"Developing Perfect Pitch"

[TyBo]

The subject of perfect pitch came up in another thread here, and by coincidence a video on the subject by Amy Nolte was suggested to me in the YouTube feed. So Amy, do you have perfect pitch? "Well yes ... and no." "No, I don't actually have perfect pitch." Amy can immediately name any note played on the piano ... but that's not quite the same as perfect pitch, as she recognizes.

She does have an nice little game one can play to be able to generate a particular note in your head. Just for fun.

Actual perfect pitch is something one learns as a baby, as Rick Beato describes in his interesting video on the subject. Rick shows his young son Dylan demonstrating his perfect pitch, and relates that as very possibly connected to the musical environment in which he grew. He draws the parallel to language development, which seems very apt. Cultures which speak tonal languages have a 30% higher rate of perfect pitch than those (like us) who don't. Fascinating, Captain ...

 

[Verticos]

General consensus of what constitutes perfect pitch is usually something similar to the following (pulled from Wikipedia):

Generally, absolute pitch implies some or all of the following abilities, achieved without a reference tone:

• Identify by name individual pitches played on various instruments.
• Name the key of a given piece of tonal music.
• Identify and name all the tones of a given chord or other tonal mass.
• Name the pitches of common everyday sounds such as car horns and alarms.

The allied ability to sing a note on demand, which by itself is termed "perfect pitch," appears to be much rarer.

[I know that this flies in the face of wikipedia's definition, but for the sake of my post I treat "perfect pitch" as an interchangeable term with "absolute pitch".]

Note that this definition does not have a time limit associated with arriving at the answers. You don't have to be able to do it "fast" to have perfect pitch. Note that there is also not a lower or upper bound to the number of tones in a given chord in bullet point three. You do not need to be able to identify every note in a 10-note atonal cluster specifically designed to confound you, and do it within two seconds.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've come to the conclusion that perfect pitch is perceived as a binary, which is false. IMO, it's not that one either has it or doesn't, it's a trainable skill with an entire spectrum of possible ability.

The language comparison is indeed an apt one in a lot of ways. But I'm not sure I agree with this:

Actual perfect pitch is something one learns as a baby, as Rick Beato describes in his interesting video on the subject.

Learning language is definitely easier as a child. Nobody thinks about learning their first language, it just happens as a part of growing up. Learning a new language as an adult, however, is much more difficult. Despite this, there are plenty of adults that, with a lot of hard work, have become fluent in additional languages. In the same way, it seems that perfect pitch is easier to develop as a child when one still has high neuroplasticity. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn at an older age.

For every qualification on the definition, for every "but what about..." that I've heard over the years, I've also met someone who disproves that qualification. I know a guy who taught himself perfect pitch as an adult, practices and hones the skill regularly, and is more proficient with it than most people I know who have had perfect pitch since they were children.

When I was younger, I went to Jamey Aebersold's summer jazz camp. When we broke out into theory classes based on ability, I was in the most beginner group, taught in a big lecture hall by Mr. Aebersold himself. At one point during the lesson, Jamey asks "what note is that" as he plays one on the piano. The answer he was looking for was relative, something like "the root" or "the fifth of the chord". Young, eager, and not fully understanding the question, I raised my hand and said "F#".

"How do you know that?"
"I dunno."
"Do you have perfect pitch?"
"I guess so?"
"Come up here."

I walk up to Mr. Aebersold sitting at the piano at the front of the lecture hall. He takes all ten fingers and mashes them on the piano indiscriminately.

"What are all those notes?"
"Uhhhhhh..."
"You DON'T have perfect pitch."

I sheepishly walked back to my seat. I have always been able to sing back any song I know in its correct key. Since receiving formal music training (learning that pitches and keys have associated names like C, Eb, etc), I have been able to conjure any pitch from memory and identify any one played on an instrument. Now, can I tell you that your D string is 7 cents sharp? Of course not. Can I identify your ten randomly chosen notes are in your tone cluster? Maybe if you give me a minute.

I know that I have perfect pitch. But now when people discuss perfect pitch or ask me if I have it, I usually just say "no".

Imagine this conversation:

"I'm a weightlifter."
"Oh really? Can you bench 500lbs?"
"Well, no..."
"Then you're NOT a weightlifter!"

It seems pretty silly to me. Perfect pitch is a skill, not a one-dimensional "you have it or you don't" trait.

