10k hours doing what? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors?
Veritasium has a really good video on the subject [0], with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic—the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible—and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good.
> By the end of freshman year, I had significantly expanded my musical tastes and unambiguously had perfect pitch… for piano only. I find it highly unlikely that this was due to identifying microtuning differences;
I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch.
> Don’t learn a non-C instrument
I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.
Yeah, this advice doesn't hold up--even the OP mentions learning the clarinet, which is a B-flat instrument. I also play the clarinet and developed the same ability to detect each note by its timbre. I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates, the back-pressure or resistance you feel while playing, that becomes associated with the timbre the longer you play.
> I also think there is a kinesthetic element to each note--the way the instrument vibrates
Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing.
In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an anchor.
Every instrument is a C instrument if you want it to be. "Transposing instrument" is a misleading name. They're really just instruments for which Western staff notation is conventionally written transposed. If you're writing all your own notation for your own personal use or playing by ear it's irrelevant. The transposition isn't part of the instrument.
I could write a similar article "lose perfect pitch in 15 years".
My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440.
And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.
I do not know anyone that has taken Depakote for the purpose of perfect pitch. The individuals that I have known have taken it for severe psychotic/mood disorders. From what I remember, it's not a fun time for the side-effects can be absolutely brutal.
was waiting for the inevitable hdac inhibitor comment seeing as vorinostat was recently so often spruiked by a vested individual on reddit. to other readers, these are literally chemotherapy drugs that globally inhibit cell formation, albeit taken at much lower dosages than therapeutic.
Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :)
A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.
It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard somehow fades, or something...
This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear" after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in perfect clarity in the proper key.
I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task, but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly anyone who studies music at the university level or above would find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly incorrect.
> Random chance would be 8.3%.
A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love" played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he might just have picked up a reference note from the piano or his in-ear monitors, like a filthy commoner. Usually when making music, having good relative pitch is required, and a reference instrument is mostly handy, making perfect pitch somewhat redundant. But do tell what you're doing with perfect pitch, I'm curious.
And on curiosity, I went to your website and randomly listened to "The Fugue Song" [0]. Really loved it! Very nice moment when the singing comes in, repeating the phrase from the fugy guitar intro. Good song! (I'm a total sucker for Nina Simone's "Love Me Or Leave me", do you know that? A song where she's inserting some counterpoint improvisations in the middle). I'm listening to a bit of "Hiss" now.
> 8.3%
Rounded to the next semitone of course, I left that detail out, it's in the paper.
It's just an anecdote, but: I remember playing in a band with an amateur musician friend who told me had perfect pitch, and it was "very annoying", according to him, when we transposed songs to fit our voices. They just "sounded wrong" to him. He would make beginner mistakes since he relied on pitch memory rather than listening to us to know what to play/sing.
I have no idea how it works in general, but it seems like it was a problem for at least this one guy.
xD Well I didn't expect it to go there. I don't know that song but I'll have to listen to it when I get home.
I don't have perfect pitch but it's not too hard to imagine what I could do with it. For me, it'd simply make a lot of tasks faster. I've spent a lot of time throughout my life transcribing music. I can do it relatively quickly but there's lots of moments where I have to confirm things, or poke around notes finding the matching notes, struggling to clarify shades of a chord based on the presence of notes.
Reading music will be easier for people with AP, especially in singing situations. Even if you're a pianist it will still be helpful. There are a few Marc-Andre Hamelin interviews out there where he describes some of the advantages. It's easier to read music if you know immediately what it's going to sound like. Again, this is possible with relative pitch, but it's just more work and slower.
Arranging and composing away from the keyboard will be much easier with perfect pitch.
As time goes on, it'll be less important, most likely. And yes, there are some downsides obviously. In my final aural training class in music school, we had a competition at the very end of the year for fun. It came down to a team of 3 I was on vs. a team of 3 that had a guy with AP. The final task was to sight-sing a musical 'round' (a composition where the melody repeats in the various voices at different points in different voices overlapping each other). The guy with AP actually ruined it for his team. They mistakenly chose him to finish the round instead of start it. Mid-way through their performance, the pitch on their team had drifted so heavily they were in-between notes on the piano when he took over. He tried to sing 'relative' to everyone else but it was so hard for him. It was so unnatural for him to sing out of key, he couldn't do it; it sounded really bad. Great guy though and a ridiculously good violinist.
> A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the correct pitch.
It's not called "in-the-ballpark" pitch, it's called perfect/absolute pitch. Being up to a quarter tone off is a large error in music. Thinking of pitch in terms of 12 buckets is not musically useful. The vast majority of music is based off consonance where being even a few hertz off means unpleasant dissonance. TLDR: Thinking of pitch as 12 buckets is mostly irrelevant.
I always observed that the number of random non-musicians who can get it right using the "major" handful of those twelve keys is remarkable enough to be considered.
Since those are the only 12 notes so many people have been hearing from every direction for so long, and truly confined to not more than a few of the major keys that are "dominant" as a result of modern instrumentation, it gets ingrained in the psyche and the notes are almost memorized by frequency. With nothing in-between, so that's what they reproduce without any training. Or can have a more sensitive ear for out-of-tune notes than an actual music student of a number of years.
This is more common than people thought. I don't remember who said it but most people can get pretty close to the first note of All Star - Smash Mouth for example.
Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.
Not quite music, but I had quite the adventure learning pitch perception as it applies to languages.
As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.
One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.
Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
I think you could definitely do the same thing to learn relative pitch. In western music theory there's generally only 12 notes. And #1 and #12 are the same, an octave, which many people can recognize implicitly
Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.
Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know
If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition
You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.
You have a fencepost error; the notes in Western music in equal temperament are C, C♯/D♭, D, D♯/E♭, E, F, F♯/G♭, G, G♯/A♭, A, A♯/B♭, B, then c an octave higher is the thirteenth.
yeah I was wondering the same thing. I'm only marginally familiar with Japanese, but studied mandarin in Taiwan for years and Chinese is considered a significantly more "tonal" language in terms of pitching up, pitching down, etc.
