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I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I h

by bjoli 4y ago

I am a professional musician (bassoon player in a symphony orchestra). I can, if I practice it a couple of times a week, achieve and sustain perfect pitch. I had no semblance of perfect pitch until I decided to practice it at age 24. Before that the only chance I had to guess a note was to put in in relation to my own voice. Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.

vnorilo 4y ago
Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.
- muxator 4y ago
  Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility. I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.
  - cormacrelf 4y ago
    It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.
    - Tor3 4y ago
      There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano. As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.
- fsckboy 4y ago
  from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be aggravated if I don't have to?"
- psutor 4y ago
  Same here, also as a former bassoonist - each note on the bassoon has extremely unique timbre, and I find it very easy to identify them. No perfect pitch for other instruments.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    You should try it on the baroque bassoon. It works there as well, despite the notes being a half note too low. Or even the dulcian. The low C is very much the same as the bassoon low C despite being either too sharp or too low depending on school.
- muffles 4y ago
  > because, as you said, it is not that useful. Having perfect pitch can be useful for a lot of musicians, or educators, or composers in various ways, including: Improving accuracy in performance: Perfect pitch can identify and reproduce musical notes more accurately and quickly, which can help perform music with greater precision. Improving music education: Perfect pitch can help people teach music theory and composition more effectively, as students with perfect pitch can better understand and apply the concepts. Enhancing creativity in music composition: Composers with pitch can more easily hear and reproduce musical ideas in their heads, which can help them create more complex and interesting compositions. Facilitating communication among musicians: Musicians with absolute pitch can communicate more effectively with each other by using a common standard for identifying notes. Improving the ability to transcribe music: Musicians with perfect pitch can more easily transcribe music by ear, which can be useful for analyzing and studying music.... the list goes on
  - kaba0 4y ago
    Many of your points are unsubstantiated.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    I am an orchestra musician. Having perfect pitch was only trouble, despite playing in good orchestras at the time. In the end of Ein Heldenleben the orchestra will not be the same pitch it started and, and for you to be in tune you will have to play notes that will be more than a quarter tone too high compared to what you think is correct. I found it awful. The only orchestras I have played in that stayed in tune was the Swedish radio orchestra and the Munich Phil. But a major third is 13 cent low there as well. And regarding most other things: I would have loved to have it during solfege exams. That is about it. The trouble it gave me when doing the work I studied to do it got in the way. Most colleges I went to had special classes for students with perfect pitch as they were taught different strategies. In my final exam in "Gehörbildung" the two top scoring students did not have perfect pitch.
- edbaskerville 4y ago
  My experience with pitch memory is nearly identical to yours (but only 34 years playing cello, not 35). Absolute (perfect) pitch really does seem to be a whole different thing neurally, akin to (and perhaps actually related to) the difference between learning a language before a critical age and learning one afterwards. I'm gonna try to teach it to my kid, because, why not. Even if it's not that useful most of the time, there are definitely times when it would come in handy for me, e.g., being faster at transcribing notation from recordings. If he doesn't end up using it, that's fine.
  - bjoli 4y ago
    I suggest not to do it. It is really painful in the orchestra when the orchestra has gotten sharper than what you are comfortable with and you have to play a minor third. I remember playing Mahler 2. The hall was hot as hell and the orchestra had risen from A441 to what must have been A445. I had to play a major sixth and it was borderline revolting. I stopped practicing it after some experiences like that. Knowing what note to play by some absolute measure is only useful if you are playing alone. What you play in an ensemble is relative to a lot of other people.
- bjoli 4y ago
  On the bassoon this was (and is) the case for me. It even translates to instruments very close to the bassoon such as dulcian and the French basson. If I hear a baroque bassoon I know what note it is in 415.
klysm 4y ago
I’m curious how much initial effort it took you to get decent at it
- bjoli 4y ago