Then there's the pernicious conflation of "relative pitch" and "less developed perfect pitch" According to consensus definition, you don't have to have internalized all pitches. If you had only memorized the pitches of the open strings on a bass and then used those as mental references to identify others, all in your head, then by definition you have absolute pitch. You can do what it says on the tin. (Your only mistake would be explaining to others about how you arrived at your answer, to which they'd shriek "you don't have perfect pitch, you have really good relative pitch!") Okay, so you used relative pitch to think about a note you do have memorized, open G, and from there you mentally identify Ab. How did you conjure the mental reference tone out of thin air? There's a name for this skill - perfect pitch.

Anecdotally, almost all of the perfect pitch posessors I know are very humble about it. The ones who really seem to care about the semantics (and sometimes seem hell-bent on convincing a perfect pitch posessor that they don't actually have perfect pitch) are the ones that don't posess the ability at all anyway.

 

[buldog5151bass]

Relative pitch can be developed.

I certainly don't have perfect pitch, but I can hear certain tones and chords - some because of songs I know, some because of a guitar chord (a guitar changing between open D and Dsus is easy to recognize).

 

[LBS-bass]

I sheepishly walked back to my seat. I have always been able to sing back any song I know in its correct key. Since receiving formal music training, I have been able to conjure any pitch from memory and identify any one played on an instrument. Now, can I tell you that your D string is 7 cents sharp? Of course not. Can I identify your ten randomly chosen notes are in your tone cluster? Maybe if you give me a minute.

I know that I have perfect pitch. But now when people discuss perfect pitch or ask me if I have it, I usually just say "no".

It seems to be there there are two things which we often do not really separate out very well. One is whether or not a person can hear and identify a pitch, and the other is whether or not a person has gone through training to hone this skill into something closer to what's described in the Wikipedia article.

I don't have perfect pitch according to the accepted definition. I can hear a song in my head, recognize the pitches of the various parts and identify a note correctly. In other words, what plays back in my head when I "hear" a song that's been recorded in the key of E is that song in the key of E, and if I go to the piano and play what I hear in my head, the notes will be in the correct key.

But I never went through any training that took that into the realm of "ok, now listen to this chord and tell me what the notes are." I could pick apart those notes in my head and figure it out, I'm sure, because I know what key the song is in. But there's training involved in learning how to recognize the key without prior knowledge, etc. In other words, I can hear and match a pitch correctly in my head but I would need to train my head to recognize that the pitch as an E, or whatever it is. And I would need to relate that pitch I hear in my head to a known pitch.

So I possibly could have developed some or all of those skills if it had ever mattered to me, but it never has. I can do what I can do well enough, and I can find the key I need to be in for any song in a fraction of a second after hearing the first notes played. That's all that's ever mattered to me in a practical sense.

So I view the concept of "perfect pitch" as a bit of a dog and pony show, really. It's kind of a parlor trick in the sense that if your ear is that good you will be just fine doing music whether you train that up or not. In my opinion.

 

[Verticos]

It seems to be there there are two things which we often do not really separate out very well. One is whether or not a person can hear and identify a pitch, and the other is whether or not a person has gone through training to hone this skill into something closer to what's described in the Wikipedia article.

I don't have perfect pitch according to the accepted definition. I can hear a song in my head, recognize the pitches of the various parts and identify a note correctly. In other words, what plays back in my head when I "hear" a song that's been recorded in the key of E is that song in the key of E, and if I go to the piano and play what I hear in my head, the notes will be in the correct key.

But I never went through any training that took that into the realm of "ok, now listen to this chord and tell me what the notes are." I could pick apart those notes in my head and figure it out, I'm sure, because I know what key the song is in. But there's training involved in learning how to recognize the key without prior knowledge, etc. In other words, I can hear and match a pitch correctly in my head but I would need to train my head to recognize that the pitch as an E, or whatever it is. And I would need to relate that pitch I hear in my head to a known pitch.

So I possibly could have developed some or all of those skills if it had ever mattered to me, but it never has. I can do what I can do well enough, and I can find the key I need to be in for any song in a fraction of a second after hearing the first notes played. That's all that's ever mattered to me in a practical sense.

So I view the concept of "perfect pitch" as a bit of a dog and pony show, really. It's kind of a parlor trick in the sense that if your ear is that good you will be just fine doing music whether you train that up or not. In my opinion.

I completely agree with you on all points. Maybe things would be more clear if the terms "perfect pitch" and "absolute pitch" and "relative pitch" were all abandoned. They carry too much baggage and people define them with wild variance. Maybe we need to switch to terms like "sense of tonality" to describe it without all the preconcieptions people have about the subject.

 

[James Collins]

Eddie from two set violin has perfect pitch and developed it around 20 years of age as I recall.

