PERFECT PITCH ?

stratamania

Fractal Fanatic
A lot of the members on the forum spend a lot of time listening to tones and such. So it occurred to me that this might be a useful place to ask the following questions to see what feedback there is.

Just prior to the questions a bit of background my Dad was an organist and pianist who started playing when he was 3 years old and he could sight read anything including stuff he had not heard before. On the listening side he would play all sorts of things such as pop songs off the radio or TV themes just off the cuff without any analysis or figuring it out. I also asked him once how a riff was played and he just wrote it directly to paper without reference to an instrument and said you'll have to figure out the fingering and it was spot on. Now he was a very trained musician, but I have known musicians who have had no formal training who can play by ear well who probably are naturally gifted.

Does anyone on here have perfect pitch ?

If you do have perfect pitch :-

Was it a natural gift ?
Did you develop it ?

If you developed it, did you use a course and did it really help or was it just through listening a lot ?

If you have relative pitch also any comments you may have on whether you have tried training and did it bring you any nearer to achieve perfect pitch ?

For anyone, do you think perfect pitch matters ?
Is this something you would like to have ?

Many thanks in advance for any feedback etc.
 
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Perfect pitch and synestesia

Hello,

I’ve been interested in this topic for a while so I can give you a few pointers. It is assumed that perfect pitch is a “gift” and very few people have it but is seems to be possible to learn it. You have a couple of methods (look for perfectpitch on the web) which claim to do that. I bought one a while ago and it’s quite simple : the whole concept is to associate colors with the notes you hear.

This takes a lot of time but eventually your brain creates the neural connection and the everytime you hear a C you will see blue, or, as Hendrix did, see violet everytime you hear an E7#9. Which leads us to something called Synestesia, which is the condition where people naturally see colors (or feel taste, or …) when they hear something. A short circuit of your senses, if you will. Most famous musicians were born like that and used it for their craft (see List of people with synesthesia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia). So people with perfect pitch have a mild form of synesthesia I think – ask your dad id he sees colors when he listens to music !

As a matter of fact, there are much more people with perfect pitch in the visually impaired. I have a handicapped son who was close to blindness when he was young and he got perfect pitch “naturally”, one day I was playing guitar to him and I realized that one I had told him : this is a C, this is an A, etc., he just knew it. Now he can tell you the tone of any song he hears and any major minor chord. For altered chords it's more difficult.

If you think about it, we all have perfect color pitch and it’s exactly the same “vibration recognition pattern” so there is no more magic in identifying an sound vibration than a color vibration.

Some neuroscientists think that every baby is born with perfect pitch but it is an ability that is lost when they start to learn a language, as obviously in language the pitch matters less than the meaning, so it’s more efficient for our survival to use our neurons to understand vowels and consonants than identifying the perfect pitch of a singing bird or a roaring leopard.

Now back to guitar when it comes to tone it’s different. Tone is a root note plus a piling of harmonics that vary based on the dynamics – specially those elusive “breakup” sounds where you go from clean to distorted just with the pick attack. I think that it’s more of an experience thing there and it’s more acoustic and engineering studies that can help there, as in our case there is lots of technology involved and the science of analyzing and creating sounds is quite developed those days. Just look at what Cliff is doing, and i'm sure that if we sat down with him he would analyze like an engineer that the glassy tone of an Strat in the in between position come from a comb filter created by picking up the string vibration in to very close locations creating lots of phase cancellations ... all this can be measure and analysed.

Oliver Sacks wrote an fascinating book about music and the brain, Musicophilia, where most of my data comes from.

Now let's go retune this f@&" guitar :)
 
ask your dad id he sees colors when he listens to music !

Unfortunately he passed away in 1989, but as I seem to recall he said it was just conceptual, perhaps he had gone beyond colours in the music. Although I must admit music does have colour and emotion, some can evoke feelings of places etc.

My personal view is that it probably can be trained, certainly my own listening skills have improved just through use but I never tried one of those perfect pitch courses. Perhaps I will try it one of these days.
 
pdelanghe has pretty much nailed it ....

I've been fortunate enough to play with two different individuals that have had perfect pitch in my life. The first one ( a lawyer by day ) described it the same way ....

"I just seem to hear in color !"

He didn't understand it much more than that. He could play almost any instrument .... He was mainly a keyboard player, but was also a damn good bass player. He played all the saxes, and could play a little guitar too. When I was learning new material and got stuck, I could literally hand him my guitar, que the CD to the part I was stuck on, and he'd play the riff. If we were working on our backing vocals, he'd listen to a part once and then just write down all of the parts on staff paper ....