I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native language though.
I suppose I have perfect pitch, in that I can more often than not:
* aurally identify key signatures
* aurally identify chords
* sing a given note on command
It wasn't until I was into my early twenties that I could do this. For me, the single biggest stepping stone was building the connection between what I could hear in my head from a song that I remember clearly with the underlying music theory.
Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:
* Pink Floyd's "Comfortably Numb" is in B minor
* The famous motif in Beethoven's 5th is in C minor
* Blues Traveller's "Hook" is in A
* Regina Spektor's "Eet" is in D-flat
* Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is F minor
* etc.
Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in "Comfortably Numb". Huh, The Beatles "Across The Universe" sounds tonally like "Eet" - I guess it is also in D-flat.
A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
Not a playlist, but I've always hit up Song Key Finder[1] when trying to figure out what songs might fit together for mashup-type purposes. They rank the songs by popularity within their user community.
Its worth noting that adults can learn something called pseudo absolute pitch, which sounds similar to what you're describing. The difference (which you're also describing) is that it requires reinforcement, and is a bit less accurate than having perfect pitch
It seems like a "bit less accurate" is a misnomer here. If you can successfully employ this technique, and use calibrated test equipment to measure it, you have in fact demonstrated your accuracy in recalling the pitch of notes, also known as perfect pitch. The means of achieving this recall do not in any way affect the accuracy of the results, because the results exclusively speak for themselves.
Uhh.... What? There's no guarantee that the song you hear ringing in your head after a certain time has passed is going to be in the original key, in fact there's a very good chance (depending on your range) that you'll end up subtly transposing it to a different key when you try singing it in the shower apropos of nothing.
This is by no means a guaranteed method to learn perfect pitch.
I believe my claim of having perfect pitch stands on solid ground, and consists largely of what OP is describing. That's because I can demonstrate it. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the described method is a reasonable way to _acquire_ perfect pitch, but I do contend that what is described is a reasonable method of demonstrating and explaining one's perfect pitch. If you do have perfect pitch, that is reflected in the fact that you don't transpose the music you hear on in your head.
This idea of recalling songs is an easy way to explain perfect pitch to others in a way they can easily try for themselves. If you can sing the first note to a song, and then afterwards you actually listen to that song, and you are actually in tune, then you have perfect pitch. That's a far cry from being able to name the note, or rattle off the notes in a chord, but in my view the mental recall is the true innate essence that undergirds every other component of the umbrella of perfect pitch.
Yeah I would agree that with proper practice (assuming you have a "locked in" song for every semitone in a scale) - that this could probably be extrapolated to being able to hear a random note on an instrument and then naming that note, and vice versa singing a given note on command.
An even easier method, which I was taught is interval training. The jaws theme is a minor second. Do re mi starts with a major second, and so on. Interval training is easier, imo, and would then allow you to memorize fewer songs with absolute notes.
Interesting but prior studies in a more controlled environment show that the ability to recall a song in the correct key is only about 15%.
From the article: "Psychologists wanted to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day. When researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were based upon.
More specifically, 44.7 percent of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9 percent were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were recently published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics."
This study seems extraordinarily suspect because it's essentially relying on good faith that the person recalling this song hasn't just literally heard this song on the radio a few hours before that or in the morning, and now it's an "earworm."
EDIT: The actual published paper makes it more clear how this study was done. Participants (N = 30, convenience sample) were surveyed at random times over a week and asked to produce a sung recording of any music they were experiencing in their heads. This is a little bit more reliable, but still hard to say how long this pitch perfect recall lasted from the last time that they actually heard the song.
What you are describing is known as "perfect relative pitch." It's quite a feat to acquire it -- takes many years of practice.
My understanding of true, perfect pitch is something a bit more innate. Individual with perfect pitch do not need to rely on any other techniques.
I've known people with both types. If anything, the practical differences are not significant enough to truly matter from my observations. Many of the folks with true, perfect pitch have told me that it is a curse more than a blessing. These people tend to hear notes even when they do not want to e.g., toilets flushing in an out of tune C, the pitches in people's voices, the pitches of jet engines, CPU coil whining in D#, etc..
When a lot of modern life is constant noise and out of tune, it can be somewhat distressing for people with perfect pitch, or at least, so they have told me. I can't imagine turning off a song on the radio solely because it's a few cents out of tune, but hey, I knew people that would.
Many of the responses to this comment imply that this is something fundamentally different than perfect pitch and give it some different name ("pseudo absolute pitch", "perfect relative pitch", etc.). While I concede that most people think of perfect pitch as something that is instilled in some way in early childhood rather than achievable through practice, I guess I would ask those commenters... why do you think the latter is fundamentally different, or is using some separate mechanism?
There are many skills which are much easier to instill in early childhood and are simply harder to master if approached in adulthood -- language learning, certain athletic skills, and more -- but we would never consider any of these impossible to achieve through study. Sure, maybe the maximum achievable skill level is less than what could have been possible if study began in early childhood, but we would not say that it is impossible for adults to achieve a level of mastery, or that those who gained a skill through serious practice must be using some separate mechanism than those who learned it in early life.
I contend that it is the same with absolute pitch. After all, there is not even a perfect level of absolute pitch mastery! In layman's terms, "perfect pitch" is usually understood to mean that a person can immediately name a pitch when played -- on a 12-tone western music scale. But some people people with perfect pitch have better precision than that and can estimate quarter tones, etc. If a note is played that's 20 cents sharper than Ab, and person #1 says "that's an Ab" while person #2 says "that's a note a touch sharper than Ab", most people consider neither statement to disqualify them from having absolute pitch. But there is a difference. Moreover, no person on Earth can name a pitch down to, say, a couple decimals of absolute frequency value. Doesn't this imply that the skill exists as achievable points on a spectrum, not as a flat binary?
In fact, there is an interesting historical anecdote about polish-american pianistic prodigy Josef Hofmann related to absolute pitch:
"Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was."
