who has perfect pitch?

[haydxn]

that, herodotus, was a brilliant post. kingston is being a whining grouch, i choose chagzuki's arguments over his but herodotus you've banged the nail right into the whore's ass.

[Kingston]

kingston is being a whining grouch

oh well, at least I'm not fighting against estabilished terms and taking sides.

However, none of this has a damn thing to do with musicianship, the ability to sing or play well, or the ability to write brilliant compositions.

But then again, it might. It just seems to me that too many people in this thread who do not have pitch recognition abilities are trying to justify not needing the skill (and hence dissing the concept). Yeah you don't have it, but are you SURE it wouldn't help or make you a better musician.

Seriously. Every little bit helps.

[droolmaster0]

hink,

here are some recent statistics as you seemed to want to know about them,

http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/200401097/

That should clear many of the myths that have popped up even in this thread. No need to speculate.

everyone is speculating...I have read quite a bit about perfect pitch...however the biggest myth is that we actually know where perfect pitch comes from...whether it's developed or we are born with it is a pretty interesting topic imo...sure beats the hell out of protection threads...

I think that the mistake is in making this a mutually exclusive choice. As in most abilities, there is a genetic component and a learned component. From my experience, which (of course) is not any kind of scientific proof, I'd say that this is most certainly true, as I really doubt that the ability to name pitches in the violin range is totally genetic. Obviously (to me, of course, I had a genetic predisposition, and then it was developed partially).

But to what degree a person who has had no previous family member with this ability, and has not had early musical training, can develop this ability - I simply don't know. There used to be some guy who advertised a course in which he claimed he could teach this to you. I never heard that anyone developed perfect pitch from his course, and I kind of guessed that it was a scam.

[vurt]

i have perfect pitch
all my coughing is done in e flat

[droolmaster0]

A load of bollocks really. The only issue is how your skills help you make the music you want to, and of course the better your understanding of harmony in relation to the music you want to make, the easier it is to make that music.

Hearing, for expample, a vacuum cleaner and being able to identify the frequency of the main harmonics may have next to no bearing on one's ability to create the music that one want's to make.

Having perfect pitch, at least to a degree, I'd basically agree with this. To some degree it can be a detriment, because it can make you inflexible, and unable to 'stretch out' with mictrotunings, or to play with other musicians who are not tuned at exactly 'concert pitch'.

It would be interesting to know who, among great musicians of the past and present (including composers), had perfect pitch, and who didn't.

[haydxn]

However, none of this has a damn thing to do with musicianship, the ability to sing or play well, or the ability to write brilliant compositions.

But then again, it might. It just seems to me that too many people in this thread who do not have pitch recognition abilities are trying to justify not needing the skill (and hence dissing the concept). Yeah you don't have it, but are you SURE it wouldn't help or make you a better musician.

Seriously. Every little bit helps.

thruout this whole argument i've observed, kingston you've been a bit of a naughty hypocrite. chagz is saying that perfect pitch has nothing to do with good musicianship. you're saying that it MIGHT, but you're also saying that it IS important. leave it at MIGHT and drop it all, i say.

personally? load of flapping bollocks.

[Kingston]

flapping bollocks.

argh! you just had to put that image into my head did you!

[droolmaster0]

The point is that perfect pitch has next to nothing to do with composition, whereas relative pitch has everything to do with composition.

I'd have to disagree with that. Wouldn't someone with perfect pitch potentially make different decisions about whether to write a piece in one key vs another, because one has a different 'color'?

I don't know how you can state this so definitively.

And what if one is not writing harmonically? Might not one's choices be different if one had a better recognition of pitches in an absolute sense, rather than only in a relative one? (actually that triggers the memory that some people refer to 'absolute pitch' rather than 'perfect pitch')

[droolmaster0]

If perfect pitch was crucial to composition, you'd have a load of people with perfect pitch nowadays saying that the expression of a piece by Bach was ruined by the the fact that orchestral tuning has changed, but that's not the case.

I don't think that's the issue. I think that having absolute pitch (I prefer that term) can cause you to think differently. Bach's pieces are harmonic in nature, so I suspect that the differences that one would get by shifting the pitch a little would not be major. HOwever, if Bach himself were to listen to a modern performance (if he indeed did have perfect pitch), he might say that it sounds a little bit off because he intended it to be pitched exactly 'this' way.

