Are we all born with perfect pitch?

Re:Are we all born with perfect pitch? by baddox on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @08:56PM (#9455981)

Personally, it feels to me like the ability to recognize intervals (relative pitch) is so much easier than the ability to recognize pitches (absolute pitch) that I wonder if they really are both "simply memory." Why is one so much harder than the other?

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Re:Are we all born with perfect pitch? by dfan on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @09:08PM (#9456015)

Well, it's also a lot harder to tell a whether a given square is 20" or 19" on a side at a glance than it is to tell a whether a given rectangle is 2 x 1 or 1.9 x 1. Does that analogy help? It's more relevant than it might seem; absolute pitch is about recognizing frequencies and relative pitch is about recognizing ratios of frequencies.

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Re:Are we all born with perfect pitch? by baddox on Tuesday April 28, 2015 @11:38PM (#9456361)

That's true, but can you "memorize" something that lets you tell whether a given square is 20 or 19 inches on a side?

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Re:Are we all born with perfect pitch? by sukilot on Wednesday April 29, 2015 @12:43AM (#9456519)

If you spent a lot of time with 20" squares (carpenter?), I bet you'd start to notice that 19" looked small, even in isolation.

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