This is incredibly impressive for two reasons:
- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification
- A pure tone from a tuning fork doesn't have any of the characteristic overtones, timbre, etc. that you'd get from an instrument to help identify the sound
I imagine the gold standard of perfect pitch would be identifying exactly how many cents sharp or flat a given sound is--you could tune a piano by ear if you had that.
You can tune a piano by ear by listening to the beating. You need one note to be tuned according to a given reference but that reference doesn't have to be 440 hz
> While I concede that most people think of perfect pitch as something that is instilled in some way in early childhood rather than achievable through practice, I guess I would ask those commenters... why do you think the latter is fundamentally different, or is using some separate mechanism?
As soon as having learned some relative pitch, it becomes very difficult to train absolute pitch. One single note a day. For the second note the brain will switch to relative mode, and there's no progress on absolute. Forcing the ear/brain to run in absolute mode seems possible, but is difficult consistently enough to practice absolute.
Source: Experimenting with my own ability (or lack thereof).
I personally do believe that there is something fundamentally different about perfect pitch perception, and think of it more like discussions around aphantasia or maybe synesthesia. I followed along with this guy's research years ago on his quest to understand and obtain perfect pitch [0] and was pretty obsessed myself. I had a number of friends with perfect pitch and would do random experiments and quiz them ("ooh, you're drunk, can you tell what note this is?" etc).
From that link:
> For the same reason, absolute listeners do not perceive pitch "height". They do not perceive pitches as "higher" or "lower" or physically "next to" each other. As musicians, of course, absolute listeners learn that, metaphorically, pitches are "higher" and "lower" than each other, because they can see these relationships on a page of sheet music. They also learn that, theoretically, "distance" between notes exists, because you can count the semitones that separate them, and you can see the "distance" between keys on an instrument. But, to an absolute listener, neither "height" nor "distance" has any direct perceptual reality.
> For example, when a non-absolute listener hears a guitar slide, we literally hear something moving down. But an absolute listener's experience is nearer to the color-changing rectangle above. They hear a series of discrete pitches, changing—not moving—from one to another. Although they know the sound has "descended" from their knowledge of the musical scale, the sound does not give them a literal experience of downward movement as it does to non-absolute listeners.
The link has a gif of a box moving through the color spectrum which helps understand the point.
I'm fascinated by this discussion because of how imprecise the terms "perfect," "absolute," "pseudo-absolute," etc. are. It's doubly interesting because we're describing things that happen in our own minds, with each of us having potentially different abilities and training and no common reference to what a "typical" person can do.
For me, sometimes, I can hear the opening note or chord of one song and it will immediately remind me of another unrelated song. When I check, they're almost always either in the same key or a semitone off. It happens most reliably when the timbres are similar. It's not a conscious thing, and the more I try to make it happen the less it ever does. Oddly enough though, I am terrible at identifying intervals. (Major third, perfect fifth, yeah, I know they're different and I can hear that, but ask me out of the blue which one was just played and I'll manage to get it wrong.)
Another thing I can do is play what is essentially a "mental recording" of a song I know well in my head. It's like if I had an iPod, and I felt some urge to listen to "La Grange" by ZZ Top, I can hear it in my head -- guitars, drums, vocals. I can skip around to whatever part interests me. I find that when I start tapping out the rhythms of what I'm recalling, or humming along with its melody, my recollection is pretty spot on when played against a real recording on speakers. Again maybe a semitone off at worst.
Both of those suggest to me that, somewhere in there, I do have an absolute pitch reference that I'm drawing from in an undisciplined way. If I sat down and practiced I bet I could refine it, but... why? Might be a neat party trick, but aside from that I don't really feel like I'm missing anything without it.
For some there is joy in the act itself even if the benefits are dubious at best. Just look at how much time we as a species have spent on mastering the rubik's cube.
The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch.
If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two.
Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if you're a dedicated musician the skill is an asset that allows you to execute a whole lot quicker. Occasionally it can be a curse, because you're more sensitive to out-of-tune notes.
The definition of relative pitch is unfortunately ambiguous, however--I've heard it defined as being able to pick out one note or several note, but having to rely on that reference note from memory to determine the pitch of other notes. I have A flat and E flat burned into my mind from playing Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf rag so many times as a teenager, so if I think hard I can figure out what any note is based on that reference. I can't quickly identify a note without doing that in my mind though, so I don't claim to have perfect pitch.
> The meaning of perfect pitch is unambiguous. When a note is played someone with perfect pitch can identify that pitch (Ab, F, C#, etc) without a reference. Also known as absolute pitch.
How does that work with variations in concert pitch? As I understand it, although the most common standard is to tune the A above middle C to 440 Hz, it's not universal.
Are the differences too small to matter? Or does music played on instruments tuned to a different standard sound "off"? Or are the other standards sufficiently rare that most musicians will never encounter them?
I also have a repertoire of songs whose keys I've memorized to function as anchors, then using relative pitch to gauge whatever note I'm trying to discern.
I'd like to skip this relative pitch translation and jump straight to recognizing each note directly, but I have gaps in coverage. I'm happy you brought up "Comfortably Numb" since it's also burned into my neurons - just now I thought about it for a moment, went to the keyboard and hit B exactly! Also love "Hook" and will never be able to forget that harmonica intro.
Some of my songs:
* Vampire Weekend - "Mansard Roof" in F major
* Radiohead - "Everything in its right place" first chord: C major
* Queen - "Bohemian Rhapsody" piano part in Bb major
This is the way. Most people don't have 'absolute perfect pitch' but, almost anyone can train themselves to have relative pitch, which can mostly give the same result. That is when you are given a good starting point to refer from, you can then work out where something is relative to that starting point.
That's why tuning forks and pitch pipes exist. You need a source of truth to ground things in, and then you can train yourself to hear the relative distance between notes from there.
