5 ms·

It does depend on the style of music, but it's easy to notice the clash between piano and violin tuning in, say, a slow movement of a Beethoven or Mozart piano

• jstanek 12y ago
  > she struggled to enjoy some concerts that I enjoyed, simply because the notes from the various players weren't aligned well enough... Hmm, it depends from listener to listener. Obviously I can't comment for your partner, but I too have perfect pitch. Bad alignment of players isn't really a problem for me unless the players are dramatically out of tune. I'm not the greatest at determining tunings by ear either, as this kind of thing varies.
  • jessaustin 12y ago
    ...I too have perfect pitch... I'm not the greatest at determining tunings by ear either... Sorry I'm relatively ignorant when it comes to these topics; what does this mean? What are you able to do, upon listening to a particular musical performance?
    • TheLoneWolfling 12y ago
      Perfect pitch means knowing absolute versus relative frequency. Most people have no (or very little) sense of absolute pitch - if you get asked to sing / hum / whistle a song, you'll start on any random old note. You'll get the relative pitches right - the change in pitch between notes - but not the absolute. (To be pedantic, you'll get the ratio of the frequencies approximately right) Someone with perfect pitch can identify "that note is the A# below middle C", for instance. But not necessarily that accurately. " not the greatest at determining tunings by ear " just means that he's not very good at it. So he may identify that A# as a C or something.
      • GuiA 12y ago
        Can perfect pitch be developed with a lot of training, or is it really a biological thing?
        • filoeleven 12y ago
          It is likely some amount of both. Studies have shown that there is a higher prevalence of people with perfect pitch in countries where tonal languages--languages in which the same series of sounds made with distinct voice pitches can denote entirely different words. However, the percentage of people with perfect pitch remains tiny, which is not what I would expect if it was due to training alone. It seems like it might be helpful enough for musicians that we'd have turned it into a method by now if training alone reliably produced good results.
        • makeset 12y ago
          It's believed to be inborn or somehow acquired spontaneously at a very early age. There are products that claim to teach it, but there's no scientific evidence. Years ago I tried a few, and my impression was that it's mostly snake oil, and even if some rudimentary progress is possible, it's definitely not worth the effort, better expended on improving relative pitch and other aspects of musicianship. Wikipedia agrees: From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch "[...] there are no reported cases of an adult obtaining absolute pitch ability through musical training; adults who possess relative pitch, but who do not already have absolute pitch, can learn "pseudo-absolute pitch", and become able to identify notes in a way that superficially resembles absolute pitch. Moreover, training pseudo-absolute pitch requires considerable motivation, time, and effort, and learning is not retained without constant practice and reinforcement."
        • Smaug123 12y ago
          Around the age of 15, I acquired something an awful lot like perfect pitch: I can identify and (conversely) produce seven particular notes. n=1.
        • hvidgaard 12y ago
          I'm fairly certain that it is one of those things you either can hear, or cannot hear - it requires a certain sensitivity in the ear, and not all people have that. Not all people that can hear the difference have trained it to a degree where they're conscious about it, so for some people it's possible.
• eru 12y ago
  Wouldn't absolute pitch be enough to make you struggle to enjoy?