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Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

From what I’ve heard, absolute pitch can be distracting in certain scenarios, like if you are listening to something which does not use A=440 (more common than you might think, just imagine that some instrument in a band is flat, and then everybody else tunes to match that instrument, or consider choral music, which drifts over the course of a song for various reasons). The other problem is that absolute pitch often drifts as you age, so someone with AP in their 40s or 50s might start hearing everything as out of key, because their sense of pitch has drifted.

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I don't have perfect pitch, just an average hobby musician, but I can immediately tell when an orchestra is tuned up or down (A 440Hz vs 441 or 442, or baroque, really low).

I also find out of tune music extremely distressing, and can't stand it. My ears actually have this weird "bleeding" sensation if I listen to out of tune music long enough.

It sounds like you may have perfect pitch, but not enough ear training to link the note "colors" to names.

Unfortunately I don't. I wish I did though. I have tried some training, to no avail. When hear a pitch I have no notion of uniqueness.

However, since I listen to so much music and tune my violin to A 440Hz every time I play, my ear knows when something is off even by a degree or two when listening to some European orchestras. And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)

There is a really cool phenomenon with some musicians who play instruments with a one to one correspondence between a pitch and feeling + fingering (so woodwinds, and sort of brass) that have played long tones for so long that they have internalized the "feeling" of a note and can (with a small delay) seem like they have absolute pitch. Really cool stuff. A youtuber called Saxologic dubbed this ability "Real Pitch". Really interesting video showing this in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4zo6POThHc

The skill you are describing is usually called “absolute pitch”—someone without absolute pitch cannot easily tell the difference between A=440 and A=432 in isolation (to say nothing of something like A=442).

> And I think every musician hates out of tune music :)

The notion of “out of tune” is different for people with and without absolute pitch. Someone with absolute pitch can hear something as “out of tune” just because it uses A=432 instead of A=440, whereas someone without absolute pitch will hear it as in tune. That is, more or less, THE characteristic difference between having absolute pitch and not having absolute pitch.

I don’t have absolute pitch. I’ll hear a guitar as out of tune if it is not tuned to itself. Like, if one string is flat relative to the others. However, if you tune a guitar to standard tuning in A=432, that sounds “in tune” to me. I think I have a decent sense of tuning—you can tune to equal temperament, and you can tune to just intonation, and I can tell the difference between the two. But I cannot tell the difference between A=440 and A=432.

The difference between 440 and 442 is exceptionally small, I’d be surprised if you could hear the difference in an A/B test.

With all due respect, I think you may be underestimating the amount of training that you would need. My sister has perfect pitch, but only really honed her skill at it after ~5 years of music theory/ear training classes. That was about when I learned to identify intervals by ear.

Singers also get "real pitch," I think, and in general, when you know the sound of an instrument's registers really well, it can be a hack for professionals to turn their relative pitch into "perfect pitch."

Also, FWIW most professional musicians I know can't tell whether their A is sharp or flat by a few cents (eg the difference between 440 and 442), but they can tell interval size immediately. The interval sizing tends to determine "out of tune" rather than the frequency of the A.

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