2 ms·
Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good
by bunderbunder 2y ago
Tangentially, I have heard a couple times that learning absolute pitch is not necessarily considered worth the effort. Good relative pitch is just about as good in practice, and absolute pitch has the downside that, unlike relative pitch, people tend to lose their absolute pitch as they get older. Which then means they end up having to learn relative pitch skills, anyway. That could be a challenging thing to have to do late in your musical career.
- kqr 2y agoAlso with perfect pitch you hear when things are even a tiny bit out of tune (and this will annoy you!) even if everything is just fine relatively speaking and you're the only one of 500 musically trained people who is even capable of noticing.
- omnicognate 2y agoAs described to me by a couple of professional musicians who have absolute pitch (I don't) it's not so much that you lose it as that it shifts. For example the qualia you experienced for a B might now be felt in response to a slightly flat C, the whole sensation having shifted by a bit less than a semitone. This sounds vastly worse than just "losing absolute pitch" and was an extremely unpleasant and life-changing experience for the people that described it to me. Hearing about it was enough to convince me that absolute pitch is more of a curse than a blessing for musicians.