As someone with absolute pitch, I should say I have not found it musically useful, and I would hesitate recommending people train for it even if it was possible. When I was learning to play jazz, it was actually a major crutch for me. For jazz especially, the modes, chords, progressions, and relationships between tones are really important and are what determines the 'color' of what you're playing. Harmony in general is determined by the relationships between tones, not the absolute tones themselves (mostly - there are of course differences in sound playing three octaves up or down), and an ear for absolute pitch doesn't help much there at all.
I could use absolute pitch to identify chords and modes, but it didn't help me 'think' about and play within them the way relative pitch does. A good ear for relative pitch, and an understanding of harmony go much farther.
This is interesting, because a tonal language like Mandarin does not care about absolute pitch; it's all relative. For example, 1st tone is a (usually higher) flat tone. But it doesn't matter what pitch you use. 2nd tone is a rising tone, but it doesn't matter what pitch you start at or end at; it just matters that the two pitches differ enough that your listener can tell that there was a change, and that it was rising.
I wonder why that sort of thing also leads to a higher prevalence of absolute pitch.
While it helps with starting on the right note when singing a song and deriving single pitches, it by no means makes me instantly know a note's pitch like someone with perfect pitch would experience. I still have to derive pitches manually, and while singing the sound of my voice is loud enough that I don't hear the tinnintus anymore and I often don't notice my singing going slightly out of tune.
I do have the ability to recognize relative pitches in relation to e. g. accompaniment playing in a given key, and this recognition is automatic in a way that the derive-from-tinnitus definitely isn't.
Also sometimes the tinnitus goes out of tune down to almost E4, this sucks.
Absolute pitch (or perfect pitch) is the ability to identify a note without having any memory aid or reference tone to compare it to.
So if you have a constantly-present reference tone, due to tinnitus, and you figure everything out based on the interval from that tone, that's simple relative pitch and the ability to figure out intervals. Not perfect pitch.
I have tinnitus as well, and while it is very mild, I am surprised at the idea it can be ‘stable’ enough to form a basis for absolute pitch. Most of the time I don’t experience it as a pitch layered on top of all other sounds. Even if I focus on it, it doesn’t feel like a sound that can be given a clear singular tone, if that makes sense. I do know experience of tinnitus varies, so perhaps there are forms that are more capable.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/speaking-tonal-la...
True. Perfect pitch can indeed prevent you from appreciating some kinds of music that become too predictable, too fast.
Having perfect pitch does not make it impossible, or even difficult, to "enjoy" music at varying pitches, etc.
http://publish.uwo.ca/~emacphe3/pipes/acoustics/pipescale.ht...
Or cool in this specific case, or just different and fun. You can intentionally do 13ET as well because you want to, but without claiming it's somehow better. Or use many other choices...
Funny story: Watching "A Hard Day's Night" with my son, when he was around 8 years old: "Daddy, why are the Beatles out of tune?" (The tracks in the movie were slightly off-pitch compared to the album.)
Turns out he has perfect pitch. As in, he can start singing a song in the exact pitch he learned it -- close enough to sound in tune with the recording. This is accuracy to the discrimination level of trained musicians -- I estimate about 0.5% or 1/10 of a semi-tone.
Oddly, or not, it took him several years to learn to hear music on a relative basis -- to hear C-G as similar to D-A. Transposed songs (Sinatra sings "Something" in F) sounded to him like completely different songs.
Now he has developed an excellent musical ear, and taught himself to play bass.
relevant: https://www.pianostreet.com/smf/index.php?topic=34782.0
Your son sounds like he might be bored by a schools traditional learning pretty quickly, channels like Adams and Andrew Huang would be great ways to keep his curiosity piqued!
On the other hand, if you do have perfect pitch, you can lose it over time! I've had perfect pitch all my life, and now that I'm going on 40 I surprise myself by sometimes hearing a song a half-step off (i.e. I'll assume a song is in F but it's really in E). This has never happened to me until the past few years. Not sure how much is due to my ears aging, and how much due to I'm not a practicing musician anymore.
1. help the singer hit "higher notes".
2. sound "heavier" and just that "bit off" that half-step down tuning gives.
In conjunction with "drop-D" tuning (pulling the low E-string down a full step in order to give a "deeper", more heavy tonality), this gives much of modern "heavy rock" heavier feel.
My first encounter with half-step down tuning was, I believe, Motley Crue's Too Fast For Love album, where I beleive Mick Mars used both tunings in order to use a beer bottle for full chord slides (dropping the low-E allows barre chords, the staple of rock music, to be played using just one finger or, in Mick's case, one beer bottle) and that exceptionally low "drop-C#" (remember, we dropped the low-E down a step and a half to C#) drone growl that gave that album an exceptionally hard feel.
[edited]
I can easily say that in the 100's of rock songs that are tuned a half-step down (the entire Guns N Roses catalog for one quick example) and thus lend themselves to keys like G# and D# instead of A and E, that I have almost never encountered a song in G# or D# that were not using half-step down tuning.
This is not likely to happen with a recording of the instruments I’ve always played (piano and trumpet) but might happen if I’m listening to guitars or organ.
Well, we don't actually know this do we? We know that it's very hard, and that it's never been done before, but so was running a sub-4 mile for most of human history.
If we knew the mechanism through which people learn perfect pitch and could prove that it vanishes with age, then you'd have an argument. But we're not there yet.
I have a pet parrot who seems to always sing in the same key. Now I feel bad for whistling off-key to him all these years!
Assuming that perfect pitch is an immutable skill after a certain point, I wonder whether the age of acquisition still matters. Do people who learn the skill earlier have more fine-grained perception?