  Not very much, surprisingly. It was in a period of my life when I was practising a lot, which might have helped. It took only about a month before I went from having to reason about what note it was to just knowing instantly.
  - klysm 3y ago
    I usually use the technique of finding the interval from the lowest note I can hum - did you reason with a similar technique?
0x445442 4y ago
Interesting, I didn’t know perfect pitch was something you could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His teachers always told us it was something you’re born with.
- opan 4y ago
  I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good speller was something you were born with (she was not the best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good, to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's cube.
belter 4y ago
How far does it go on your own case? Are there degrees of it? Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's own? https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY
- bjoli 4y ago
  Not quite that extreme. I could use it for harmonies if it wasn't too many dissonant notes because I couldn't tell the notes apart. However, that is something I trained before doing the perfect pitch thing. Being able to pick apart harmonies is extremely useful. Having perfect pitch just made it a little easier. I always found it hard on the piano. I wonder if it is related to the fact that everything sounds good on the piano, even things that are badly composed. Parallel fifths in a chorale on the piano? Sounds wonky but ok. In a chorus? Awful.
helaoban 4y ago
Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a certain age (at least that's layman my understanding). Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a new language?).
- hluska 4y ago
  The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago’s study is most famous but results have been replicated at many other schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine. The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as artists they’re better off spending their time elsewhere.
  - coliveira 4y ago
    Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is relatively the same. Things would be different if every key had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought about different keys having different moods.
    - pjlegato 4y ago
      That statement is not true of Western music in general, only of most (not all) classical and poular music since roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became popular.[1] Much Western music, such as that written during the the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. use a variety of other systems such as some form of just intonation[2], where different keys sound very different as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same interval. Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American music.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation
freedomben 4y ago
How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about it not being possible)
- 49531 4y ago
  There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others out there.
  - sparky_z 4y ago
    That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.
      - C-x_C-f 4y ago
        I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that strategy makes sense
      - Tor3 4y ago
        That's simple pitch memory. I started playing guitar at 12 and at that time used a tuning fork - and I noticed that after a while I could hear the "right" note of the A string in my head and I didn't really need the fork anymore. That ability is just pitch memory (which can be thrown off) combined with learning the timbre of the instrument you play (in my case a guitar string). And yes, that's not the same as perfect pitch, which typically includes much more than the above. I certainly don't have it, even if I can pick any string first time in the morning and hear if it's "off". Because that's all I can do. But then again I don't get annoyed by "out of tune" sounds in the world around me, unlike what people with perfect pitch sometimes tell about.
nostrademons 4y ago
I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command. But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist) could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds. It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent.
- vnorilo 4y ago
  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.
  - klipt 4y ago
    > 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-pitch-may-not-be-absolute-after-all.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...
samstave 4y ago
May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'
- hluska 4y ago
  Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command. If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch for a short time after they stop playing and others (apparently) always have it. In that aspect, it’s a little like memory. Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald are two famous people you’ve likely heard who had absolute pitch though I have never read or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly useful. Of the musicians I know who have worked to develop it, it’s mostly kind of a party trick. If you’re interested in perfect pitch, you should likely learn about relative pitch as well. Whereas perfect pitch refers to the ability to correctly distinguish a note cold, relative pitch refers to the ability to distinguish notes in relation to each other.