 

[LBS-bass]

I completely agree with you on all points. Maybe things would be more clear if the terms "perfect pitch" and "absolute pitch" and "relative pitch" were all abandoned. They carry too much baggage and people define them with wild variance. Maybe we need to switch to terms like "sense of tonality" to describe it without all the preconcieptions people have about the subject.

Yes, and I think anecdotes like the one described where the poster was shamed for not having this training serve to discourage people who have ability and skill. Instead of shaming someone because they can't name notes in a cacophony played on the piano, why not give that person some kudos and encouragement for having a useful ability that many people do not have?

 

[TyBo]

An article from the University of Chicago posits the idea that maybe perfect pitch actually can be learned in adulthood (though they sprinkle in some caveats here and there ). Hmm ...
Perfect pitch, explained

Beato makes the point that if perfect pitch was something that could effectively be learned as an adult, it seems likely that in the hundreds of years of musical instruction, somewhere there would have been academic courses in it ... or maybe everywhere. We don't see such courses, and anecdotally Beato relays that none of the many instructors he knows from Julliard, Berkeley, etc., have ever seen a student come in without perfect pitch and then leave with perfect pitch. It seems pretty clear that it's basically a childhood related ability, which is bolstered by the stat about cultures speaking tonal languages having 30% more people with perfect, absolute, pitch. (That language being learned as a child.) I just find those ideas about early learning process to be very interesting.

Anyway, I know I don't have perfect pitch, and even my relative pitch can occasionally be a bit shaky. But I can grab a melody like a dog on a bone and carry it home ... which is ok for me.

 

[J Wilson]

I knew two people who had this; one, as they say, 'was born that way'. The other just had very good pitch sense.

Aside from the things listed above, the other side of the coin is that it drives you crazy, as essentially the whole world is out of pitch to these people.

One was one of my piano teachers. She was a degreed musician from North Texas in Denton; as a child, she was plucked from the rice fields of Winnie Texas and spirited to Julliard in Paris, her talent was that prodigious, as was her perfect pitch. She and her husband were my teachers. In their studio they had a matching pair of 6-foot Steinways, kept at a constant temp and humidity (quite a job in coastal Texas), and their tuning seen to FOUR times a year, she could hear the slightest slip.

The other was a musician I played with in the country bands, and of all things he was a steel player. It was a real luxury, as he was one of the few steel players I ever worked with that was dead-on-the-money in tune, both in the setup of his guitar and his bar placement. It was a real hoot to see him suddenly look up, and tell the guitar player his A-string was a bit flat, and sure enough, throw it on the strobe tuner and he was off 15 cents.

But . . . put them in a situation with out of tune instruments, she'd get a headache from it, and he'd stop everyone till we were all tuned up.

I have pretty good ears, but nothing like those two.

 

[micguy]

I have perfect (or is it absolute???) pitch … but not to the degree that Rick Beato’s son does. I sometimes wake up in the morning, thinking “C” (sometimes it’s another note), but I haven’t heard or played music in over 8 hours. I’ll sing the note, and go over to my bass and play the note - right on. When I hear a tune, I can pick up a bass and join right in without having to hunt around for the key. Yes, it’s a useful skill.

This does have its downsides. I went backpacking once on an island. The only man made sound around was a bout - the damn bell was clanging F sharp whenever a wave hit it. It took me a day to find (in my head) a tune that my band was doing that was in F sharp, so I had something to mentally play along with it.

The other snag for me was I kept a bass tuned in D standard for a while. My pitch memory and muscle memory made it tough to play - I’d hear “c” in my head, and my fingers would go to where c is in standard tuning. But…it wasn’t there. In the end, the solution was to give up and play a 5 string - extended range without having to retrain my brain.

I have played music since I was 7, but my pitch perception improves greatly in periods where I’m playing a lot - it seems to have first solidified to something close to perfect pitch in my 20’s. I took a decade off from music (wrist issues), and re-started at age 52. My pitch perception and retention (whatever you want to call it) was not good at all at that point, but a dozen years of substantial daily practice later, it’s back. I think you can learn whatever we’re calling this in adulthood. Are some folks more capable of this than others? I think that’s true of any skill.

 

[Patrice B]

You have it or not. Can’t be learned. Is it Adam Neely or Rick Beato showing that you loose it when you’re older? Meaning that your perfect pitch shifts: you think you hear a C but it’s a C sharp instead (as an example).

I have one student having perfect pitch: she can name any notes in a chord or a melody.

Me, pretty good relative pitch.

 

[kevindahl]

My relative pitch is quite poor compared to other musicians who have put in the same hours of practice as I have. I wish it was better. I still struggle identifying intervals. Oddly enough I find chord changes easier to identify than the melody.