From personal experience, long ago I spent some time trying to acquire perfect pitch using a synesthetic method from somewhere, and eventually convinced myself that I was making some progress, but that the effort required to take it to the point of being at all useful wasn't going to be worth my practice time.
If music was all about relative intervals, surely this wouldn't be an issue?
* Not the world's best singer, hence my observations around transposition, as I try to bend songs I like into a range I can just about manage.
For an equal temperament instrument (like a midi keyboard), transcription would be seamless.
For a fretless instrument, transcription can be made seamless, if the player is good at intonation.
However, the timbre of the instrument can still be a little different for each key (e.g. open strings vs fingered notes), but that's a nuance on instrument rather than transcription per se.
> That's because you are using a guitar, which is not perfectly in tune no matter how you tune it.
I've though powersnail point is about different shapes and your comment is about True Temperament guitar [1], [2].
Do you think timbre is the reason we notice pitch changes? And we would not notice transposition if it was pure sine? I am sure going to test it [3] and will add pure sine instrument.
[1] https://truetemperament.com/
I play (hobby) harmonica and I feel them differently. I like dark tone of G (blues in D), bright and someone neutral tone of C, I have A and don't play it much. How can one explain this?
Do you experience Doppler effect on ski elevator? It was devastating. Can it be that harmonica trains ears to find a hole and bend notes? But any fretles instrument should have same requirement (violin).
Some people claim adults can't learn languages, while in reality we lack not neuron plasticity but time, patience, culture. Maybe skill learned by adult and child is different but serves same function. It is fine by me to learn "perfect ear equivalent". At least I can train myself and play with a kid, maybe he would acquire this skill in full potential.
In the linked above dissertation [1] AP have 80% accuracy (C4 to B5).
It's the same thing mechanics use to identify engine sounds quickly or why some people can tell who's walking on a hallway because of how the steps sound. Repeated exposition to a stimulus that then gets associated with something etches a memory.
This not only happens with perfect pitch. To for example know how to tell a major third from a minor third on all keys you can "memorize" all the sounds and know which one they are. I think my brain kinda did that and now I sometimes get confused with M3 and P5 because of how "similar" they sound even though you can like totally fit another tone comfortable between the root and the fifth and the root and the third don't have enough air for that.
If you are interested, see Chapter 3:
> Participants got significantly more trials correct when the timbre of the trials was congruent with the participant’s primary instrument (M = 39.13 (out of 48) trials, SD = 11.26) as opposed to incongruent with it (M = 36.5 (out of 48) trials, SD = 13.7), [t(23) = 2.935, p < .01].
Curious if this happens to others - you’ll hear a noise (e.g a glass hitting something, an object falling to the ground etc) that makes a single tone, and a song immediately starts playing in your head because it starts with that same tone?
My stand up desk at an old job was the starting pitch to Beyoncé’s Crazy in Love
minor 2nd : Jaws
major 2nd : Frere Jacques
...
Yep... intervals helped during music exams :)
I remember noticing in highschool that hitting a few different corrugated plastic gutter pipes in my backyard would allow playing the bass line to Crazy Train...in principle, i immediately recognize the notes to different beeps and alarms in daily life and think about it unconsciously.
Sometimes when I'm bored and microwaving something I'll try to match my hum to the microwave's tone and I sometimes do this when planes fly by too.
I never get it immediately but it usually syncs up after a few seconds.
Do you mean you can’t tell the difference between the two? My first thought is that the difference would be obvious, but I could be wrong. Is there a pair of recordings like this anywhere, so I can try it out?
Not sure if there are recordings like this, but you could use GarageBand, Audacity, or the like to pitch-shift a recording without changing the tempo.
I'm really fascinated by our ability to perceive relative pitch even without training. See, for example, how "detuning" by a few cents in lo-fi hip hop provides a very distinct feel to the genre, compared to playing the same tune in standard equal temperament tuning.
[1] https://www.thatericalper.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/max...
This makes me wonder why someone would want to have perfect pitch.
Other than that, it's mostly a cool parlor trick. The best story I've heard of someone who had it is that of Woody Shaw, the great jazz trumpet player. A piano player tried to test him on it once, and played a bunch of different chord voicings -- Woody correctly identified all the notes in each of them. Then, to up the challenge, the piano player played a random cluster of notes. Woody listed them all out, and the piano player replied, "Wrong," thinking he had finally stumped him. Then Woody replied, "Now take every note I just said down by a half step." Of course, Woody got them all right, and everybody's mind was blown.
Why wouldn't that be the case with someone who can "only" hear relative pitch? I mean, you start writing a note and from then on all other notes are relative to that note, where the actual pitch (in Hz) doesn't really matter.
"If I hear the same song played in C, and then in Db, the two of them will hit me emotionally the same."
For example the Schubert Impromptus Op.90/3 was written in Gb but published in G (for sales reasons). But Gb is dramatically more emotionally for me.
Something interesting is that before 12-tone equal temperament, you'd tune your instrument in just ratios (basically using harmonics/whole ratios), so there would actually be interval differences between keys.
I have very good relative pitch, and a highly trained ear, and that you can teach. If you play me C, I can tell you what the other notes are based on that, and my internal reference for what C is persists for quite a while. If you play me a song, I can hear what the chords are -- the color (major, minor, dominant, diminished, etc.) and the degree of the scale. But that is all relative to itself. If I hear the same song played in C, and then in Db, the two of them will hit me emotionally the same. Whereas for someone with perfect pitch, I understand it can be different. And for someone with perfect pitch and synesthesia, I understand it can be different still -- notes and keys are perceived as colors. And while I can imagine what that might be like, there's no way for me to train myself to be that.