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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch?

And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ?

Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?

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".

Kind of, your eyes are doing automatic white balance.

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.

I can hear a note and say whether it's high, low, or in the middle. But perfect pitch further requires a resolution of 1 semitone.

Have you never argued over colors before? I wouldn't trust eyes to be that accurate or objective.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence if you think it's tempo it's not.

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".

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