4 ms·
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail
by beat 8y ago
I have two musicians I've played with who have perfect pitch, and I've seen it fail for both. One is an older man, whose legendary perfect pitch started to fail in his early 60s (not much later came the onset of early dementia, so...).
The other is a bandmate of mine, a woman in her late 20s/early 30s when i saw hers fail. She's genetically predisposed - both her father and her brother have perfect pitch; plus her father is a professional musician, she has a degree in music performance, and has had a violin in her hand since she was old enough to hold one. One day, we were recording, with her overdubbing parts onto some previously recorded work. She complained that a B flat played at the start of a guitar riff was out of tune. I said "No, that's a B". She insisted it was a B flat. I told her I had also played the part on keyboards, and it's a B.
She panicked.
It was extremely difficult for her to play for the rest of the session. Her playing relies so heavily on her perfect pitch that she's always had, that when she can't trust it, anxiety takes over.
- eigenstuff 8y agoLate 20s woman, started playing violin when I was 4, genetically predisposed. I had that SAME moment of shock and panic when I practiced with my sister before we played for my cousin's wedding a year ago. It was wild, the best way I can describe it is my ear has flattened out to baroque tuning down from modern 440 turning. I don't like it! I'm losing my best party trick to age but oh well, I don't think anybody's really gonna fault me if I'm off by a half step when I figure out what note a door is squeaking in lol
- tomcam 8y agoThat sounds like a tiny horror story to me. Losing my hearing would be much more difficult to me than losing my site. My sympathies are definitely with you
- muglug 8y agoYup, singing at 415 fucked up my pitch for a while. Still, it's a good excuse for human lapses. And at least it's not singing at 430, which is uniformly terrible for everyone.
- maaarghk 8y agofunny thing, I've noticed actual detuning happening in one ear only two or three times since I've passed my mid 20s. the second time, I tested it with earbuds - I had my PC play a sine wave at 440, sounded fine in the left but was very flat in the right, by easily 10 to 15 Hz. listening to anything with any kind of harmonic content with both ears was, obviously, terrible. nausea inducing, actually. it goes away after 30 mins or so but the first time I had a brief moment of panic that this was some kind of permanent effect I had woken up with. if my memory has any accuracy (dubious) then I was suffering from fairly heavy head colds every time this happened, so - applying totally uneducated guesswork - I put it down to something like uneven pressure buildup from a stuffy nasal cavity dampening the vibrations inside the ear.
- mockingbirdy 8y agoIs this consistent? You could correct your perception using this knowledge then. Just add the half step. As long as the measurement device is still working, you can always re-calibrate (in this case cognitively) the base.
- dfan 8y agoYeah, but this is sort of like saying "whenever you see red, remember that it's really green instead." It's not like you stop seeing and thinking red.