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Comment by vnorilo | Hacker News Reader

I think pitch memory is not at all the same neural phenomenon as perfect (absolute) pitch.

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.

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> Whereas the "real" perfect pitch people are always anchored, no matter how much noise anyone throws at them

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...

Nothing in that article mentions their sense of pitch being detuned "months later."

A good friend of mine in high school had perfect pitch. We played music together and he would complain about his 'anchor' of pitch getting thrown off if/when we wouldn't tune to A 440Hz but instead something else slightly up or down from A440.

My choir director finds it easier to transpose organ pieces on the fly than "set the organ to a different key" and just play the keys as written for that reason: There's too much dissonance between what his fingers know they're playing and what his ears are hearing.

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’m a former pro musician. I’m a drummer so lol I don’t have perfect pitch, but I met a few folks who did. Having true perfect pitch sounds awful honestly. The world is constantly out of tune and it takes effort to ignore it.

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.

I think there's different components to pitch memory, including both relative and absolute pitch. (I suspect there's more than that, too - some people seem to just hear a chord as a single unit while others pick out the individual notes in it, some people have a very good ear for timbre.)

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.)

Have a look at this study about moving the "absolute" pitch anchor: https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...

Maybe you could apply their methodology to yourself to retrain your A to 440Hz?

When I played in a youth orchestra our music director told us that certain European orchestras use A=443Hz (he said ones in Vienna specifically but there might be others). Perhaps you have a history of listening to many recordings with such tuning.

441+ is also very common in the US. Top-tier orchestras rarely use 440 at this point.

It differs. 442 or 443 are the most common ones. My orchestra tunes 442. When I worked in Germany it was usually 442, but some orchestras tuned 443.

Vienna Phil have historically gone even higher, but are probably down to standard levels by now.

>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

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 did not have perfect pitch before this exercise. During it I very much had it.

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.

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