I've got far from perfect pitch, but I can relate. In high school (mid 90's) I took up guitar and figured out that I could use (the memory of) the intro to "November Rain" by Guns N' Roses as a way to mentally get an "E" in my head to tune the lowest string and go from there.
I'd heard the song so many times that I found I could recall the low, then high E at the start and that's really all you need to get the rest in tune.
Oh wow, I’ve always thought this would be a good way to do it but I’ve never bothered to actually look up the key of the songs I can “hear” in my head. If the “Hello” of Comfortably Numb is an F#, that’s all I need :)
I don't have perfect pitch, but I basically have a 440Hz sine embedded in my brain which I can use for tuning stuff and figure out the rest through relative pitch. Perfect pitch sounds actually extremely distracting as a listener...
It’s very much a regional thing where Europeans tend to tune higher than Americans, as I recall. A lot is going to be dictated by the pitch of the local church organ.
Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
A440 was standardized in 1939. There was an earlier attempt to standardize on A435 in the late 1800s, but they specified a temperature uncomfortably cold, when you move something (I'm not sure what) tuned at A435 to a more comfortable room temperature you get close to A440, and from there a little rounding and we have A440. Before the 1850s every town had their own standard which was mostly based on whatever the A note of their organ was. Turning a pipe organ takes an expert hours and costs a lot of money so if it is in tune without you make everyone else tune their instrument to the organ. The tuning fork was invented in 1711, before then we didn't even have a way to move a tuning between downs - the act of transporting most instrument changes the tuning.
There’s also a standard of using the metric system, but there are still plenty of backwards places that don‘t follow it. One of the instruments I play is flute and while there is some flexibility possible to adjust the pitch by moving the headjoint in or out, there is an idealized pitch for the best intonation.¹ Most student instruments are A440 but some intermediate and professional models are tuned to A442 or A444.
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1. Granted, the player’s technique also affects intonation so this is not insurmountable.
As expected, another one of the many that conflates well trained relative pitch with absolute.
Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days.
All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable.
However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to immediately [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of any pitch-producing entity (keyboard/string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish.
Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days.
All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2].
I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected.
But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from.
So, I've got perfect pitch, and its not quite that black and white. For context, I can do all the regular perfect pitch superpowers (except for door rattles, which don't really rattle with a single tone), and have had it from a young age. When I first remember having it, I could only reliably recognise an A (and would have to count upwards to other notes), but unambiguously meet any definition as an adult
Many things that are considered perfect pitch skills take practice, and the OP is absolutely correct in that certain timbres are easier to classify than others. As a kid I would have had a harder time telling you the pitches if two woodwind instruments were playing a chord, vs two stringed instruments, due to familiarity. Its something you tend to work on accidentally as a background process as a musician
Much of perfect pitch discrimination is an active process though, eg being able to split up a song into its constituent parts and pick out the notes of each line is something you have to learn. All perfect pitch does is give you the ability to perform that discrimination, but anything more than that is a skill. For things that people consider to be perfect pitch skills (tone classification in a cluster), there absolutely are good days and bad days
Lots of pitches in nature aren't especially clean - nor are musical instruments, which is what makes them of varying ease to classify when you're unfamiliar. There are harmonics that can be make it hard to classify, or the central tone can be washed out in noise or similar tones. Its like trying to identify the dominant frequency in white noise, it takes practice
Its likely that OP had perfect pitch as a kid (demonstrating pitch classification), and simply never really capitalised on it mentally to develop it. Because you're right in that no adult has ever experimentally been demonstrated to have learnt this, even with extensive training and musical experience
I agree with all of the above, including the hypothesis that the OP likely had absolute pitch to some degree as a child and not thought about it. Everyone I personally know with perfect pitch (including myself) started engaging with music seriously very early on in life. (I don't know quickly I acquired it because it's always been as easy as identifying colors and I didn't know it was unusual until my piano teacher noticed.)
For me piano is definitely the easiest instrument to identify, I'm sure largely because it's what I've played all my life. Pipe organs are the worst. I assume that in general the purity of the tone correlates negatively with ease of identification.
Huge +1 to this post. Lots of other posts are off-base about the basic definition.
I've always had strong relative pitch ability and many people mistake my ability for perfect pitch. But in most practical applications, it's not just the _answer_ you arrive at that makes the definition so (because this can be faked), it's _how_ you know it.
People with absolute pitch just _know_ it without thinking -- no tricks, no mental reference note, no memorizing songs, no relying on a certain instrument's timbre, etc., they just know it.
I had "temporarily perfect" pitch when I was younger, especially when I was regularly playing the cello. I could pick up my cello and tune it without a reference, and I could recognize a note or key that was being played. I kind of took it for granted.
Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining. I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing.
I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.
I've often heard people say that "true" perfect pitch can only be accomplished with synesthesia, but I have no idea if it's true. Back when I played clarinet, I had decent relative pitch and I could ballpark a B-flat tuning note if I thought hard enough. That was enough to work my way to an absolute pitch, but it took a while.
I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.
I can also do this, don't have perfect pitch, was also a cello player, and have a guess.
Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches, and our brain can pattern match that more effectively than pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get pretty close.
Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
I accidentally trained myself by playing with SimTunes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTunes> a lot as a kid. But I think it trained me to be slightly flat. Electronically perfect notes sound wrong, and I tune things down when that's an option. I wish I cared enough to try running SimTunes today and see if A was 440 Hz or not.
Someone introduce the author to microtunings. there is a whole - much more harmonic - world out there. Equal temperment is a harmonic disaster and it is time to end it. (there are advantages to equal temperment but harmony is lost)
With some effort you can find the microtonal chords Chopin was thinking of and prove it yourself. There are of course places where it isn't clear which chord Chopin was thinking of though, so it would be fun to hear different people do this assignment...
To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you it. Such a person may not even exist today.