  - samstave 4y ago
    thank you for the 'perfect pitch' response <3
  - Gunax 4y ago
    But how accurate does it have to be to be considered perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to the frequency?
    - AlecSchueler 4y ago
      Within less than half a semitone seems more likely. The frequencies of the notes don't matter as the relationship between the pitch classes are unchanged.
gabereiser 4y ago
I would imagine relative pitch is more useful/practiced? I was a musician in a rock band for many years (you never heard of) and I have relative pitch. I started in orchestra on the cello at age 7. Banged on drums during middle school. Picked up guitar in high school and formed a band. I can identify chords and I can tell you what note if I have another note as a reference (like you do with your voice).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
spaceman_2020 4y ago
Do you recommend any routine to help a young child learn absolute pitch? I’m talking under 3 years of age.
- Tor3 4y ago
  Rick Beato made a video or two about that. His son Dylan has perfect pitch. What he did when the boy was very little was to let him listen to various types of jazz music - he can't be certain, but his theory is that if the music is "interesting" in the sense that it's not always predictable then the brain automatically zooms in on that and gets interested - and that's what gave the boy perfect pitch (I believe this theory relies on an underlying theory - a quite common one - which is that babies are actually born with perfect pitch but lose it relatively early, just as all babies are born with the ability to hear every sound in every language, and that also gets filtered off as they get older. This last one is pretty certain, the other one is still debated).
- bjoli 4y ago
  I would have found it useful in school. At work it got in the way. Unless your kid is going to.play one of those perpetually out of tune instruments like the piano I wouldn't recommend it. I had a horn colleague that had the crazy kind of perfect pitch (he still has, but he is retired) and perfect metronome tempo and all that. He called it a curse.
  - spaceman_2020 4y ago
    Interesting perspective. I'm an amateur musician and always thought that absolute pitch would have made me a better musician. I wanted to make sure that my kid gets the opportunity to acquire perfect pitch, even if he doesn't decide to take up music in the future
    - bjoli 4y ago
      I find that being able to hear the note you are about to play before you play it is great, but having that note absolutely anchored into something that might not be in tune with what is around you is really just a hindrance. There are certainly people that like their perfect pitch, but I did not. There is a reason they teach in in many asian countries between the ages 2 and 5. A girl I studied with told me they never told you the note they started on when they did melody dictation. You were just supposed to know.
Tor3 4y ago
What you describe sounds like pitch memory, which doesn't have the same qualities (and problems) as actual absolute ("perfect") pitch. I also remember pitch. I can grab my guitar after a week away from it, touch a string and know if it's out of tune. I can tune it without a tuner. But what I'm actually doing is remembering the pitch with the help of the timbre of the guitar string (or harp string, for my wife's harp - I hear if a string is "off" even if it's the first single note I hear in the morning). I believe I would quickly be bewildered if I heard pure sine tones. And that's it. There's nothing more which is even close to what people with absolute pitch can do. I haven't run into that many of them, but it's like they see all the music in color, it's a different world (and they are often constantly bothered by out-of-tune sounds from life). Hit some random notes in parallel and they can tell you the notes instantly. And so on and so forth. The other thing is what happens if they lose the perfect pitch.. which does happen, with age, for many, or at least it de-tunes a bit (drops a semitone, for example). Then, when it's gone, they don't even have relative pitch to rely on. Rick Beato interviewed a couple of people this happened to. I don't want to be there. My little ability to tune without a tuner is enough for me, and what it is is trained pitch memory - not absolute pitch. And it's relatively common, unlike absolute pitch.
- bjoli 4y ago
  I have tone memory on a bassoon. I described this in another post. It even translates to baroque bassoon, tuned half a not lower. When I practiced pitch instrument did not matter. I could tell what note a sine wave was. I never made any differenriation between what I had and absolute pitch. Functionally they wäwrre the same and I believe that if I would have kept it up for a couple of months it would have been permanent. Some of it still lingers. I can still tell whether a tuning A is 440 or 442. Sometimes i just know what note is being played, regardless of instrument. When that feeling comes I am never wrong.

