original post

there's a lot of riff-raff about what perfect pitch is and what it isn't and if we're born with it blah blah blah. And so I would just like to clear some things up. You can believe me if you want, that's up to you.

1. No one is born with perfect pitch.
Just as how in kindergarten we learn what Red, Yellow, and Blue is, and distinguish the differences between them, we too must learn perfect pitch (or absolute pitch) from ground zero. Some people just develop it at a very early age, and this is normal. But saying that people are "born" with perfect pitch is as ridiculous as saying that choice few are born already knowing what the color wheel is. Perfect Pitch is also a human ability. It is something that is built in in all of us, it is not a genetic trait or defect.

2. Perfect Pitch is NOT a hindrance. I personally developed perfect pitch with the Burge Supercourse and I tell you now, if an entire orchestra is toned down, I'll just know it's toned down, it won't drive me crazy or up the wall. It won't annoy me, or bother me, or cause me to throw up and pass out or any other nonsense. I'll simply go like, huh, that's a different pitch. If you have a friend that has perfect pitch and says they can't stand to listen to some music because it is not in tune then they're most likely lying to show off. Either that, or it's a personal preference, but it is not the actual perfect pitch that is making them suffer. Absolute pitch just clears up what you hear. Remember it's a HUMAN ability. That means that once you develop perfect pitch it won't turn your ear into a robot and all of a sudden anything that isn't a Studio Standard of 440hz will drive you crazy.

3. Perfect pitch is Tone Color recognition. Basically how you can visually see red and yellow and how they differ in hue, the same applies to music except in tone. Now this doesn't mean we associate colors to sound, not at all. Tone color is different than visual color. How sharp or dull, how twangy or mellow, how this and the other, how you describe the sound of each separate pitch is the tone color. And each pitch has a its own tone color. Thats how perfect pitch works, it's basically opening your ear up to pick up these delicate differences, you fine tune your ear to perceive these tone colors. Now the myth is that once you have perfect pitch that you sing EXACTLY or hear EXACTLY what the pitch is. This is simply not true. In colors, red, for example has different shades, light to dark, either way we can still tell it's red. The standard red could be compared to C5. A darker red to C4 and a lighter red to C6. Perfect pitch doesn't mean you will be able to distinguish a tone down to the exact semitone/cent remember, it's a human ability, no one is EXACT. If they claim to be, don't believe them.

A lot of people with perfect pitch claim a lot of things just to get attention and show off. My friend being one of them, said he was born with it. Once I developed it, his ego got a well deserved slap in the face.

DON'T BE AFRAID TO OBTAIN PERFECT PITCH, IT WILL NOT RUIN MUSIC FOR YOU, IN FACT IT WILL COMPLETELY CLEAR UP MUSIC AND OPEN YOUR EAR TO RICHER TONES AND SOUND.

Trust me. It's worth it. The urban legends, don't listen to those, just find out for yourself what is true and what isn't.

I'm not sure you're right, but i'm just stating my opinion on this, if things are out of tune, you don't really feel pain.. It's hard to explain but you kind of hear the vibrations more than the actual notes..or something
I have jumped to the conclusion that i have perfect pitch, i have nothing to back it up with though. Sometimes i have a hard time focusing on stuff when something's out of tune though. Like, it's extra distracting in some way...
I can't imagine i've "trained" for perfect pitch, if i have it, so i'd naturally think i was born with it. I might be wrong though, i'm pretty much jumping to conclusions but the fact that i know no theory at all, and still people appreciate my compositions has to mean something?

*HINT*No such thing as perfect!*HINT*

true. Perfect Pitch is just a nickname

I'm sitting in class bored and decided to get on the 2knet and stumbled across this thread. I just thought I'd add my input...

Just because pitch recognition works a certain way for you doesn't mean that it works that way for everyone. I find it interesting that you use tone colors for recognition, however the idea that "that's how it works" is ridiculous. In fact, many people do associate notes with colors (for instance, C is red and F# is green), but not all. Perfect pitch is simply pitch recognition (i.e. the ability to reproduce and identify pitches).

I'm sure you don't vomit when "an orchestra is toned down." I've never heard an orchestra that played flat personally. I would love to see that. Orchestras tend to be either "in tune" or sharp. Another thing I'd like to point out:

There is no such thing as a "C" or a "D" in the sense that if you listen to a D played on a guitar in a rock concert or a piano in a recital or on a cello in an orchestra and any two of those being the same.

We typically play in a system called "equal temperament." In the US, most people use 440hz as the standard for A, and equal temperament means an equal subdivision of the twelve pitches within that octave. This makes all keys sound equally "decent," but also equally out of tune. However, for a chord to truly be "in tune" with itself, all members other than the root must be altered in some way (thus, if you looked at the notes on a tuner, they would register as "out of tune.") Also, different orchestras use different standards as to what an A is (for instance, the I believe the Vienna Philharmonic tunes to A=444hz whereas the New York Philharmonic uses A=440hz).

Being an aspiring orchestral musician, I have to be able to play every note (reasonably) in tune, by myself, all the time. Having perfect pitch is very helpful to me for this, but it DOES cause problems. The more I play and the better my intonation becomes, the more ingrained the eleven equally tempered pitches become in my brain. When I hear recordings with different tuning systems or random noises that do not conform to this tuning system, I have to try very hard not to listen to them. If I do, I get a juxtaposition in my head of the pitches I hear versus the pitches I want to hear. This actually does hurt my brain. It causes problems for me. It can make me antisocial and unable to focus on tasks. For instance, a lot of room lights (and refrigerators) have a "hum" of a pitch that falls right in between a Bb and a B. If I'm trying to study or take a test with this going on, it becomes very difficult to focus on the test.

