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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

I sincerely doubt that if you ask a professional musician with perfect pitch if they would "turn it off" they would say yes.

Is it necessarily something like "turned on h24 in every single sound"? I would be rather surprised that it would be the case in general.

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.

Microtonality is a rabbit hole you'll likely enjoy.

Have you really met people with perfect pitch with that level of resolution, like can tell 440hz from 432hz? I always thought that was a myth.

I think there is also perfect pitch and Perfect Pitch. identifying which note is played is different from what is essentially a frequency inference.

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.

It's very useful for a session musician. You could pick up a song without hunting for the key.

I have perfect pitch and find it to be quite a burden in certain ways: it's very, very hard to transpose in real time.

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.

In this video you can see an example of how it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF4onowI1xw

[1]: https://pt-m-wikipedia-org.translate.goog/wiki/Harpa_Crist%C...

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!”

I'm really impressed by the guitarist making her sound better and her pitch was all over the place

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.

Why do you need to transpose? You mean when playing a transposed instrument like woodwinds / brass?

Jazz. Jazz is all about transposition.

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

That’s fair. I could also play any note on the piano and she would play the exact same note back.

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.

As an amateur who does have it, yes, it's super awesome for transcription. However, I don't think it's very useful for anything else.

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.

Equal temperament strikes again.

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