People like Rick Beato's son and Jacob Collier have incredible ears.

My strength is the ability to hear and play back rhythms very easily. I feel my timing is very good.

I think this had to do with how I listened to music. Melody and the lyrics were the last elements of a song I listened to. For me it was all about the bass, drums and the overall production.

 

[steelbed45]

General consensus of what constitutes perfect pitch is usually something similar to the following (pulled from Wikipedia):

[I know that this flies in the face of wikipedia's definition, but for the sake of my post I treat "perfect pitch" as an interchangeable term with "absolute pitch".]

Note that this definition does not have a time limit associated with arriving at the answers. You don't have to be able to do it "fast" to have perfect pitch. Note that there is also not a lower or upper bound to the number of tones in a given chord in bullet point three. You do not need to be able to identify every note in a 10-note atonal cluster specifically designed to confound you, and do it within two seconds.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I've come to the conclusion that perfect pitch is perceived as a binary, which is false. IMO, it's not that one either has it or doesn't, it's a trainable skill with an entire spectrum of possible ability.

The language comparison is indeed an apt one in a lot of ways. But I'm not sure I agree with this:


Learning language is definitely easier as a child. Nobody thinks about learning their first language, it just happens as a part of growing up. Learning a new language as an adult, however, is much more difficult. Despite this, there are plenty of adults that, with a lot of hard work, have become fluent in additional languages. In the same way, it seems that perfect pitch is easier to develop as a child when one still has high neuroplasticity. But that doesn't mean it's impossible to learn at an older age.

For every qualification on the definition, for every "but what about..." that I've heard over the years, I've also met someone who disproves that qualification. I know a guy who taught himself perfect pitch as an adult, practices and hones the skill regularly, and is more proficient with it than most people I know who have had perfect pitch since they were children.

When I was younger, I went to Jamey Aebersold's summer jazz camp. When we broke out into theory classes based on ability, I was in the most beginner group, taught in a big lecture hall by Mr. Aebersold himself. At one point during the lesson, Jamey asks "what note is that" as he plays one on the piano. The answer he was looking for was relative, something like "the root" or "the fifth of the chord". Young, eager, and not fully understanding the question, I raised my hand and said "F#".

"How do you know that?"
"I dunno."
"Do you have perfect pitch?"
"I guess so?"
"Come up here."

I walk up to Mr. Aebersold sitting at the piano at the front of the lecture hall. He takes all ten fingers and mashes them on the piano indiscriminately.

"What are all those notes?"
"Uhhhhhh..."
"You DON'T have perfect pitch."

I sheepishly walked back to my seat. I have always been able to sing back any song I know in its correct key. Since receiving formal music training (learning that pitches and keys have associated names like C, Eb, etc), I have been able to conjure any pitch from memory and identify any one played on an instrument. Now, can I tell you that your D string is 7 cents sharp? Of course not. Can I identify your ten randomly chosen notes are in your tone cluster? Maybe if you give me a minute.

I know that I have perfect pitch. But now when people discuss perfect pitch or ask me if I have it, I usually just say "no".

Imagine this conversation:

"I'm a weightlifter."
"Oh really? Can you bench 500lbs?"
"Well, no..."
"Then you're NOT a weightlifter!"

It seems pretty silly to me. Perfect pitch is a skill, not a one-dimensional "you have it or you don't" trait.

Then there's the pernicious conflation of "relative pitch" and "less developed perfect pitch" According to consensus definition, you don't have to have internalized all pitches. If you had only memorized the pitches of the open strings on a bass and then used those as mental references to identify others, all in your head, then by definition you have absolute pitch. You can do what it says on the tin. (Your only mistake would be explaining to others about how you arrived at your answer, to which they'd shriek "you don't have perfect pitch, you have really good relative pitch!") Okay, so you used relative pitch to think about a note you do have memorized, open G, and from there you mentally identify Ab. How did you conjure the mental reference tone out of thin air? There's a name for this skill - perfect pitch.

Anecdotally, almost all of the perfect pitch posessors I know are very humble about it. The ones who really seem to care about the semantics (and sometimes seem hell-bent on convincing a perfect pitch posessor that they don't actually have perfect pitch) are the ones that don't posess the ability at all anyway.

Interesting. Maybe that's an old school way method of filtering people out. I remember in college decades ago that one of my professors would demonstrate his perfect pitch by having someone do that same thing - mash their hands on the piano. Of course, he couldn't see the keyboard. He'd then rifle off every note that hadn't been played. All I could say was, well, that's some ___ I'll ever do, so I may as well put my time into relative pitch training.