by bjoli 4y ago

vnorilo 4y ago

Cellist for the last 35 years here. No perfect pitch. My "perfect" note identification is based on timbre: I know what each note sounds like on the instruments I know intimately. For synthetic tones, I will be off +/- 3 semitones because I will be using an aural memory of the cello a string as a reference, rather than recognizing the frequency like the perfect pitch folks do. Never occurred to me to practice perfect pitch because, as you said, it is not that useful.

muxator 4y ago
Same for me on the guitar: it is easy to distinguish even the same note on different strings. Chords, too. But it's more a timbre plus relative pitch sensibility. I never felt the "need" for absolute pitch.
- cormacrelf 4y ago
  It is useless for everyone except singers. If you’re a singer, you can cold-start a song in tune and have the band come in seconds later. Hard to do that without the confidence that you both started correctly and haven’t drifted.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    There's a story about the opera singer Kirsten Flagstad (1895 - 1962) from when she performed at a small place somewhere, singing opera songs with just a piano. Afterwards one from the audience actually complained directly to her that she didn't sing well, she was out of tune. She apologized and said that she had perfect pitch, and the piano wasn't tuned to her inner pitch - and she found herself unable to adjust to the piano. As for singers in general, I've seen lots of professional singers who don't have perfect pitch but still can cold-start a song - they know their own vocal cords so well that they can start at the right pitch with confidence.
fsckboy 4y ago
from what I understand, perfect absolute pitch is (to me) of negative value in the sense that it makes you annoyed at a lot of music. I've heard some people say it makes them not enjoy practicing pieces with other musicians. I think "why be aggravated if I don't have to?"
psutor 4y ago
Same here, also as a former bassoonist - each note on the bassoon has extremely unique timbre, and I find it very easy to identify them. No perfect pitch for other instruments.
- bjoli 4y ago
  You should try it on the baroque bassoon. It works there as well, despite the notes being a half note too low. Or even the dulcian. The low C is very much the same as the bassoon low C despite being either too sharp or too low depending on school.
muffles 4y ago
> because, as you said, it is not that useful. Having perfect pitch can be useful for a lot of musicians, or educators, or composers in various ways, including: Improving accuracy in performance: Perfect pitch can identify and reproduce musical notes more accurately and quickly, which can help perform music with greater precision. Improving music education: Perfect pitch can help people teach music theory and composition more effectively, as students with perfect pitch can better understand and apply the concepts. Enhancing creativity in music composition: Composers with pitch can more easily hear and reproduce musical ideas in their heads, which can help them create more complex and interesting compositions. Facilitating communication among musicians: Musicians with absolute pitch can communicate more effectively with each other by using a common standard for identifying notes. Improving the ability to transcribe music: Musicians with perfect pitch can more easily transcribe music by ear, which can be useful for analyzing and studying music.... the list goes on
- kaba0 4y ago
  Many of your points are unsubstantiated.
- bjoli 4y ago
  I am an orchestra musician. Having perfect pitch was only trouble, despite playing in good orchestras at the time. In the end of Ein Heldenleben the orchestra will not be the same pitch it started and, and for you to be in tune you will have to play notes that will be more than a quarter tone too high compared to what you think is correct. I found it awful. The only orchestras I have played in that stayed in tune was the Swedish radio orchestra and the Munich Phil. But a major third is 13 cent low there as well. And regarding most other things: I would have loved to have it during solfege exams. That is about it. The trouble it gave me when doing the work I studied to do it got in the way. Most colleges I went to had special classes for students with perfect pitch as they were taught different strategies. In my final exam in "Gehörbildung" the two top scoring students did not have perfect pitch.
edbaskerville 4y ago
My experience with pitch memory is nearly identical to yours (but only 34 years playing cello, not 35). Absolute (perfect) pitch really does seem to be a whole different thing neurally, akin to (and perhaps actually related to) the difference between learning a language before a critical age and learning one afterwards. I'm gonna try to teach it to my kid, because, why not. Even if it's not that useful most of the time, there are definitely times when it would come in handy for me, e.g., being faster at transcribing notation from recordings. If he doesn't end up using it, that's fine.
- bjoli 4y ago
  I suggest not to do it. It is really painful in the orchestra when the orchestra has gotten sharper than what you are comfortable with and you have to play a minor third. I remember playing Mahler 2. The hall was hot as hell and the orchestra had risen from A441 to what must have been A445. I had to play a major sixth and it was borderline revolting. I stopped practicing it after some experiences like that. Knowing what note to play by some absolute measure is only useful if you are playing alone. What you play in an ensemble is relative to a lot of other people.
bjoli 4y ago
On the bassoon this was (and is) the case for me. It even translates to instruments very close to the bassoon such as dulcian and the French basson. If I hear a baroque bassoon I know what note it is in 415.