Now that said, his technique on the instrument(s) were limited by the amount of time he actually played them. He never "really" developed any proficency on some, so if you didn't know better you'd think he was a beginner ( and he kinda was ) .... He couldn't really play any lead guitar, not because he couldn't hear the notes ( or riffs ), but because he'd never spent any time developing the technique.

It was still facinating to watch him work !


The other guy knew he had a "gift", and had really worked to maximize it. When we first met, I asked him about hearing in color .... His response was,

"gee I never thought about that, but yeah, I guess that's it."

He said he was home sick from school once as a kid ( maybe 9 or 10 years old ), he way laying on the family couch and stareing across the room at the family piano ....

"All of the sudden, I just got it ! Up until that time, I'd only banged on it like most kids do. But suddenly I just knew what all the keys were for ! I got up and went over to the piano, just sat down and started playing some of the same songs my mom played."

Now he really, REALLY worked on his technique too .... He was ( is ) a total MONSTER player. When he was 18 he took a local band out to LA to try and "make it", but the pay for play killed them. He spent years in his 20's working as a music director for one of the major shows in Vegas ( until he got majorly bored ), and now in his 40's is playing a one man show around the Milwaukee area ( as well as sitting in w/ literally dozens of bands in the area all them time.

The first time I saw his solo show, I asked him if he'd ever played the song - Walking in Memphis. He said he'd heard it but never played it. I told him he should .... Anyway, he went out to his car on his next break and downloaded it from Kazaa. Spent 5 minutes writing down the lyrics on a sheet of paper and for the very first song in the 2nd set he played it .... He sat there talking to the bar and just plunking the main riff very slowly, kinda out of time .... Suddenly the rhythm clicked in his head and away he went, completely without a hitch.

To this day, I've never seen anything like it ever. First time through a song, performance ready ( never even having rehearsed it ), except for a minute or so on the main riff ....

Simply amazing ..., and YES I wish I had that gift !
 
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As a matter of fact, there are much more people with perfect pitch in the visually impaired. I have a handicapped son who was close to blindness when he was young and he got perfect pitch “naturally”, one day I was playing guitar to him and I realized that one I had told him : this is a C, this is an A, etc., he just knew it. Now he can tell you the tone of any song he hears and any major minor chord. For altered chords it's more difficult.

Yes I have come across this also, piano tuners who have been blind.

Also interesting to note is when Ludwig van Beethoven became deaf he was still able to write music, so he was one who definitely could hear in his head.
 
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I dont know if thats what you call perfect pitch, but i think i have something similar? I can determine the note "B" with 100% accuracy. So if i have to identify the note "D" for example i have the "B" in my head and can determine the "D" by usual interval theory.
 
To this day, I've never seen anything like it ever. First time through a song, performance ready ( never even having rehearsed it ), except for a minute or so on the main riff ....

Simply amazing ..., and YES I wish I had that gift !

Yes exactly, growing up with someone with perfect pitch was a gift in itself just to hear the man play. I wish I had that gift too.
 
So if i have to identify the note "D" for example i have the "B" in my head and can determine the "D" by usual interval theory.
It sounds to me that you definitely have good relative pitch, referencing an interval from a known note and if you can hear that B in your head 100% accurate it must be a possibility to develop that to just be able to hear any note and know what it is. It would seem that 100% accurate B is perfect.
 
I guess death is a typo :) but who knows, composing music while decomposing is an interesting concept ... His stage name may have been Ludwing van Rotten - couple of centuries before the Sex Pistols :)

You can definitely hear music in your head when you are deaf the same way you can see things with your eyes closed, or when you are dreaming... But if you're born blind or deaf then it does not work. You have stories of people who were blind, got their eyes fixed and could see and were overwhelmed by the sensations and could not get used to it and went back to the surgeon and asked to be "unplugged";

Sacks in his book explains that there are different types of memory used for memorizing music and he talks about one of his patients who had lost immediate memory after a brain damage (like his memory would reboot every 20 seconds, a little bit like a fish) but he still remembered complete piano pieces that he could play. All the great composers can hear the music in their heads and "play" it while they write it which is also something I'd like to be able to do !!! I remember reading an interview of Satriani where is said he wrote songs this way. I also think that with practice you can memorize chord perceptions. Like, i'm a really average player, i can hear major, minor, sus4, sus2 and 7maj. Can not tell if it's an A or a C, but Maj7 or sus4, yes, because .. I don't know, there is some characteristic to it. And this can improve a lot if you practice ear training regularly.

for Frozen : you have relative pitch, because you need a reference note. Still useful, actually some people say that it's better to have relative pitch than perfect pitch, because you can "adjust". There is this story of a classical musician who had perfect pitch and could not play with an orchestra who was not tuned at A 440 (which by the way is higher than the reference A 3 centuries ago which was 400), because he felt that everything was out of tune. I once gave my son a little cheap keyboard and I was surprised to see him playing his usual tunes with a very different fingering than usual and then I checked and the keyboard was 1/2 sharp.
 