 

[Wasnex]

IMHO perfect pitch is recognizing tones directly. Relative pitch is deducing tones from other pitches you recognize directly. I generally see perfect pitch more as an inherent ability and relative pitch as something that some can learn. This are simply the definitions as I learned them, and I concede that other definitions for these terms exist.

I agree there is a range of ability with these talents. I would say someone has relative pitch even if they need to take a tone from an external source before they can identify pitches. People with higher functioning relative pitch have the ability to use internal pitch references.

I don't totally accept that perfect pitch and relative pitch are necessarily the same process. They may be, but I have not seen any definitive studies that prove it. Until a definitive study is done on the actual brain science, it's sort of silly to argue over the semantics. The brain science may show that there are multiple forms, essentially different combinations of intelligences that produce what we perceive outwardly as perfect pitch.

There seems to be a related link to synesthesia. It makes sense that if you see a colors when you hear sound, it should be fairly easy to associate pitch names with the colors. Different people see different colors.

The people I know with perfect pitch could probably pass the tone cluster test. They could listen to a bell and tell you the fundamental and primary overtones of the bell, as well as whether each frequency was sharp or flat. They said it was as much of a curse as a blessing. The reason? Hearing out of tune notes tends to be very distracting, sort of like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I think that I once had the potential to develop relative pitch with internal references, but life had a different path in mind for me.


All IMHO so YMMV.

 

[Patrice B]

IMHO perfect pitch is recognizing tones directly. Relative pitch is deducing tones from other pitches you recognize directly. I generally see perfect pitch more as an inherent ability and relative pitch as something that some can learn. This are simply the definitions as I learned them, and I concede that other definitions for these terms exist.

I agree there is a range of ability with these talents. I would say someone has relative pitch even if they need to take a tone from an external source before they can identify pitches. People with higher functioning relative pitch have the ability to use internal pitch references.

I don't totally accept that perfect pitch and relative pitch are necessarily the same process. They may be, but I have not seen any definitive studies that prove it. Until a definitive study is done on the actual brain science, it's sort of silly to argue over the semantics. The brain science may show that there are multiple forms, essentially different combinations of intelligences that produce what we perceive outwardly as perfect pitch.

There seems to be a related link to synesthesia. It makes sense that if you see a colors when you hear sound, it should be fairly easy to associate pitch names with the colors. Different people see different colors.

The people I know with perfect pitch could probably pass the tone cluster test. They could listen to a bell and tell you the fundamental and primary overtones of the bell, as well as whether each frequency was sharp or flat. They said it was as much of a curse as a blessing. The reason? Hearing out of tune notes tends to be very distracting, sort of like fingernails on a chalkboard.

I think that I once had the potential to develop relative pitch with internal references, but life had a different path in mind for me.


All IMHO so YMMV.

Two different things in my opinion, I agree. Once I hear a first note and know what it is, I can decently find the other ones. Not in a chord though but I’m able to tell if the chord is major, minor, diminished, maybe get the 7th, 9th… in a good day.

However, 30 seconds later, not sure I could get the same first note without « seeing » it on the keyboard or bass.

I’ve also heard that microtonal music and maybe Baroque music (lower than A 440) is a pain for them!

 

[ardgedee]

...and spirited to Julliard in Paris

Paris?

 

[Rolling Thunder]

I have perfect toanz. I can listen to a song and know the guitarist is using a fuzz, a wah, and a touch of chorus.

 

[J Wilson]

Paris?

Yes. She was singularly the most talented piano player I ever heard, supernatural, a gift, she didn't even have to think about it, it just flowed in great rivers.

 

[Wasnex]

Two different things in my opinion, I agree. Once I hear a first note and know what it is, I can decently find the other ones. Not in a chord though but I’m able to tell if the chord is major, minor, diminished, maybe get the 7th, 9th… in a good day.

However, 30 seconds later, not sure I could get the same first note without « seeing » it on the keyboard or bass.

I’ve also heard that microtonal music and maybe Baroque music (lower than A 440) is a pain for them!

I would think microtonal would not be problem if that is the type of music they were raised with.

I was also wondering about how someone with perfect pitch would process alternate pitch standards. Maybe it would be okay, if they expected it. My guess is the response will vary by individual.

 

[Patrice B]

I would think microtonal would not be problem if that is the type of music they were raised with.

I was also wondering about how someone with perfect pitch would process alternate pitch standards. Maybe it would be okay, if they expected it. My guess is the response will vary by individual.

Yes, indeed. Someone in India, Africa or Middle East with perfect pitch would probably be able to cope with microtonality. Occidental musician, not sure…