klysm 4y ago

I’m curious how much initial effort it took you to get decent at it

bjoli 4y ago
Not very much, surprisingly. It was in a period of my life when I was practising a lot, which might have helped. It took only about a month before I went from having to reason about what note it was to just knowing instantly.
- klysm 3y ago
  I usually use the technique of finding the interval from the lowest note I can hum - did you reason with a similar technique?

0x445442 4y ago

Interesting, I didn’t know perfect pitch was something you could practice. My son was a pretty high level french horn player and from a very early age he had perfect pitch. His teachers always told us it was something you’re born with.

opan 4y ago
I had an English teacher tell me once that being a good speller was something you were born with (she was not the best speller despite teaching English, and I was pretty good, to be clear). I think saying stuff like that is just how people cope with their own lack of trained skills and how they justify not improving. I've seen similar excuses from people who don't quite feel like learning to solve a rubik's cube.

belter 4y ago

How far does it go on your own case? Are there degrees of it? Can you do the level harmony recognition like in the video below, or it's more the individual notes when played on it's own? https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY https://youtu.be/hli-9maxDjY

bjoli 4y ago
Not quite that extreme. I could use it for harmonies if it wasn't too many dissonant notes because I couldn't tell the notes apart. However, that is something I trained before doing the perfect pitch thing. Being able to pick apart harmonies is extremely useful. Having perfect pitch just made it a little easier. I always found it hard on the piano. I wonder if it is related to the fact that everything sounds good on the piano, even things that are badly composed. Parallel fifths in a chorale on the piano? Sounds wonky but ok. In a chorus? Awful.

helaoban 4y ago

Could you elaborate on your method? That's quite impressive considering it's widely believed to be untrainable past a certain age (at least that's layman my understanding). Did you start with a complete inability to identify notes, and now are able to identity them immediately (i.e like acquiring a new language?).

hluska 4y ago
The idea that you cannot attain perfect pitch as an adult has been thoroughly debunked. The University of Chicago’s study is most famous but results have been replicated at many other schools. Adults can develop perfect pitch just fine. The issue seems to be that most adults find it useless and as artists they’re better off spending their time elsewhere.
- coliveira 4y ago
  Yes, the biggest problem to acquire perfect pitch is that Western music is made exactly to wash away the difference between keys. Instruments are designed so every key is relatively the same. Things would be different if every key had a slightly different relationship. This used to be the case in medieval music, that's why early composers thought about different keys having different moods.
  - pjlegato 4y ago
    That statement is not true of Western music in general, only of most (not all) classical and poular music since roughly the 18th century, when "equal temperament," tunings designed to make all keys sound the same, became popular.[1] Much Western music, such as that written during the the Baroque, Renaissance, and medieval eras, as well as certain modern genres like barbershop quartets, modern classical, electronica, microtonal and atonal music, etc. use a variety of other systems such as some form of just intonation[2], where different keys sound very different as they exhibit differently sized versions of the same interval. Conversely, much non-Western music also uses some kind of equal temperament (where keys all sound the same), such as Chinese, Arabic, Indonesian, Thai, and Native American music.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation

freedomben 4y ago

How does one "practice" perfect pitch? (genuinely asking so I can try it, not trying to make some dumb rhetorical point about it not being possible)