Choral/string music is quite nice - the musicians have an opportunity to bend pitch as locally appropriate to make perfect intervals. I definitely did this when I was singing in a chorus. But piano is still my first love :)
You can use equal temperament with any number of divisions of the octave (or other interval, e.g. Bohen-Pierce tuning's equal division of the "tritave" into 13). Some of these provide excellent approximations of common just intonation intervals, e.g. dividing the octave into 53 gives you fifths that are only 0.07 cents off the just interval, and all other intervals in standard 5-limit Western harmony within 1.5 cents of just. It's simpler to compose with than stacking frequency ratios and in practice sounds equally good.
That is something else to introduce the author to. The author clearly thinks there are 12 notes to an octave, which is by far the most common tuning system but it isn't the only one.
It should be noted that a lot of people mistake relative pitch for perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it.
Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example.
You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.
> Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it.
Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
I don't think anyone's gatekeeping it - it's important that you define something as it actually is otherwise it ceases to lose all meaning. (Cough fascism cough).
Nothing but a random comment, but my daughter has near perfect pitch and it amazes me to no end. She can hear a note and 99% of the time tell you exactly what it is. She loves telling me when I'm off key in the car singing along to things. She's only just turned 11.
Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform - there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the particular harmonic structures that they've trained their ear to, e.g. a particular instrument.
And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner.
Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.
Yeah - there has been some speculation that the additional overlaying of a sound (overtones, timbre variations, etc) can help someone who has absolute pitch - whereas even those with the ability can sometimes struggle with something more pure - like a sine wave.
I have...good pitch? If you play notes on a piano I will guess right significantly more often than I could by chance, and my misses will often be one note away. Not perfect pitch, and not useful in any event.
20% to 30% of autistic people seem to have perfect pitch [1, 2].
Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3].
I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid).
The perfect pitch skill I admire the most is being able to count cycles/recognize/sing pitches by frequency and/or sing various types of temperament.
Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.
I have some perfect pitch due to having piano training for 2 years when I was around 8, started playing tenor saxophone 2 years ago, because of perfect pitch I had to learn the instrument as a concert pitch instrument instead of a Bb one, because thinking about a C but hearing a Bb will drive me crazy.
My kids somehow have perfect pitch. They hear a microwave beep and can say "that's b-flat". They say it's the same as looking at some shoes and naming the color.
From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 138 ms ] threadBTW, is 10,000 hours not considered pseudoscience?
10k hours doing what? And why would we expect to see an approximately equal amount of time to achieve expertise across so many different human endeavors?
Veritasium has a really good video on the subject [0], with a much more compelling explanation for what it takes to develop expertise. He comes up with 4 things, but the two that stood out the most to me are that the field needs to be deterministic—the more randomness is involved the less expertise is possible—and that the learner needs consistent and accurate feedback on what they get right and wrong. Absent those factors no number of hours will do you any good.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA
I think the more convincing theory for instrument-specific perfect pitch is that one learns to recognize the timbres of the individual notes, not any minute variations in pitch.
> Don’t learn a non-C instrument
I would recommend against this because it severely limits your options for instruments to play.
Interesting point. I had a similar thought about singing.
In theory, a good enough singer would be able to use their vocal chords as a reference. Unless their vocal range is changing on a regular basis, if they remember the highest piched note they can sing, they could refer to that as an anchor.
My sense of pitch was cast-iron in college and in the years after. It started to get a bit messed up after singing a bunch of stuff at 415 Hz and (worse) 430 Hz instead of the usual 440.
And then I went cold-turkey on music-making for over a decade. I think it was not playing violin regularly that really did it — tuning and playing an instrument really helps the memory aspect.
[0]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
Any first-hand experience?
A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.
It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-024-02936-0
[1]: https://youtu.be/wK6gbKC90Ps
I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
> a completely useless skill
It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task, but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly anyone who studies music at the university level or above would find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly incorrect.
> Random chance would be 8.3%.
A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love" played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he might just have picked up a reference note from the piano or his in-ear monitors, like a filthy commoner. Usually when making music, having good relative pitch is required, and a reference instrument is mostly handy, making perfect pitch somewhat redundant. But do tell what you're doing with perfect pitch, I'm curious.
And on curiosity, I went to your website and randomly listened to "The Fugue Song" [0]. Really loved it! Very nice moment when the singing comes in, repeating the phrase from the fugy guitar intro. Good song! (I'm a total sucker for Nina Simone's "Love Me Or Leave me", do you know that? A song where she's inserting some counterpoint improvisations in the middle). I'm listening to a bit of "Hiss" now.
> 8.3%
Rounded to the next semitone of course, I left that detail out, it's in the paper.
[0]: https://josephweidinger.com/project/the_fugue_song/
I have no idea how it works in general, but it seems like it was a problem for at least this one guy.
I don't have perfect pitch but it's not too hard to imagine what I could do with it. For me, it'd simply make a lot of tasks faster. I've spent a lot of time throughout my life transcribing music. I can do it relatively quickly but there's lots of moments where I have to confirm things, or poke around notes finding the matching notes, struggling to clarify shades of a chord based on the presence of notes.
Reading music will be easier for people with AP, especially in singing situations. Even if you're a pianist it will still be helpful. There are a few Marc-Andre Hamelin interviews out there where he describes some of the advantages. It's easier to read music if you know immediately what it's going to sound like. Again, this is possible with relative pitch, but it's just more work and slower.
Arranging and composing away from the keyboard will be much easier with perfect pitch.
As time goes on, it'll be less important, most likely. And yes, there are some downsides obviously. In my final aural training class in music school, we had a competition at the very end of the year for fun. It came down to a team of 3 I was on vs. a team of 3 that had a guy with AP. The final task was to sight-sing a musical 'round' (a composition where the melody repeats in the various voices at different points in different voices overlapping each other). The guy with AP actually ruined it for his team. They mistakenly chose him to finish the round instead of start it. Mid-way through their performance, the pitch on their team had drifted so heavily they were in-between notes on the piano when he took over. He tried to sing 'relative' to everyone else but it was so hard for him. It was so unnatural for him to sing out of key, he couldn't do it; it sounded really bad. Great guy though and a ridiculously good violinist.
Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the correct pitch.
I always observed that the number of random non-musicians who can get it right using the "major" handful of those twelve keys is remarkable enough to be considered.
Since those are the only 12 notes so many people have been hearing from every direction for so long, and truly confined to not more than a few of the major keys that are "dominant" as a result of modern instrumentation, it gets ingrained in the psyche and the notes are almost memorized by frequency. With nothing in-between, so that's what they reproduce without any training. Or can have a more sensitive ear for out-of-tune notes than an actual music student of a number of years.
I agree, it doesn't happen magically.
It just happens about any time naturally.
Of course this is still not really perfect pitch as we know it. Maybe one could argue that this is still relative pitch, but through day-to-day practices we are able to hold pitch memory for long enough of time.
As an adult I learnt to speak Japanese. Japanese has a pitch accent that is used to discriminate certain words. For example 箸 (chopsticks) and 橋(bridge) are both "hashi" but with a different pitch accent. Event though I spoke Japanese for years I couldn't hear the difference. With isolated words spoken slowly and carefully I could maybe perceive some difference, but in normal speech at normal speed it just wasn't there. Even without this I could have normal conversations without issue so it didn't bother me too much.
One weekend I sat down and spent the entire weekend listening to words and guessing the pitch accent. Hear word, guess pitch accent, check answer. I must have spent a good 10+ hours doing that. Thousands and thousands of words. After a while I could actually hear the difference. For me it didn't feel like a difference in pitch, more like a subtle difference in emphasis. It's a very hard feeling to describe. It kind of feels like learning to see a new color. It was always there but you never noticed it before.
Another goal of mine is to learn relative pitch for music. There are training apps out there and I'm convinced that if I do a similar amount of practice on mass I will be able to hear the difference between a fourth and a fifth and so on.
Furthermore, while a piano might have 88 keys (still doable with practice) most actual music rarely jumps more than an octave or two.
Generally, music is also further restricted to a key/mode of 8 notes, again with 1 and 8 being the octave, which you probably already know
If I were to teach myself again, I would first find a reference for the intervals 1-8 in a major key and in a minor key. Or learn the full 12 at once if that's more sensible to you. For example the main theme from "Jaws" is a minor 2nd (2/12. Or the song for Happy Birthday (in the USA) starts with a major 2nd (3/12). I had a few more examples, but this Wikipedia article seems to have far better information than I could give you https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_recognition
You could also just try to listen to music, possibly at half or quarter speed (easy to do on YouTube), and try to write down the notes, and checking your answers, I'm sure that could work.
Best of luck!!
The Japanese Wikipedia page for pitch accents simply call it “Accent for Japanese dialects“.
That is to say, I don’t think this is pitch as in musical pitch perfect.
I'd be interested to see if there are any studies around any correlation between absolute pitch and a tonal native language though.
The closest thing in English is "uh-oh" (said when you make a mistake). It goes high-low. If you reverse the pitches it sounds completely wrong.
The pitch change in Japanese words is smaller than "uh-oh" but it's the same basic idea.
Specifically, building up a library of knowledge regarding the key signature of songs I liked:
Then, make connections based upon that. Want to sing a B? Just recall the opening, sustained keyboard chord in "Comfortably Numb". Huh, The Beatles "Across The Universe" sounds tonally like "Eet" - I guess it is also in D-flat.A simple way to do this is to make playlists for a given key, which helps reinforce the sense of shared tonality across songs.
This is gold. I similarly maintain lists of melodies that prominently feature certain intervals.
I'm a programmer interested in music visualization and it would be handy to have a few of these
[1]: https://www.songkeyfinder.com/
Has popular songs for each key and mode
This is by no means a guaranteed method to learn perfect pitch.
This idea of recalling songs is an easy way to explain perfect pitch to others in a way they can easily try for themselves. If you can sing the first note to a song, and then afterwards you actually listen to that song, and you are actually in tune, then you have perfect pitch. That's a far cry from being able to name the note, or rattle off the notes in a chord, but in my view the mental recall is the true innate essence that undergirds every other component of the umbrella of perfect pitch.
From the article: "Psychologists wanted to study “earworms,” the types of songs that get stuck in your head and play automatically on a loop. So they asked people to sing out any earworms they were experiencing and record them on their phones when prompted at random times throughout the day. When researchers analyzed the recordings, they found that a remarkable proportion of them perfectly matched the pitch of the original songs they were based upon.
More specifically, 44.7 percent of recordings had a pitch error of 0 semitones, and 68.9 percent were accurate within 1 semitone of the original song. These findings were recently published in the journal Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics."
This study seems extraordinarily suspect because it's essentially relying on good faith that the person recalling this song hasn't just literally heard this song on the radio a few hours before that or in the morning, and now it's an "earworm."
EDIT: The actual published paper makes it more clear how this study was done. Participants (N = 30, convenience sample) were surveyed at random times over a week and asked to produce a sung recording of any music they were experiencing in their heads. This is a little bit more reliable, but still hard to say how long this pitch perfect recall lasted from the last time that they actually heard the song.
My understanding of true, perfect pitch is something a bit more innate. Individual with perfect pitch do not need to rely on any other techniques.
I've known people with both types. If anything, the practical differences are not significant enough to truly matter from my observations. Many of the folks with true, perfect pitch have told me that it is a curse more than a blessing. These people tend to hear notes even when they do not want to e.g., toilets flushing in an out of tune C, the pitches in people's voices, the pitches of jet engines, CPU coil whining in D#, etc..
When a lot of modern life is constant noise and out of tune, it can be somewhat distressing for people with perfect pitch, or at least, so they have told me. I can't imagine turning off a song on the radio solely because it's a few cents out of tune, but hey, I knew people that would.
There are many skills which are much easier to instill in early childhood and are simply harder to master if approached in adulthood -- language learning, certain athletic skills, and more -- but we would never consider any of these impossible to achieve through study. Sure, maybe the maximum achievable skill level is less than what could have been possible if study began in early childhood, but we would not say that it is impossible for adults to achieve a level of mastery, or that those who gained a skill through serious practice must be using some separate mechanism than those who learned it in early life.
