My late daughter was able to memorize pi out to a hundred or so digits. She said she did it by making the numbers sound like a song.

May the best of the memories live with you always. I’m so sorry.

I am sorry for your loss.

My college gf had synesthesia. We played a game where I rattled off about 20 numbers from a phone book and randomly said several names. Without hesitation she recalled all their numbers, no mistakes.

Had a similar ability with music, upon hearing a melody or a chord, would rapid-fire off what the notes were. Detuned a string a few cents, could immediately tell is was out of tune. As a guitar player this was a bit annoying as she would always be telling me something was off when it was slightly out of tune, it was like a nails on chalkboard kind of experience for her.

I think ear training helps with that. I found listening to fusion helped because you were introduced to many scales you didn't hear in everyday music, so soon heard the differences.

There's nothing more grating than hearing people playing slightly out or doing half-bends on guitar. I've played with people who have played for decades and still can't hear that they're out, and it's terrible.

Ear training can help with relative pitch, but it's still super hard to tell for instance if your instrument is slightly sharp or flat due to changes in humidity unless you're playing against a piece of music or other instruments.

Guitarists can usually tell when one of their strings is slightly out of tune and can often tell when all their strings are out of tune yet in tune relatively to each other. Successful guitarists will have a guitar tech off-stage; swapping guitars isn't just for tonal purposes, it's to quickly swap out a slightly out of tune guitar for one that has just been tuned. But it seems unlikely that without perfect pitch that we can trust a non-musicians' assessment that a musician played a song perfectly faithful to the original. Even assuming that this occurred, this is not exactly all that unlikely nor that it rarely occurs, but, instead, it is academic for the experienced performer and trained musician. And for every hour of performance there are many hours of rehersal. The very best performances are built from muscle-memory which will obfuscate how much raw talent there actually is.

I've been a guitarist for 35 years who took an ear training course w/ vocal lessons about 10 years in.

I could probably do better than blind determining what is 432 vs. 440 because there are enough common reference examples out there that I have sense of feel for the difference, and I could tune an A4 cold +- 5 cents. But a third of that? A vanishingly small number of musicians would be able to do that with any reliability without a reference point.

She didn't know how on-point a pitch was because she was listening. It was innate and immediate. It was literally described as the intensity of a color that corresponded to a key.

We're kinda off in the weeds from the point I was making, which was refuting the notion that music could have any analog to reciting a phone book. There is a bit of a connection between memory and processing music in a way, at least for those with this condition, that probably is more subconscious for those without.

True. Music is relatively easy to perform and create (forgetting whether it is Eleanor Rigby or not). But even though there are many that can, let's not diminish the very often seemingly miraculous feat of those that can perfectly perform a piece they've never heard just by reading it, often while they perform it, even though perfectly reading English out loud is a similar exercise. As many people can't read music as can read literature, and I've never heard of music literacy ruining a musician's career. But it is a good thing music is so easy for the curious and determined, because though many have learned it in their later years, learning to read music gets more and more difficult the older one is, but music itself never gets more difficult. Now, Gold Records, OTOH, I seriously doubt are easy to do, even if it was very likely easy for the artist, they had no way of knowing beforehand even if they so claimed.

That is the wonderful thing about music. It is actually pretty easy/simple but quite often those simple things move our soul. When we attempt to intellectualize this we forget that part.

This is Jazz

> This is Jazz

Sure, but even though we consider Jazz anything that sounds jazzy, i.e. using Major 7ths or flat 5s, because Jazz and Classical are so individually encompassing, literally every other genre of music is also Jazz and Classical, any sound that can be made with an instrument fits in Jazz and Classical, i.e. it can be interpreted using the modes and forms of Jazz or Classical without changing how it sounds. It just isn't very useful to approach or interpret, say, a folk song from the perspective of Jazz, nor the sound a guitar makes when smashed to pieces, but technically, everything is either Jazz or Classical or both.

Why come from a perspective of x or y? It’s music. It isn’t jazz or classical. It’s music. Humans like to do 2 things: make stuff and categorize stuff.

When I was in high school and was struggling with learning to recite a poem from memory, I'd compose a melody and record a song with that poem as lyrics. Suddenly, reciting it from memory was becoming incredibly easy.