> A few years ago, I had a student who had taken one of these teach-yourself-perfect-pitch courses, and I was fascinated. From time to time I would fire random notes at him in an attempt to catch him out... and I never could! When I asked him how the system worked, he explained that the best analogy was to think in terms of colours. For argument's sake, he said, think of Bb as sounding blue and D as a greenish colour.
> Intrigued, I played him a Cmaj7 chord and asked him to identify that. He shook his head in despair, and gave up almost immediately.
> "Can't you just home in on each note in turn and identify the separate colours?" I suggested. "Then you could look at your list of notes and figure out what the chord is."
> "No, you don't understand," he replied. "All chords sound brown to me!"
- Guthrie Govan, from Creative Guitar 1 (which, incidentally, I had to dig out to find the quote)
I imagine that Guthrie's student might have been able to combine his pitch training with some ear training and have a better shot of hearing something other than mud when he heard a chord, but this always stuck in my brain and I'm reminded of it every time I see discussions of perfect pitch. It seems like perfect pitch is barely even desirable, in this framing.
And that makes sense, as discussed elsewhere in the thread, what you really want as a musician is a great sense of relative pitch, and a good mind-body connection between the fingers and ears that lets you easily turn what you're hearing in your mind - where your ear wants to go - into actual music.