Am I doing that for attention? Not hardly.

In fact, I know several people with perfect pitch (being in the music field), all of whom complain about the complications they experience from perfect pitch. Perhaps the most annoying thing of all is to listen to other people try to sing tunes they've heard and just start on whatever pitch comes out. A song that is not in the right key sounds "broken" to me (in the sense that I feel like it needs to be fixed). I can either be an asshole pitch nazi and correct them, or I can just be bothered by it. The worst is if I'm working on a solo or concerto and hear an arrangement of it that's in a different key from what I'm playing. Just a few weeks ago, I heard an arrangement of Schubert's Arpeggione Sonata that was in D minor instead of A minor. For about three days, I could only hear it in D minor, and if I tried to sing the piece in my head in A minor, I got a juxtaposition of both keys, and heard the piece in parallel fourths. I know most people reading this probably don't know what that means, but trust me, it's not fun. It actually caused me to lose sleep at night.

< /rant >

^ some people are just like that.

I got a couple of questions as a musician.

1) Is there a better way to learn perfect pitch other than to play random notes and try to place them?

2) How do you temper the tuning of a scale to make it better? Which notes should be tuned up and down and by how much?

Seems there are disadvantages and advantages, but I think I would mostly find it a positive thing.

I can see that I would experience the same thing about not being able to concentrate if theres a hum, but that happens to me anyway, especially when there are two different hums at an inexact interval to each other. (Except in the case where they are in a cool interval, like a minor third, and i remember or make up tunes by listening to one then the other. But then I still flop my test :P)

Also, is perfect pitch easier to learn if you are good with recognizing intervals? (I have learned to do this really well. Its possibly the most useful thing I've learned music-wise.)

1) I have no idea. I've been able to recognize notes since before I knew that that ability was called perfect pitch. My parents (both musicians) taught me about chords when I was like 3. I used to think that everyone could do it.

2) I suppose answering this question would take a long time. There are many different tuning systems, some of which would sound strange nowadays. For some information on different tuning systems, here's a link.

Just in general, you would lower a major third by about 22 cents (from an equally tempered scale) and raise a minor third by about 14 cents. I'm not sure if those numbers are correct - I practice intervals against a drone note on my metronome. I can hear when they're in tune and play them in tune, but I don't think about exactly how much I'm lowering/raising it.

Oh, 100 cents equals 1 semitone (or half step), so if you were to raise a C by 100 cents, it would be a C#.

I hope this was helpful.

About intervals - that is called relative pitch. Anyone can learn it and it is taught in music schools. The ability to hear intervals is crucial when playing music.

Did you mean 440hz as in the standard frequency that A above middle C should be tuned to or did you mean 44.1khz, the most commonly used sample rate for commercial music?

Yes, this A. This note is usually tuned to a frequency of 440hz.



I think you're thinking about digital audio compression. I'm just talking about pitch frequency.

Oh man, and i always bitched about the TV being on, 5 rooms away from me with blackscreen and no sound. I could hear the humming of them from outside my house :E

I think I'm inadvertantly getting it. I was in the bar new years eve and this band was playing. They had an impromptu encore and started play this tune (i was in the other room btw) and i heard the bass player searching for the ky of the song, and I was just thinking "huh I guess he wouldn't expect it to be in G"(or something like that) and i went through to watch them AND THEY WERE PLAYING IN G i was like woah... uh wow


i sometime can do it with C aswell, but thats more common.

Ah, Absolute Pitch. When I was in music classes in high school, my teacher attempted to give us ear training lessons to improve our skill. Some people completely sucked at it, but for me it was kind of an interesting experience.


I have Absolute Pitch if the instrument is a flute, which is the main instrument I play. If I hear a melody in my head (for composing or whatnot) I usually hear it as that instrument, compose it as that instrument, and then change it later. I guess one would say I have relative pitch.


The two instruments my teacher used were piano and guitar.

The piano was alright, as I do have some background in piano but it wasn't "perfect". I could tell what kind of chord was being played, and the majority of notes. But when it came to naming chords, I couldn't do it.

Guitar was a disaster.....thats all I have to say about that xd

I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's all relative to someone's background in music, what instruments they use or are influenced by. There are tests online that are made to help you practise your skill in pitch, a few of which actually helped me with the guitar...enough so that I could pass. haha. :lol:

I hope you know that relative pitch has NOTHING to do with absolute pitch... Yeah, perfect pitch usually starts on your dominant instrument, then it fans out to all instruments, then at the most advanced stage you start getting tones off of other things, ie vacuum cleaner, lawn mower, cars, ect.

Well, yes I know that they are generally not realted to one another.


The problem with me saying relative pitch is that, if I was to read the definition...my skill is that of "perfect" pitch, but with only my dominant instrument. The me calling it relative pitch was my teacher from high school telling me thats what I have...she had two kind of definitions for relative pitch....yeah, it was kind of awkward writing tests for her -_-

We can all agree it's a vague term and you're not really spectacular if you consider yourself having it :D

Here,

What is perfect pitch?

What is relative pitch?

This hopefully settles it once and for all. David Burge explains it no other.

Haha thanks.


Also, This is that ear training website I was talking about:

Flash Music Games

Ear Trainer


Those may be good for those who want to practise...