I think that the mistake is to state categorically that having absolute pitch makes no difference to composition. I'm not sure how you can say that.

[Kingston]

ok maybe the choice of words was wrong. 'help' should've been 'influence'. droolmaster corrected it really, I mean imagine this as a composer,

you can't dwell into microtonal scales as easily, you also avoing non-standard tunings. Maybe you then subconciously never have anything to do with those two compositional tools? Would you still say pitch regocnition has nothing to do with musicianship?

I'm sure there are positive sides to it as well, but the former shall serve well as an example.

[droolmaster0]

If perfect pitch was crucial to composition, you'd have a load of people with perfect pitch nowadays saying that the expression of a piece by Bach was ruined by the the fact that orchestral tuning has changed, but that's not the case.

Actually, Peter Yates and various other writers think that the different intonation does make a difference.

But perfect pitch as it is being used here has nothing to do with it.

Since 1600 or so western music has employed various different forms of intonation:

Just intonation is the most pure, in the sense that it employs acoustically pure consonances. The problem is that the nature of acoustics (and the dreaded Pythagorean comma) limits one to only a few keys and a few octaves.

To deal with this, the system of temperament called meantone was employed, which retains the acoustically pure thirds while narrowing the fifths and fourths. This was the regnant system when Bach was writing his early music. It allows for 8 different keys and has a rich harmonic coloration that changes from key to key (which is the historical origin of the notion that there are mood/key associations).

Meantone was very slowly replaced with equal temperament. It didn't happen overnight the way midi has. There is reason to believe that the well tempered clavier is in fact written in an intonation different from the one we use today.

A different intonation is completely different from a different tuning. The relationships between the intervals don't change in equal temperament, no matter what middle A is. Conversely, a keyboard in meantone intonation will sound different from a keyboard in equal temperament., even if middle A=440 on both of them.

And so (lets have some bold lettering),

1. No one is born with an innate 'natural' knowledge of equal temperament! This is impossible because, as we have seen, equal temperament isn't natural! If that is what people mean by 'having perfect pitch' they are flat out wrong. Certainly there are some people who have really good pitch recognition skills. But they still have to learn the system.

2. There is no particular musical virtue in equal temperament. On the contrary, most music that is harmonically simple enough to support it (which is the vast majority of the music discussed here) sounds way better in just intonation. In fact, a great deal of contemporary music would be intolerably dissonant to Bach, even if it were a song where everyone was banging away on one simple open fifth.

Now it is true all of this is useless from the standpoint of the music business. And if one wants above all else to be a 'pro', then the ability to remember what all of the notes of our tempered scale sound like at different registers might be useful. But I have trouble believing that it is all that important. I mean when is a pro likely to be without an assortment of tuned instruments and tuners?

"Our A Cappella group forgot our pitch pipe and its going to be recorded and it has to be perfectly at middle A=440 because it is going to be synced up with some other prerecorded thing later"



However, none of this has a damn thing to do with musicianship, the ability to sing or play well, or the ability to write brilliant compositions.

Did Beethoven have 'perfect pitch' when he was deaf and writing his 9th symphony?

Does it matter?

I've never interpreted 'absolute pitch' or 'perfect pitch' to have any conceptual relationship at all to temperament or tuning. There is (degree unknown) a genetic component, and there is a learned component (degree unknown) to pitch recognition. I think that the learned component would be very influenced by the temperament and tunings that one learned, though I think that if one learned in a more flexible environment, absolute pitch might mean that one could describe a pitch in a number of ways depending on what reference system one was using.

[Markleford]

There are lots of confusing, overlapped terms to describe aspects of pitch sensing. There's pitch recognition, pitch memory, absolute pitch, and "perfect pitch", among others. And there are degrees in between.

I can hum a Bb without hearing a reference pitch. If I sing a line a capella without reference, it will be in the key of the original song.

If someone plays a note on a piano, though, I will be unable to name the note. And if someone plays a song in a different key than the original, my ear will "snap to" the new key and I can sing it fine (if it's still in my limited range). After that point, my sense of tuning will be recalibrated to the new experience, the last key being new attempted tonic note for everything, until I "forget" it again.

I'm told that that's a combination of pitch memory and relative pitch.

Brains do weird things.

- m

[droolmaster0]

Did Beethoven have 'perfect pitch' when he was deaf and writing his 9th symphony?

Does it matter?