49531 4y ago
There are tools you can use that will play a note like C and then another note, and you listen and guess what the 2nd note is. It just takes a bit of consistent trial and error learning, after a bit you get the hang of it and kind of create a mapping of what notes sound like in your head. I use a app called Tenuto for it, but I am sure there are others out there.
- sparky_z 4y ago
  That would be practising "relative pitch", which is a standard part of ear training. "Perfect pitch" means being able to identify the 2nd note when played by itself, without hearing the 1st note to reference from.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I had an ear training teacher who claimed to have acquired perfect pitch by listening to a tuning fork for 10 minutes a day, and training himself to remember the pitch as a reference. I doubt very much that this worked long-term.
    - C-x_C-f 4y ago
      I don't have perfect pitch but if there's no sound around I can accurately recall the pitch of my alarm (the standard Android one) within a half tone, so I think that strategy makes sense
    - Tor3 4y ago
      That's simple pitch memory. I started playing guitar at 12 and at that time used a tuning fork - and I noticed that after a while I could hear the "right" note of the A string in my head and I didn't really need the fork anymore. That ability is just pitch memory (which can be thrown off) combined with learning the timbre of the instrument you play (in my case a guitar string). And yes, that's not the same as perfect pitch, which typically includes much more than the above. I certainly don't have it, even if I can pick any string first time in the morning and hear if it's "off". Because that's all I can do. But then again I don't get annoyed by "out of tune" sounds in the world around me, unlike what people with perfect pitch sometimes tell about.

nostrademons 4y ago

I took a music theory class in college that had a very heavy ear-training component. The TA in the course would often talk about the concept of "pitch memory", both absolute and relative. In other words, perfect pitch isn't a binary concept of you either have it or you don't, but it's your ability to remember and reproduce absolute pitches from memory. What we think of as "perfect pitch" is the extreme version of this, where your pitch memory is basically long-term and you can sing a middle-C on command. But many people have decent short-term pitch memory. One girl in my ear training session (a pretty accomplished cellist) could remember absolute pitches for the whole 1.5 hour session; if we came back to a note, she could get it, but she was usually lost in the beginning of the session when we came in cold. I (9 years of violin training, starting at age 7) had a pitch memory of about 5-10 minutes - while we were working on a specific interval, I could remember and reproduce the base note without being prompted by the piano, but once we moved on to another interval I'd lose it. My wife (no specific music training) goes off-key after about 20 seconds. It wouldn't surprise me that training this ability when you're young leads to much longer-term memory than training it as an adult, the same way that training gymnastics when young leads to the ability to do a back handspring from muscle memory, or training a foreign language gives you a much better ability to speak it without an accent.

vnorilo 4y ago
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.
- klipt 4y ago
  > 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-pitch-may-not-be-absolute-after-all.html https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/perfect-p...

samstave 4y ago

May you please explain ELI5 what "perfect pitch" means? (I was told I was a musical savant, and once I was told that, I was scared away from music... my Violin teacher was known to be owb of the best, SO i dont know what "perfect pitch" is, as I attribute it to 'bad actors'

hluska 4y ago
Perfect (or absolute) pitch refers to the ability to distinguish a note (correctly) when you hear it played. Singers with perfect pitch can sing a particular note on command. If you had perfect pitch, I would be able to play notes on a piano and you would be able to distinguish each. There is a continuum of perfect pitch - some may have perfect pitch after they have warmed up, others may retain their perfect pitch for a short time after they stop playing and others (apparently) always have it. In that aspect, it’s a little like memory. Mozart and Ella Fitzgerald are two famous people you’ve likely heard who had absolute pitch though I have never read or heard anything that suggests either found it terribly useful. Of the musicians I know who have worked to develop it, it’s mostly kind of a party trick. If you’re interested in perfect pitch, you should likely learn about relative pitch as well. Whereas perfect pitch refers to the ability to correctly distinguish a note cold, relative pitch refers to the ability to distinguish notes in relation to each other.
- samstave 4y ago
  thank you for the 'perfect pitch' response <3
- Gunax 4y ago
  But how accurate does it have to be to be considered perfect? As in within one hz? What about very high frequencies, where a single hz is much smaller, relative to the frequency?
  - AlecSchueler 4y ago
    Within less than half a semitone seems more likely. The frequencies of the notes don't matter as the relationship between the pitch classes are unchanged.

gabereiser 4y ago

I would imagine relative pitch is more useful/practiced? I was a musician in a rock band for many years (you never heard of) and I have relative pitch. I started in orchestra on the cello at age 7. Banged on drums during middle school. Picked up guitar in high school and formed a band. I can identify chords and I can tell you what note if I have another note as a reference (like you do with your voice).

