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.<p>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.<p>Even though I don't practice this anymore (it isn't very useful), I still often just instinctively know what note I hear.
Rick Beato's channel on Youtube was pretty much launched from the viral video where his son Dylan demonstrates his apparently unerring ability to identify individual pitches in note clusters with very high accuracy.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI</a><p>For some musical jobs having perfect pitch can really make a difference. For example singers, musicians playing bowed stringed instruments or a trombone benefit from perfect pitch. Also, conductors frequently have perfect pitch, probably because a strong musical memory and being able to sight sing on pitch from a score are valuable and depend to a certain extent on perfect pitch. See here for a lot more.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music-related_memory</a><p>Perfect pitch is also apparently more common in people who speak tonal languages like Mandarin.
My theory and composition teacher in college went through this same thing 100 years ago. I noticed she had a perfect pitch and asked her why. She told an identical story: that, at the kindergarten level, her entire class was taught how to recognize pitches. She was not impressed by her own ability, however, because her sister could identify the pitch of anything IRL, whether you kicked a rock, or you were listening to an exhaust pipe.<p>I also had a classmate who could identify any pitch to the exact frequency, so A443 versus A440, for example. Of course we tested him.
There are a lot of comments in this thread that seem to confuse "really good relative pitch" with "perfect pitch".<p>After the first note is known, the two are mostly indistinguishable. A person with really good relative pitch can, once they're told what the first note is, immediately identify everything that comes after it, just like someone with perfect pitch would. The difference is that someone with perfect pitch don't even need to be told what that first note is.<p>(This means someone with perfect pitch can walk along a road and tell you the note played by a tyre squeal in the distance, whereas someone with merely really good relative pitch would need to also hear a single reference note within a few seconds or minutes (pitch memory varies between individuals) to do the same.)
I wonder what's the physical basis of perfect pitch? Neurons growing in a certain pattern?<p>When I was in my late teens I went to a concert which was way too loud - for a few years after that incident I could hear something akin to modulation distortion if the sound was loud enough - a sort of low ringing like what you hear if you spin a suitcase wheel using your hand.<p>It was unpleasant, but surprisingly helpful in identifying pitch, because the distortion would just sound differently depending on pitch - I associated it with a few notes and could roughly identify them - especially the lower ones (E, D and C# specifically).<p>The effect faded over time and now I can't do it any more.<p>In any case, non-newtonian fluids exhibit such distortion and the body is full of them(most notably blood). I wonder if they play any role in this?
Is absolute pitch something you would actually want? From what I’ve read as people with absolute pitch get into late middle age in many their reference drifts and they start to perceive music that is in tune as being out of tune. For some this makes it hard to continue to enjoy music.<p>People with relative pitch can learn specific notes well enough to be able to recognize them given the constraint that the note is being played roughly in tune on an instrument tuned to the common tunings of the music they are familiar with, and they can learn to recognize intervals.<p>This allows them with practice to identify notes almost as fast as someone with absolute pitch, and allows them to do all the practical musical things people with absolute pitch can do.
Interval-training is a lot more useful. Regardless of what key you're in, particularly if you're not playing (or don't know how to play) from sheet music. E.g. given two notes, what is the distance between them in semitones.<p>Once you can recognize any interval then, given a pitch, you can identify the other notes in any chord (major, minor, etc.) it's a part of. Useful for tuning instruments (e.g. guitar). Useful for understanding chord notation (charts), and what chords are being used (progressions). Useful for quickly figuring out all the notes in a melody. (Especially one you want to remember.) Useful for deciding what -scale- is being used (dorian, phrygian, pentatonic, etc.)
While I think it's pretty cool, is absolute pitch actually "useful" for music-making? I feel relative notations (I-V-vi-IV) capture the essense of a piece of music better than absolute notations (C-G-Amin-F). It's just my layman opinion though.
Can anybody explain what is so useful about having absolute pitch?<p>And is there a visual equivalent to perfect pitch? E.g. you see a color and you say it's #f3eb20 ?<p>Or you taste a soup and say it's 2 grams of salt on 1L of soup?
Lately I have a theory about perfect pitch training as an 18+ year old human, I think we will achieve it (my friend and I) via the following: Using Tuesdays to practice E chord songs, using Thursdays to practice C# minor chord songs. One day play only E songs, one day play only C#m songs, do this several weeks, pick 2 new chords for 2 fresh days, repeat.
