitivity of the peripheral auditory system. If we were to exceed human hearing would people then get implants without a medical need?

That's a wild one, never even thought about that. Hearing changes tremendously with age, sensitivity and range drop perceptively between 'newborn' and as old as 16, and it keeps on descending after that. This is mostly a function of the various components of the cochlear channel getting stiffer and less conductive to sound from outside, I'm not sure to what extent bypassing that would allow you to recover range but sensitivity seems to be a pretty clear win already.

I can relate to this as something I never thought possible either, yet in a pretty short time (one hour a week for ~1yr) I've made progress that almost feels magical.

I've studied piano as an adult for about 5-6 years (with some prior music education as a child) but never had a solid grounding in music theory and could not transcribe anything out of thin air at all.

For the last year or so, I've added ear training and the results have been beyond anything I ever expected. It's hard work and absolutely takes a good teacher to collaborate with who can identify your weaknesses and drill you past them.

Now I can identify chords, their inversions (by function - not absolute) and transcribe melodies and more complex rhythms. It's all relative pitch and not absolute pitch but still it feel magical to do it - like a sixth sense when it just clicks. It absolutely can be a learned skill.

Here's the set of books we use and despite the child-like book covers they are anything but that.

https://www.alfred.com/alfreds-basic-piano-library-ear-train...

There are 5 books in the series.

I had an experience where for a couple weeks I could playback symphonic music in my head and be able to control the loudness of individual sections, repeat passages, etc. with the same fidelity as a lived experience. I knew it was meme-erex but it sounded live.

It was a transformative experience and it gave me a small glimpse of what it would be like to have another order of magnitude of brain capability. The brain can be a wonderful place.

How much of you seeing your friend transcribe music with such ease, enabled you to achieve the same thing? I was thinking the other day about people being "first" at something and how once that happens, hundreds of others follow, almost as if they needed permission by the person being first. When know something is possible, that often removes the biggest barrier for doing a thing.

I swear I've been handed sheet music that was produced like this. However, there were some pretty obvious mistakes in it, and we all had to scratch out and write in updated notes.

Even with updates, I was still impressed as the person doing the transcribing was still more talented than I.

Thanks for this information, I’ve been recently going through some jazz solos transcribed by other people and amazed what they are able to pick out.

Regarding your deafness - mind if I ask how you listen to music now and what you will do after your cochlear implantation ?

Also which implant model do you feel is best for music listenability?

My daughter is deaf and recently had her CI surgery. She is very musical, loves singing, dancing, etc. She’s still getting used to the new way of listening post-implantation.

I'm quite jealous of people who have this skill. I played saxophone for a school band part but they didn't really have anything for saxophone at the time. The band captain took out a pen and paper and scribbled something in like 10 minutes. I thought that was pretty badass

> I could correctly identify things like the chord sequence of a song

I've seen this being described as relative pitch, which is apparently a different skill than perfect pitch and easier to acquire via practice.

Could you tell what key the song was in, without any sort of reference tone? Or just name what note is being played, without anything to compare it with?