If he indeed had perfect pitch before he went deaf, then I think that (unless one insisted on the the component of hearing) you could say that he still had it afterwards. When he heard music in his head, he would still hear exact pitches, and if he wrote what he heard, he would have written it in the key he heard. I think that, if he did have absolute pitch, he would have thought that it made a difference to HIM.

Whether it has a difference to you or not - well, I think that it can make a bit of a difference, probably more so if you also have absolute pitch. But how much of a difference would it make? Would there ever be a piece of music that you would find great in one key, but a piece of shit in another? Nah. It's subtle.

I think that people are being way too categorical in their judgements and interpretations as to what perfect or absolute pitch really is, and what its affect on music and composition is. It's an interesting topic, though.

[Frippertronix]

I was once reading a book as someone told me that you can actually enhance perfect pitch with it. It's a myth that you're born with perfect pitch, by the way. Anyway, this book had me making progress and I was hearing all these identifiable pitches around me more and more.

I agree with this and I'd say I'm in a similar situation. I think it's unfortunate that absolute pitch (which is a better term than perfect pitch, since, you know, nothing's perfect ) is misunderstood or just not recognized at all by most musicians. I wholeheartedly recommend finding your own way to work with bettering your own sense of absolute pitch or, to use the technical term, pitch "chroma" (color), since my feeling is that anyone with an ear for music can develop a workable sense of absolute pitch.

The hardest thing about it, in my opinion, isn't concerned with what you don't hear, it's what you already hear too much of that is the problem with developing absolute pitch sense later in life. What I mean by this is that we grow up hearing scales and intervals and so we automatically idenitfy differences in pitch as only having to do with intervals, or, worse, just by the highness and lowness of the different pitches. Intervals and highness/lowness are the expression of total relative pitch (i.e. relationships between pitches that have no individual identity, only relative identity through scales and intervals).

Here's a trick for you, go to your instrument (keyboard is probably best if you play it) and go through some octaves, through several registers, one note at a time. Play G3, then G4, then G5. Then go back and play C#3, C#4, C#5, etc. Now think for a minute. Wasn't there something similar between those notes in each octave set that seemed to exist within the notes themselves (i.e. not purely because you were playing octaves)?

If you can honestly say yes, then you are recognizing your own innate sense of absolute pitch. The octaves excercise is nice because it forces you to hear the sameness in the note, even though the various notes are higher and lower than one another, so they are actually different in pitch, and yet somehow there is something the same about them. C#4 is a different pitch than C#5, and yet, at the same time, they are the same pitch. How can this be? It is so because they are octaves of the same absolute pitch chroma. And so on with all the other pitches of the scale.

I'm like Kingston and I think I use absolute pitch while composing and improvising about half the time, relative pitch about half the time. The great thing is, though, if you don't happen to play a continuous scale instrument, like a fretless bass or trombone, you don't need "perfect" pitch at all, since you can rely on a tuner to get your instrument in tune and then the pitches are fixed after that. But having a strong sense of absolute pitch is an incredible boost to your abilities as a composing and improvising musician, even if it isn't "perfect".

[Frippertronix]

A load of bollocks really. The only issue is how your skills help you make the music you want to, and of course the better your understanding of harmony in relation to the music you want to make, the easier it is to make that music.

Hearing, for expample, a vacuum cleaner and being able to identify the frequency of the main harmonics may have next to no bearing on one's ability to create the music that one want's to make.

Having perfect pitch, at least to a degree, I'd basically agree with this. To some degree it can be a detriment, because it can make you inflexible, and unable to 'stretch out' with mictrotunings, or to play with other musicians who are not tuned at exactly 'concert pitch'.

It would be interesting to know who, among great musicians of the past and present (including composers), had perfect pitch, and who didn't.

It just depends on how adaptable your ear is. Look, it's exactly like seeing in color. Pitch "chroma" is pitch color. If you'd spent most of your life in rooms painted only in primary colors and then you went on a trip and the buildings and so forth were all painted in mauves and red-oranges and turquoise I don't think you would just flip out and not be able to cope, though it might seem a little strange to you for a while.

Yes, it would be a little bit more work to adapt to microtunings if you have perfect pitch and have always only played in diatonic A=440, but then people with fairly advanced ears are sensitive to a continuous spectrum, the same way all of us can see many variations in color throughout the visible spectrum of light.