I've come to believe that almost everybody could learn absolute pitch, it is just not tought. In school I asked "what is that tone?" or "what does a D sound like?" and the teacher basically laughted and said that is wrong, you are not supposed to ask that, and music doesn't work like that. (Same story a few years later when it came to musical scales, I wanted to understand how they are built up and what the mathematical principles are, the (other) teacher said I have to stop using "problem thinking" and just accept that I have to rote learn the scales.)
If I understand it correctly, the key to this method is to teach children to recognize chords first and then the notes in them. They practice by associating a different colored flag with each chord.
Don't know if it counts as "absolute pitch", but I can hum at 120hz pretty accurately, as it's the first harmonic of 60hz which I'm hearing all the fucking time.
My wife, my son and his piano teacher all have perfect pitch. Me and my daughter don't have it. Watching my kid figure out pitch is interesting because sometimes he will know, and other times he'll use a reference note, like middle C and then get the notes from there. When we listen to a song, I will ask him what scale the song is in, and he'll dissect it to figure out. It's all fascinating to someone like me who has no concept of perfect pitch.
If you're interested, just expose your infant/toddler kids to a lot of music. Especially complex music like classical and jazz, not just what's on the top 40 radio.<p>Kids' brains at that age are in peak sound processing mode. They are learning to understand the aural world. This leads to understanding spoken language. Music is just sound, and pitch can be learned like any other sound. We could speak in musical notes if we had a language codified that way.
A summary of the teaching method, which dates back to apparently 1991<p><a href="https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html" rel="nofollow">https://ichionkai.co.jp/english4.html</a>
Our daughter has perfect pitch. Her violin teacher was curious how she was learning so quickly and ahead of her first test did some aural practice, whatever key she played on the piano our daughter could tell her with 99% accuracy what it was. My family and my wife's family are quite musical (neither of us are).
Many people have absolute pitch for certain well known sounds.<p>Who can't tell if a sine wave sound is higher or lower than the emergency broadcast tone. That tone is 1000 hz.<p>So, that is absolute pitch, just low resolution. I'm assuming if you can add in a lot of reference points that you know well, you could get better resolution.
You don't want perfect pitch. Various people suggested that one of my sons (aged 9) had absolute pitch, as he could remember the starting notes for pieces from memory. Unfortunately, the organ in our church is a quarter-tone sharp.<p>The goal should be very very very good relative pitch.
I couldn't find any apps that use this method to try it with my 3 y/o, so I started working on my own here: <a href="https://eguchi.app" rel="nofollow">https://eguchi.app</a> .<p>I'd love feedback if anyone is interested in trying it!
I've heard that some people with absolute pitch lose it as they age (50's and 60's), but they tend to lose it in a weird way. Apparently, they still have absolute pitch in a sense, but it just kind of shifts over time so it's a little offset. It'd be like if you could still see color, but all the sudden your blues started to look purple or something like that. Curious if anyone with absolute pitch can confirm.
What's with nerddom's fascination with absolute pitch? I've already made several lifetimes' worth of ruckus in my few and am continually only barely learning to listen. Is it because for so many of us music lessons have proved a more affordable form of childcare than the presence of a compassionate, listening human being?<p>If you ask me, it's pretty fucking neat if you're someone who from some early years is already fluent in the universal language of 440Hz. But chief, what do we do with the 438Hz ninjas from the other village then? And there surely must be a solution to many of existentialism's pointless crises to be found in elucidating a universal theory of how brains pick up language, music, (hello tonal languages), maths, and all other myriad traditional symbol systems using the same underlying neurobiological mechanisms.<p>But every day this spring, hearing the birds outside teaches me new unique facets of the sense of hearing. (It's a mad racket out there - there are the birds that I could possibly learn to name, and then there is this one that sounds totally out there - nuff said). Funny testament of how we seek to cultivate in others what we fail to cultivate in ourselves.<p>The committee for meta-ethics is mildly piffed at un(ac)countable replications of the natural phenomenon that, yes, young children can be taught symbol systems of arbitrary complexity up to maximum sensory perception (and, if they're anything like us, they'll even manage to pick up a bunch of metaphysical spooks on the way to the oceanic moment of unlearning it all and interfacing more directly with "real reality" beyond their nervous system lol)<p>Thankfully, if they're anything like us, by middle age they will have reverted back to monkeys.