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spaceman_2020 4y ago

Do you recommend any routine to help a young child learn absolute pitch? I’m talking under 3 years of age.

Tor3 4y ago
Rick Beato made a video or two about that. His son Dylan has perfect pitch. What he did when the boy was very little was to let him listen to various types of jazz music - he can't be certain, but his theory is that if the music is "interesting" in the sense that it's not always predictable then the brain automatically zooms in on that and gets interested - and that's what gave the boy perfect pitch (I believe this theory relies on an underlying theory - a quite common one - which is that babies are actually born with perfect pitch but lose it relatively early, just as all babies are born with the ability to hear every sound in every language, and that also gets filtered off as they get older. This last one is pretty certain, the other one is still debated).
bjoli 4y ago
I would have found it useful in school. At work it got in the way. Unless your kid is going to.play one of those perpetually out of tune instruments like the piano I wouldn't recommend it. I had a horn colleague that had the crazy kind of perfect pitch (he still has, but he is retired) and perfect metronome tempo and all that. He called it a curse.
- spaceman_2020 4y ago
  Interesting perspective. I'm an amateur musician and always thought that absolute pitch would have made me a better musician. I wanted to make sure that my kid gets the opportunity to acquire perfect pitch, even if he doesn't decide to take up music in the future
  - bjoli 4y ago
    I find that being able to hear the note you are about to play before you play it is great, but having that note absolutely anchored into something that might not be in tune with what is around you is really just a hindrance. There are certainly people that like their perfect pitch, but I did not. There is a reason they teach in in many asian countries between the ages 2 and 5. A girl I studied with told me they never told you the note they started on when they did melody dictation. You were just supposed to know.

Tor3 4y ago

What you describe sounds like pitch memory, which doesn't have the same qualities (and problems) as actual absolute ("perfect") pitch. I also remember pitch. I can grab my guitar after a week away from it, touch a string and know if it's out of tune. I can tune it without a tuner. But what I'm actually doing is remembering the pitch with the help of the timbre of the guitar string (or harp string, for my wife's harp - I hear if a string is "off" even if it's the first single note I hear in the morning). I believe I would quickly be bewildered if I heard pure sine tones. And that's it. There's nothing more which is even close to what people with absolute pitch can do. I haven't run into that many of them, but it's like they see all the music in color, it's a different world (and they are often constantly bothered by out-of-tune sounds from life). Hit some random notes in parallel and they can tell you the notes instantly. And so on and so forth. The other thing is what happens if they lose the perfect pitch.. which does happen, with age, for many, or at least it de-tunes a bit (drops a semitone, for example). Then, when it's gone, they don't even have relative pitch to rely on. Rick Beato interviewed a couple of people this happened to. I don't want to be there. My little ability to tune without a tuner is enough for me, and what it is is trained pitch memory - not absolute pitch. And it's relatively common, unlike absolute pitch.

bjoli 4y ago
I have tone memory on a bassoon. I described this in another post. It even translates to baroque bassoon, tuned half a not lower. When I practiced pitch instrument did not matter. I could tell what note a sine wave was. I never made any differenriation between what I had and absolute pitch. Functionally they wäwrre the same and I believe that if I would have kept it up for a couple of months it would have been permanent. Some of it still lingers. I can still tell whether a tuning A is 440 or 442. Sometimes i just know what note is being played, regardless of instrument. When that feeling comes I am never wrong.