I contend that it is the same with absolute pitch. After all, there is not even a perfect level of absolute pitch mastery! In layman's terms, "perfect pitch" is usually understood to mean that a person can immediately name a pitch when played -- on a 12-tone western music scale. But some people people with perfect pitch have better precision than that and can estimate quarter tones, etc. If a note is played that's 20 cents sharper than Ab, and person #1 says "that's an Ab" while person #2 says "that's a note a touch sharper than Ab", most people consider neither statement to disqualify them from having absolute pitch. But there is a difference. Moreover, no person on Earth can name a pitch down to, say, a couple decimals of absolute frequency value. Doesn't this imply that the skill exists as achievable points on a spectrum, not as a flat binary?
"Josef startled musicians by the accuracy of his ear. Once, at the Metropolitan Opera, he heard a tuning fork supposed to be at 440-A. Josef said it was a shade sharp, and it was."
This is incredibly impressive for two reasons:
- It shows absolute pitch is not necessarily limited solely to semitone identification
- A pure tone from a tuning fork doesn't have any of the characteristic overtones, timbre, etc. that you'd get from an instrument to help identify the sound
Why would it be? There's nothing fundamental about a semitone. It's an arbitrary division that varies across different musical systems.
My point was more about how everyone's ability falls along a "Hz Range Level".
As soon as having learned some relative pitch, it becomes very difficult to train absolute pitch. One single note a day. For the second note the brain will switch to relative mode, and there's no progress on absolute. Forcing the ear/brain to run in absolute mode seems possible, but is difficult consistently enough to practice absolute.
Source: Experimenting with my own ability (or lack thereof).
From that link:
> For the same reason, absolute listeners do not perceive pitch "height". They do not perceive pitches as "higher" or "lower" or physically "next to" each other. As musicians, of course, absolute listeners learn that, metaphorically, pitches are "higher" and "lower" than each other, because they can see these relationships on a page of sheet music. They also learn that, theoretically, "distance" between notes exists, because you can count the semitones that separate them, and you can see the "distance" between keys on an instrument. But, to an absolute listener, neither "height" nor "distance" has any direct perceptual reality.
> For example, when a non-absolute listener hears a guitar slide, we literally hear something moving down. But an absolute listener's experience is nearer to the color-changing rectangle above. They hear a series of discrete pitches, changing—not moving—from one to another. Although they know the sound has "descended" from their knowledge of the musical scale, the sound does not give them a literal experience of downward movement as it does to non-absolute listeners.
The link has a gif of a box moving through the color spectrum which helps understand the point.
[0] http://www.aruffo.com/eartraining/
For me, sometimes, I can hear the opening note or chord of one song and it will immediately remind me of another unrelated song. When I check, they're almost always either in the same key or a semitone off. It happens most reliably when the timbres are similar. It's not a conscious thing, and the more I try to make it happen the less it ever does. Oddly enough though, I am terrible at identifying intervals. (Major third, perfect fifth, yeah, I know they're different and I can hear that, but ask me out of the blue which one was just played and I'll manage to get it wrong.)
Another thing I can do is play what is essentially a "mental recording" of a song I know well in my head. It's like if I had an iPod, and I felt some urge to listen to "La Grange" by ZZ Top, I can hear it in my head -- guitars, drums, vocals. I can skip around to whatever part interests me. I find that when I start tapping out the rhythms of what I'm recalling, or humming along with its melody, my recollection is pretty spot on when played against a real recording on speakers. Again maybe a semitone off at worst.
Both of those suggest to me that, somewhere in there, I do have an absolute pitch reference that I'm drawing from in an undisciplined way. If I sat down and practiced I bet I could refine it, but... why? Might be a neat party trick, but aside from that I don't really feel like I'm missing anything without it.
If someone has relative pitch it means that they need to hear a reference pitch before they can identify the played pitch based on the interval between the two.
Perfect pitch may seem like a party trick for a casual musician, but if you're a dedicated musician the skill is an asset that allows you to execute a whole lot quicker. Occasionally it can be a curse, because you're more sensitive to out-of-tune notes.
How does that work with variations in concert pitch? As I understand it, although the most common standard is to tune the A above middle C to 440 Hz, it's not universal.
Are the differences too small to matter? Or does music played on instruments tuned to a different standard sound "off"? Or are the other standards sufficiently rare that most musicians will never encounter them?
It's like saying water melts at 0 degrees Celcius vs 33 Fahrenheit. As long as you're talking about the same temperature, it doesn't matter.
I'd like to skip this relative pitch translation and jump straight to recognizing each note directly, but I have gaps in coverage. I'm happy you brought up "Comfortably Numb" since it's also burned into my neurons - just now I thought about it for a moment, went to the keyboard and hit B exactly! Also love "Hook" and will never be able to forget that harmonica intro.
Some of my songs:
That's why tuning forks and pitch pipes exist. You need a source of truth to ground things in, and then you can train yourself to hear the relative distance between notes from there.
I'd heard the song so many times that I found I could recall the low, then high E at the start and that's really all you need to get the rest in tune.
Historically, as I recall, A was a bit lower than 440 as testified by older wind instruments and organ pipes.
⸻
1. Granted, the player’s technique also affects intonation so this is not insurmountable.
Perfect pitch, for me, was an incredibly smooth and long learning curve. For each new instrument or texture I learned, I went from only hearing relative intervals, to being able to say, “this piece is probably in D major”, to being able to trace along the exact notes of the melody and bass lines, to being able to instantly lock onto notes when I wanted to. These weren’t discrete transitions either; I would have good days and bad days for recognizing pitches, and over time I would have more and more good days.
All this is indistinguishable from a person who has had received substantial ear training as is indeed the case with the author, and that is ofc commendable.
