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.
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 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.
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.
https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...
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 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.)
Maybe you could apply their methodology to yourself to retrain your A to 440Hz?
Vienna Phil have historically gone even higher, but are probably down to standard levels by now.
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.
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.
I didn't recognize the notes like I do on bassoon. I just knew. I sometimes still do, but not every note I hear. Now it is just once in a while.
> 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...
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. :-)
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.
there are the certain skills which can be "forgot" but can be picked up {"like riding a bike"}
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.
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”.
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.
I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.
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.
No perfect pitch for other instruments.
Or even the dulcian. The low C is very much the same as the bassoon low C despite being either too sharp or too low depending on school.
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
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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.
Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's own?
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.
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.
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.
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 issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as artists they’re better off spending their time elsewhere.
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation
"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.
[1] https://www.academia.edu/download/52277554/Auditory_working_...
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.
Rick Beato covers the subject rather well in his video "Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=816VLQNdPMM
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.
(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'
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.
Allegedly, Mozart transcribed Allegri's Miserere after hearing it performed once in the Vatican: https://www.classicfm.com/composers/mozart/guides/mozart-all....
Perhaps apocryphal, but sounds pretty useful to me.
It’s “just” insanely good memory for music.
It took only about a month before I went from having to reason about what note it was to just knowing instantly.
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.
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.