who has perfect pitch?

[soulata]

Yeah, and its always the vocalists who do the worst!

So true

Drummers never excelled at rhythm reading in our school. sure they've got rhythm, but are half illiterate.

k

pitch - I've got strong relative pitch and can guess well the absolute pitch. plan on getting it right sometime soon.

[stag]

Piano Tuners???

[speccyteccy]

I can sing and recognise white notes, but not black notes, intervals and chords. Wish I could though.

[bluedad]

Piano Tuners???

'fraid not!
While I'm sure there may be some tuners with perfect pitch, tuning a piano requires hairsplitting precision and each model piano is ever slightly so different.
btw, I bought the perfect pitch course advertised in every keyboard and guitar player mag (years ago)
Interesting, but at the time you had to have a partner to do the exercises. It's been modified now, but I've never upgraded the course.
so, it's gone the way of all the exercise machines and videos we have around the house.

[Kingston]

bluedad,

that's the same exact course I did. Trust me, it's boring even with a partner.

[DELUDE]

I started the violin at 5 and both of my parents are musicians so I quickly developed perfect pitch. I can identify any tonal sound or mixture of such sounds (chords, different instruments, etc.) playing simultaneously to semitone accuracy (and a bit further).
It feels very natural and easy since I was very young when I got that skill.

I tried tuning a piano once but when the second string broke I had to stop, otherwise I think I can easily master that with some practice and extra strings.

[Amberience]

I find it difficult to believe that perfect pitch exists anywhere outside of a computer or digital synth.

[Meffy]

Skilled telescope mirror grinders have perfect pitch.

[Amberience]

Ok.

[Hovmod]

Skilled telescope mirror grinders have perfect pitch.

Ooh. I just realized where the expression "pitch black" comes from.

The joys of foreign languages...

[Voidoid Surrealist]

That reminded me of my unfinished 12" blank...I should really start working on it again sometime...

[Meffy]

Hovmod: :-) This kind of "pitch" is a resin derived from pine, other plants, or petroleum. It's soft when warmed but brittle when cold (however, it IS a liquid... a very viscous liquid). And it's what mirror grinders use to make a "pitch lap" for polishing.

Here's Wikipedia's page on pitch, with a photo of the Pitch Drop Experiment in progress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_%28resin%29 Seventy-five years running; eight drops have fallen so far.

Voidoid: *sigh* My grinding days are in the past. Never did succeed at making a usable mirror. But I did wear a circular groove in the basement floor around the barrel.

[el davo]

individuals with absolute pitch hearing are typically exposed to intense music training at an early age, when brain development is most active. It has been shown that they have a higher number of neurons activated when triggered by sound, thus likely more efficient calculations of pitch.

Here is an old reference from Science (high impact scientific journal):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/quer ... t=Citation

Perfect relative pitch (telling pitch after hearing a reference tone) can definitely be practised later in life. Probably also absolute pitch, at least to some extent. Certainly, there is no known threshold for when brain development stops/slows down too much, but I think perhaps a good analogy is the process of learning a language. Learning to speak a language late in life will usually leave you with some trace of another accent. Similarly, practising pitch detection later on will certainly improve your skills, but might not take you to the level of a native speaker/pitch-detecter

Cheers,
David

[droolmaster0]

I started the violin at 5 and both of my parents are musicians so I quickly developed perfect pitch. I can identify any tonal sound or mixture of such sounds (chords, different instruments, etc.) playing simultaneously to semitone accuracy (and a bit further).
It feels very natural and easy since I was very young when I got that skill.

I tried tuning a piano once but when the second string broke I had to stop, otherwise I think I can easily master that with some practice and extra strings.

yeah. Some people say that perfect pitch can't be developed. That's nonsense, I think. I started taking violin lessons at 6, and the amusing thing was that I have perfect pitch in the violin range. I have to think a lot harder when the note is outside that range. I never much worked at developing beyond that range. Now I don't much care about what notes I'm 'playing', and my sense of perfect pitch has much deteriorated. I used to be able to differentiate when an A was just the tiniest bit off from 440...

[wrench45us]

i can pick out a 440 'A' but just cause i heard that every day for years and years at band practice\

and that's about the only note
people who play by ear or can identify notes, intervals, chords and chord shapes amaze me. if i don't play it myself i have no idea what it is.
course the early training was all with drums and unless you're over at tympani or chimes, it doesn't matter too much. though we did have one occasion where we had to swap out a triangle till we got one that fit with the key of the tune.