3 ms·

Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or

Musician with perfect pitch here, playing piano since 4. I find it so weird that most people don't have perfect pitch! As if you couldn't tell green from red or blue or yellow, despite seeing them all your life. Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. It's so weird to me that most jazz musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. They develop relative pitch I guess, being able to tell if a note is a fifth or flat sixth or ninth etc distant from another. I don't think I use relative pitch much, although hard to tell, as I just know what the interval is. Also I've noticed that sine waves are somewhat harder to accurately hear the pitch of. I guess because a note from an instrument or voice has a lot of overtones helping you. Like when you recognize a friend, you don't just have one thing to go by, you have their eyes, nose, mouth, hair, clothes, voice etc etc. Apparently on traditional phone lines, they couldn't reproduce the fundamental frequency of a low voice, and relied on the illusion that if you hear all the overtones besides the fundamental, you still hear the voice pitch as the fundamental pitch. So then it's not surprising that a sine wave is harder to hear.

fuzzfactor 5y ago
>musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome different limitations. Every instrument only has so many notes it can play. There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the neck on each string. Simple and not an actual musical exercise. It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest beginners before they even have much musical material under their belt to even practice or rehearse. If you are not already playing every note of your instrument every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have been missing. They've been missing you.
mannykannot 5y ago
Here's an interesting quote on the utility of perfect pitch outside of music: "Absolute pitch is too fine a form of categorisation," she said. "If that is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear. If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we couldn't understand that 'happy birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man or a woman, is the same word." https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford (an article originally linked to by jacquesm.) Also, perfect pitch is apparently much more common among native speakers of tonal languages.
Tor3 5y ago
>Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. If you're hearing a Cmaj7 chord, do you hear the "maj7" quality of it, or do you just "know" it's a maj7 from its notes? What I mean is, people without perfect pitch recognizes chords from how the chord sounds, as a unit (as a general rule). This needs some training of course, but those jazz musicians you mention are of course able to instantly identify chords, all those "jazzy" ones as well.. so what I'm asking is if you do the latter as well (imagine if you lost your PP tomorrow - what would change in that respect?)
- yesenadam 5y ago
  Hi! Uhh.. I guess I hear the maj7 quality and the notes at the same time. Yeah, I'm sure people without pp can recognize chord qualities just as well. Hmm although if it's an extremely weird chord/collection of notes, I doubt they'd know what it is. The area I imagine[0] they'd have huge problems is in improvising free music, where often there's not familiar chords, and no predetermined harmonies. Playing in a group doing that, people are playing notes around you, and without perfect pitch, I don't think you'd have very precise an idea of whether what you are about to play will fit that or not. It seems they have to play a couple of notes first to 'test the waters'.. [0] They don't seem to. But it's gotta be like flying blind. Or at least, driving in a very very heavy rain!
  - Tor3 5y ago
    Thanks for the reply, that's interesting to know. I'm trying to wrap my head around how PP actually works for people, though I understand that there's a lot of variation.

fuzzfactor 5y ago

>musicians don't know the notes other people are playing like that! How they manage so well that you can't tell they don't, I'm not sure. Instrument familiarity can really help people overcome different limitations. Every instrument only has so many notes it can play. There's a centuries-old Spanish guitar exercise for students where every note (within reach) is played one at a time up the neck on each string. Simple and not an actual musical exercise. It's expected to be performed starting with the earliest beginners before they even have much musical material under their belt to even practice or rehearse. If you are not already playing every note of your instrument every day, doing so will make you more familiar with all the notes. This can be especially helpful for the notes you have been missing. They've been missing you.

mannykannot 5y ago

Here's an interesting quote on the utility of perfect pitch outside of music: "Absolute pitch is too fine a form of categorisation," she said. "If that is all we knew, we couldn't generalise any of the sounds we hear. If we only used absolute pitch as adults, we couldn't understand that 'happy birthday' in two different pitches is the same song, or that the word 'cup' spoken by a man or a woman, is the same word." https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/feb/21/timradford (an article originally linked to by jacquesm.) Also, perfect pitch is apparently much more common among native speakers of tonal languages.

Tor3 5y ago

>Hearing music to me just is hearing the pitches of all the notes; hearing a chord is hearing all the notes in it. I can see the notes being played on a keyboard in my mind's eye, at the same time I hear them. If you're hearing a Cmaj7 chord, do you hear the "maj7" quality of it, or do you just "know" it's a maj7 from its notes? What I mean is, people without perfect pitch recognizes chords from how the chord sounds, as a unit (as a general rule). This needs some training of course, but those jazz musicians you mention are of course able to instantly identify chords, all those "jazzy" ones as well.. so what I'm asking is if you do the latter as well (imagine if you lost your PP tomorrow - what would change in that respect?)

yesenadam 5y ago
Hi! Uhh.. I guess I hear the maj7 quality and the notes at the same time. Yeah, I'm sure people without pp can recognize chord qualities just as well. Hmm although if it's an extremely weird chord/collection of notes, I doubt they'd know what it is. The area I imagine[0] they'd have huge problems is in improvising free music, where often there's not familiar chords, and no predetermined harmonies. Playing in a group doing that, people are playing notes around you, and without perfect pitch, I don't think you'd have very precise an idea of whether what you are about to play will fit that or not. It seems they have to play a couple of notes first to 'test the waters'.. [0] They don't seem to. But it's gotta be like flying blind. Or at least, driving in a very very heavy rain!
- Tor3 5y ago
  Thanks for the reply, that's interesting to know. I'm trying to wrap my head around how PP actually works for people, though I understand that there's a lot of variation.