I'm in my 30s and have had almost 0 experience in music before. I bought my toddler a xylophone a few months ago and I started playing random keys (just trying to improvise a melody on the spot) every day or so for less than an hour each time... Then after about a month, I found that I could teach myself to play pretty much any piece of music from memory in only a few minutes (national anthem level complexity). My improvised melodies have been getting better as well.<p>The xylophone helps a lot because each note has a different color and so I now associate each color with a particular sound. I tend to think of notes as (left to right) going from sad to happy. There are 2 notes I use as a reference which are 'emotionally stable'; one on the left (sad) side and one on the right (happy) side. On the left side, there is a blue note which I consider to be the last one in the 'sad' spectrum just before it gets happy... And on the right side, there is a yellow note which is at the end of the 'happy' spectrum just before the mood goes into a kind of mania.
I was forced to learn piano when I was 6, really hated it and ended in 2 years. When I really got into music in high school and started playing guitar it's an amazing feeling to discover I actually have perfect pitch. However the perfect pitch I have is an inferior one, I sometimes even miss a note by a half step, curious if someone is the same.
People can have absolute/exception memory for other things too. I dated a woman who could look at a bit of cloth and say "that's the same colour as..." and be right every time. Even when she hadn't seen the other item of clothing for months. It made shopping with her somewhat less painful because she wasn't constantly swapping things just to look at the colours.<p>Much better than perfect pitch, otherwise known as the ability to know that something is out of tune, by how much, and struggle to ignore that. A violinist friend managed to train herself to shift pitch to match the rest of the orchestra but I suspect part of the reason she turned to the dark side (jazz) was the latter's ability to adapt to her sense of correct pitch.
I've played guitar for many years, but for the last couple of decades it's only been casual noodling, often improvising with music I have on in the background. I read music, but slowly and reluctantly so have only a weak association between note names and sound.<p>But I have a strong fretboard/sound association that is some sort of pitch memory. I can jump straight to a note, or if not to it, I'll be off by a fret (semitone). It's more accurate wiht a quick intuitive attempt - if I pause to think I'll often be further off. Jumping straight into playing with/over something I hear I'll nearly always start on the right note.<p>What pitch memory I have is very clearly learned, and I suspect it could be developed it were a priority.
A member of my family is an interesting case, in that he technically doesn't have perfect pitch, but does for all practical purposes. He has a clear memory of a particular note that he heard as a child and can recount that memory. Years later he is able to identify the pitch of anything by comparing it with that memory. He might think about it for a second or hum a note to himself, but invariably can identify the pitch without have to hear a reference (apart from the one in his head).<p>He's got the best of both worlds, in that he doesn't get driven crazy by something being out of tune, but can accurately name a pitch without a reference. He's also been able to transpose on the fly from an early age.
Normally perfect pitch is thought to only be able to be picked up during a critical period in early life. However, there was a fascinating study that showed that an anti epileptic/bipolar drug (sodium valproate) can reopen the window to gain this skill!<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/</a>
Interesting that in figure 2. the nine white key chords) there are keys labelled as 'H'?? it seems like they should be 'B' instead.
One time in physics lab we had an experiment with tuning forks. I rung the fork, put it to my ear, did the “do re mi” song in my head and I unmistakably recognized that one of the notes matched. I told my lab partner, we looked it up and determined that I was correct.<p>I don’t have much musical training, I’ve tried to learn an instrument a few times but never motived myself to practice.
Really slow (impossible) to train, if some understanding/training for realtive pitch is already present. Try with one single note, training session is over, because at that moment the brain switches to relative mode, and refuses to process absoltute information. A couple (max) of individual stimulations per day isn't sufficient to learn.
About this time I always "begin" to wonder how helpful would it really be for someone <i>born</i> with perfect pitch today at A=440 if they would have instead been born during a previous century when the recognized standard pitch was seldom A=440?<p>I would have to imagine it would drive some of them nuts.
I do not have perfect pitch but the concept of pitch memory is something I’ve experienced. I’ll occasionally hear a chord or a pitch and then a song will also pop in my head. I started ear training in college and it was pretty rough but has come a long way
This video convinced me that adults cannot develop or train perfect pitch.<p><i>"Why Adults Can't Develop Perfect Pitch"</i> by Rick Beato<p><a href="https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/816VLQNdPMM</a>
I've read that perfect pitch can be a burden later in life, because it wanders. So as an older person, you still have the notes in your head, but they're <i>off</i> by a little bit.
Perfect pitch can be acquired by anyone. It’s the ability to distinguish notes by their unique sound characteristic much like seeing colors of the rainbow. It’s akin to “color hearing”.