for Frozen : you have relative pitch, because you need a reference note.

hmm yes, but the reference note is in my head! You could wake me up at night and i could hum a B-Note, but its only possible with the B. If you would ask me to hum an E i had to hum a B first and then go up to an E. Strange, i know ;).
 
i think you would rather have perfect relative pitch rather than perfect pitch. it would drive you nuts
 
i think you would rather have perfect relative pitch rather than perfect pitch. it would drive you nuts

Yeah, I think Sachs observed that some people with perfect pitch don't like to go out to listen to live music because of all the wrong notes they hear. It makes it impossible to enjoy...
 
Perfect pitch?? not, Gifted... most of my musical ability if from a gift, meaning I have no formal training other than what I have picked up or been shown over the years. I cannot sight read music I play strictly by ear, though I cab read a chord charts.
 
I don't have perfect pitch. I have very good relative pitch. Similar to frozen's B above, I can tune a guitar 98% dead on tp pitch without any reference. It's just because I've been doing it for so long. A good buddy of mine has great relative pitch. He uses Beethovens 5th - you know the Da Da Da Daaah, as reference and can find any other pitch relative to that.

Many Asian languages, like especially Korean and some Chinese dialects, have pitched built in. So almost everybody there has perfect pitch. One reason why so many music conservatories the world over have so many Korean and Chinese students!

I've known many musicians with perfect pitch over the years. I haven't seen THAT much advantage, except as producers. Coming up with parts for other musicians -- there are a couple of very talented producers I've worked with who had perfect pitch and it was amazing seeing them work. But most of the "gifted" players I've known who had it were just mediocre musicians. My theory as to why this is is that it's all too easy. There's no mystery. No desire to actually BECOME good. Having PP doesn't give you chops or the ability to play. If you can listen to Coltrane rip through his sheets of sound and you just get it, where's the tension to figure it out? OK, you don't know WHY and you don't know HOW, but you can SEE the notes. That to me is less than half the battle. That's less than a quarter of the battle. But it's something.

I find the quest for perfect pitch to be a needless effort and ALMOST silly. Plus I've known many who HATED having it. Slight variations of pitch drives them CRAZY.

There are so many things more important in music. I'm sure it can be developed, -- certainly great relative pitch can be. Associating pitch to color is one method. Just KNOWING is another. But I think you'd go further MUCH faster and with much better results simply practicing. It's amazing to me the efforts people will go through to avoid practicing! Enough practice will give you fantastic relative pitch. All those pitches are right there underneath your fingertips, all up and down the neck. You're training yourself to hear them every time you play.
 
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I've been somewhat skeptical of the claims some people make to be able to hear the difference between A440 and A438. Seems a bit hard to swallow. A lot of professional piano tuners might not be able to do this. But, apparently some of us can hear pitch quite accurately without a reference. I've seen this estimated at about 1 in 15,000 in the North American population. What's intriguing is that among native speakers of Mandarin, the estimates are 30% of the population. No physical differences are observed between the groups. This has been attributed to the fact that Mandarin and other asian languages are tonal. From infancy, they are required to listen critically to pitch contours in order to speak the language. Those among them who can develop so called "perfect pitch" do so during their early childhood years. As to whether an adult can achieve this, who knows, and it may not really be all that important to us as musicians. After all, we've got a pretty nice tuner built right into the Axe.
 
i think you would rather have perfect relative pitch rather than perfect pitch. it would drive you nuts

I would add to the two previous examples I posted.

The first person ( the lawyer ) did have a problem playing tuned down to Eb .... His brain kept sending him signals to transpose to the original key. He could do it, but it required quite a bit of extra concentration and I did catch him making rather uncharacteristic mistakes.

The 2nd person, it's no problem for him at all. I'm not sure if it's because of all the time he spent developing his technique or not, and when I asked him about it once, he'd never even thought about it ....
 
"middle C is usually set at 440 Hz (often written as "A = 440 Hz" or sometimes "A440"), although other frequencies are also often used, such as 442 Hz. Historically, this A has been tuned to a variety of higher and lower pitches. For example, Michael Praetorius proposed a standard of 465 Hz in the early 17th century.[14][not in citation given]"
- wikipedia

So people with perfect pitch. Can you explain that to me?

If you have "perfect pitch" you can't play in an orchestra because it would drive you "nuts"?

Therefor, how can you born with perfect pitch if you don't know what to "tune" for? did you born with 440 or 442?
 
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Some have complained that going to european orchestra, or american, who tune to either 440 or some other standard, have a hard time.

Middle C is not 440. That's A.
 
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