However AP is a completely different ability which largely boils down to at the very least being able to immediately [1] recognize the Hz aka note-name of any pitch-producing entity (keyboard/string/woodwind/brass instruments, toothbrush, drinking glass, car horn, airplane engines, door rattles etc.) with 100% success rate. There are even more strict definitions like being able to identify every single note of a specific cluster and there's variability of maximum number of notes each AP possessor is able to distinguish.
Also, short of old age and intoxication/sickness, the distinguishing ability is not affected i.e. no good or bad days.
All studies that attempted training any person past the infancy for this type of ability have failed and this probably includes even the notorious Valproate study [2].
I'm not saying this particular ability has no neuroscientific interest and I get the appeal of it being 'magical' however one can't help but sigh at how dreadfully disappointed so many musicians, some of them even very talented, feel for not possessing this. Maybe one could argue about it being a bit more important, not crucial though, in orchestral composition however the target audience feeling desperate to acquire it, which is perfomers of music, is definitely misdirected.
But even then, the article unintentionally presents a 'happy-ending' type of story; the author most likely definitely did not obtain AP ability but what they're describing is exactly what everyone who wants to have impeccable aural skills should strive for, and I'd wager there are many studying musicians that haven't developed their skills to the extent the author managed (and would greatly benefit from). Let's just don't perpetuate elitist obsolete conservatoire culture, which is largely where the AP possessor superiority comes from.
[1] https://i.imgur.com/7OefC0i.png
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3848041/
Many things that are considered perfect pitch skills take practice, and the OP is absolutely correct in that certain timbres are easier to classify than others. As a kid I would have had a harder time telling you the pitches if two woodwind instruments were playing a chord, vs two stringed instruments, due to familiarity. Its something you tend to work on accidentally as a background process as a musician
Much of perfect pitch discrimination is an active process though, eg being able to split up a song into its constituent parts and pick out the notes of each line is something you have to learn. All perfect pitch does is give you the ability to perform that discrimination, but anything more than that is a skill. For things that people consider to be perfect pitch skills (tone classification in a cluster), there absolutely are good days and bad days
Lots of pitches in nature aren't especially clean - nor are musical instruments, which is what makes them of varying ease to classify when you're unfamiliar. There are harmonics that can be make it hard to classify, or the central tone can be washed out in noise or similar tones. Its like trying to identify the dominant frequency in white noise, it takes practice
Its likely that OP had perfect pitch as a kid (demonstrating pitch classification), and simply never really capitalised on it mentally to develop it. Because you're right in that no adult has ever experimentally been demonstrated to have learnt this, even with extensive training and musical experience
For me piano is definitely the easiest instrument to identify, I'm sure largely because it's what I've played all my life. Pipe organs are the worst. I assume that in general the purity of the tone correlates negatively with ease of identification.
I've always had strong relative pitch ability and many people mistake my ability for perfect pitch. But in most practical applications, it's not just the _answer_ you arrive at that makes the definition so (because this can be faked), it's _how_ you know it.
People with absolute pitch just _know_ it without thinking -- no tricks, no mental reference note, no memorizing songs, no relying on a certain instrument's timbre, etc., they just know it.
Then one year my family went on a long car trip for a few weeks -- without the cello or even a radio since our car didn't have one -- and when we came home, my pitch was gone. It took just a few days to get back, but I realize that I have some sort of short term memory for pitch but do not have perfect pitch. It's not something that I'm concerned about practicing or maintaining. I'm a jazz bassist today, and my pitch is good enough for picking things up by ear, and maintaining my intonation while playing.
I wonder if there's a "spectrum" of pitch ability, and also a spectrum of how readily different people can learn it.
I always imagined the mental pathway for people with perfect pitch as being completely different from mine, but I could see it being a spectrum as well.
Instruments have fairly unique timbres at different pitches, and our brain can pattern match that more effectively than pitch itself. So, you can actually "burn in" the correct timbre, which makes it easier to find. Since I was so used to an A reference note for tuning, I got to where I could get pretty close.
Years later, I saw this video, with someone who seems to have brute forced it to approximate perfect pitch using a similar method: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT22zqg0jvE
To show a microtonal piece that stands up to Chopin requires a composing genius much better than me, so I can't show you it. Such a person may not even exist today.
Perfect pitch means that I can sit down at a piano (or other instrument), play one random note, and you can instantly tell me what note that is. No preamble, no tuning yourself up, you can just do it.
Relative pitch is much more about recognizing intervals - a tritone versus a perfect fifth for example.
You'll find as was the case when synesthesia became the trendy fashion of the day that a lot of people like to believe that they possess perfect pitch when it's almost invariably relative pitch.
Yes, I can do this. I don't understand why people are so keen on gatekeeping perfect pitch.
And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner.
Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.
Not all perfect pitch people have autism. On average neurotypical perfect pitch people do score higher on the AQ (19) than neurotypicals (12), but much lower than high functioning autistic people (35) [3].
I'm one of them, definitely high functioning autism + perfect pitch here. Got diagnosed in my mid thirties for sleep difficulties, no social difficulties in my case (except for as a kid).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AutisticWithADHD/comments/1g7fbhp/h... - not scientific but given that it normally is 1 in 2000 at best, this is way too high.
[2] More sources talk about it, but can't seem to find it right now. I'm pretty sure that [3] has some sources, but don't want to do the research.
[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3364198/
Recently I've become more irritated by the way pianos seem to be tuned, and fascinated by alternative temperaments that are designed to balance playing in multiple keys vs. a more pleasant sound. It's also interesting to hear (and play) baroque instruments (for example) which differentiate between sharp and flat notes. I think one reason I enjoy choral music is that choirs can adapt their tuning dynamically. I have also tried music apps with dynamic temperament and they are interesting.
From everything we've read, that skill had to be established in them when they were pretty young. The only musical experience they had at that age was my old Casio SK-1 that I gave to them when they were three or four. Maybe they learned notes from playing with that? I don't think they knew the notes had names until they were older and started taking music lessons.
I didn’t expect that but in hindsight it makes sense.